Converted from an OASIS Open Document
quoteSalute aggregates salutes (closings of letters) from various openly available digital scholarly editions of letters based on the encoding of the TEI‑element <salute>. The project website hosts a corpus of curated salutes, so they can be copied into an e-mail with a single button press. Thus users can quote historically important persons and use these quotes in their daily correspondence. The project is available as part of the web service correspSearch which aggregates metadata of various scholarly editions of letters. The complete source code (data, scripts, etc.) is accessible on GitHub. Furthermore, templates as well as an extensive documentation are provided, so other projects can quickly incorporate their own data into the corpus of salutes.
Salutations were and are essential elements of written communication, especially in letters. They serve as an "indicator of the relationships that the letter writer has or believes to have with the recipient" (Ermert, 1979, p. 104; translation by the author). Thus the mark-up of salutations is extremely important when encoding letters digitally. The guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (2018) have long been offering a corresponding encoding option by providing the <salute>‑element. In the context of quoteSalute exactly those <salute>‑elements are automatically extracted and subsequently transformed into the project’s TEI‑XML‑based interchange format. During an additional manual curation process, duplicate entries and inappropriate content are removed. The remaining data is enriched with semantic information to enable users to filter the corpus for: politeness (informal/friendly or formal); gender of sender and recipient how the grammar of the salute suggests (neutral, female or male); and language (currently German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and Greek).
The curation process has shown that the use of the <salute>‑element is not yet common practice in digital scholarly editions of letters, although it provides important insight into the relationship between correspondents. Editors are encouraged to use the <salute>‑tag more in their daily work.
The web application is implemented by using HTML, Bootstrap and the JavaScript framework VueJS. The salutes are stored in an eXist‑db instance. A random quote is fetched by performing asynchronous requests to the database server, query the eXist‑db using XQuery and serialize the response as JSON.
Currently, the corpus contains 981 salutes originating from 14 different scholarly editions of letters (13 digital, 1 analogue). All incorporated editions have licensed their data under a compatible free Creative Commons license.
In the light of the conference topic “Complexities” quoteSalute demonstrates how complex research data can be provided in a creative and easily accessible way without losing ties with the original scholarly resource. Since each quote is accompanied with a link to the letter of its respective edition, digital editions should enjoy greater popularity the more broadly quoteSalute is being used. The project aims to open up new contexts for the use of research data from the Digital Humanities and to promote the public presence of cultural data and research results. In September 2018 quoteSalute was awarded the DARIAH-DE Digital-Humanities Award.
»I have the honour to be with the highest consideration, Sir, your most obedient & most humble servant«
John Pickering to Wilhelm von Humboldt, 27.11.1827
Wilhelm von Humboldt - Spachwissenschaftliche Korrespondenz
https://wvh-briefe.bbaw.de/Brief?section=all&id=447