Elias, or the Battle with the Nightingales

A variorum edition shows how a text changes across different versions. That calls for an interface where versions can be read side by side and differences are clearly visible, without losing the overview.

I built the edition around structured text data, with both a clear reading view and a comparison view in which variants become visible. Researchers can click straight through from a variant to its underlying source, and compare visually across the editions. For this I implemented state-of-the-art IIIF technology.

The result was presented at an international conference on IIIF. The project shows how structured heritage data enables new ways of reading, comparing and researching.