A synoptic digital edition of the Alexanderlied

My doctoral project consists of this dissertation and a scholarly digital edition. In the dissertation, I introduce the context of this work, the scientific motivations that made it necessary, the object of study, the methodology, and the potential of this research. In the digital edition, I present data, metadata, and critical commentary that resulted from philological work in combination with the principles of digital scholarly editing. The topic of my PhD thesis is the Alexanderlied, a Middle High German poem belonging to the wider international historiographical, literary, and paradoxographical tradition on Alexander the Great. The Alexanderlied is handed down in three different Fassungen, ‘versions’, referred to as V, S, and B. They share a common nucleus but diverge from one another substantially enough that they can be considered independent rewritings of an allegedly lost original. Due to the high textual mobility of the three versions of the Alexanderlied, the considerable number of sources, and the Daedalian relationships between them, a comparative study of the three German renditions through a synoptic edition can indeed facilitate the understanding of the Alexandrian lore in the German Middle Ages. The digital component of my project has two main points of interest: defining an encoding model for the synoptic digital edition of the Alexanderlied and testing a suitable visualization system alongside its potential functionalities. As will be remarked further on in this thesis, the annotation and presentation of the texts mirror the choices and interpretation made by the researcher and/or the research group in the context of a specific project, thereby generating a new product with an individual rationale. As a first step, I pondered the encoding model best suited to represent the variability of the Alexanderlied’s tradition, which could not be based on metrical units. Consequently, I tested a breakdown of the three redactions into textual units and then looked into a system for visualizing the relationships among them while also displaying the texts parallelly. As a result, the annotation model was used as the basis for the development of a web application, as a prototype for the visualization and a basic query of the encoded data. The web application was generated thanks to the transformation of the XML data into HTML through XSLT, performed with the Saxon processor. This experiment was taken as an opportunity to reflect on how to take advantage of available standards, drawing inspiration from existing projects, and on the aspects that leave room for improvement in the spirit of the FAIR principles (Wilkinson 2016). The hope that I have for this work is to provide new knowledge and a new product for the disciplines of Germanic Philology and Digital Humanities. The comparative research and study tool which stemmed from the use of the Alexanderlied as a case study was designed with the ambition to let it be reused for the treatment of similar epic traditions in Middle High German, which, originating in the pre-courtly period, were handed down and varied, under different historical and cultural circumstances, up until the threshold of the early-modern period.