Editorial Principles

The Lili Elbe Digital Archive brings together on a single interactive site the full range of materials comprising the compositional and early publication history of Elbe’s life narrative. This history is represented using transcribed and encoded facsimiles of each witness, linked at the paragraph level to enable detailed on-screen comparison of the different versions and translations, taking the American first edition, published be E.P. Dutton in New York in 1933, as our base text. The editors and translators have provided various kinds of annotations throughout these documents. Due to copyright restrictions, however, we have not reproduced the explanatory and textual notes from the print edition, thus editorial notes here are minimal. (We have included more editorial notes in the new English-language translation of the Danish edition, though.) We refer users to Man into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition (see Resources).

The site combines traditional scholarly research with digital techniques of representation and navigation in order to create a digital comparative scholarly edition of Man into Woman that provides comparisons across the typescript and the four editions published between 1931 to 1933. We have assembled, transcribed, translated, and encoded relevant documents to enable advanced display options, linking, and searching, and to link images of original page scans to relevant passages in the collated editions.

In reproducing the early editions, we have not updated the language of the texts to comply with today’s preferred terms and pronouns, respecting the linguistic choices made in each version to refer to the subject of the story. (See our discussion under Encoding Principles and Commentary.)

Project images have been privately archived as master images in uncompressed, high resolution format. All master images are paired with their respective detailed metadata records including information about the photography and the physical object.¹ These uncompressed images have been optimized for publication in this archive as JPEGs, following best practices for color correction and image compression.

Upon completion of the archive, the search function will be provided via COLLEX/ModNets indexing. The digital archive is hosted on a Loyola University Libraries server, under the management of the Digital Services Librarian, the Metadata Technologies Librarian, and the Systems Administrator. Digital files are stored in a Libraries digital repository but with its own dedicated virtual server and separate LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) environment.

Revision control of project files and code are handled through a Git-based system, via GitLab and GitHub, ensuring efficient and sustainable collaboration between every level of the project. A customized TEI ODD schema using the P5 guidelines has been designed for the textual encoding to support the core features of the archive materials, such as mechanisms for identifying and linking related passages, people, and places across the typescript, the four published editions (American, British, German, and Danish), the English translations, and the contextual materials (letters, articles, reviews, and book chapters).

We aim for transparency in our editorial decisions. We have made no silent corrections. Where there is an error in the original edition, we have retained it unless otherwise indicated.