Taming the Hydra: A Model for Textual Dynamics and Constellations of Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams

This paper presents a digital model and software created in the context of the VEdition project, to provide a critical digital edition of Goethe’s Venetian Epigrams. The paper proposes an innovative textological approach, focusing on a generic and reusable model of autographs to represent the dynamic nature of the creative process. While preserving the “objective” reproduction of documents separate from subjective scholarly interpretations, the model focuses on a single structured, computable and compact graph-based data structure, allowing to generate multiple text versions, annotated at any granularity level, for both textual and visual content. A full-fledged web UI (and an alternative complementary DSL) facilitates the creation of content, allowing scholars to focus on the reconstruction of the creative process at a higher abstraction level, while providing virtually unlimited export formats for integration with TEI-based production flows.