Reusing modern tools and techniques to reproduce and research ancient texts

The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms project (SAWS) is establishing a research workflow of editing, linking and publishing semantically-enhanced TEI/XML-based digital editions of ancient manuscripts that contain wise sayings. Of particular research interest is the ability to investigate links between these manuscripts. Digital edition creation, storage, annotation and, most recently, the adding of RDF and Linked Data are hot topics in digital humanities research, making SAWS workflows and supporting technologies highly transferable. Updating and maintaining published files, currently stored in a web filestore, has become troublesome. Additionally, the lengthy, involved procedures of transcribing and editing manuscripts have caused delays. More intuitive interfaces for editing and annotating files would be helpful. Scholars studying manuscripts in right-to-left (RTL) languages have also reported difficulties working with standard XML editors. In this work we explore if SAWS's research workflows can be made more efficient and intuitive through the use of repository tools developed within Islandora for the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) research project.