Applications of Distributed Version Control Technology to the Creation of Digital Scholarly Editions

About

What is version control, and why should I care?

As textual scholars, we care about:

• textual difference
• versions of texts
• collaborative editing
• semantic metadata

So do version control systems! It’s a perfect match!

Problems with Electronic Texts

• Difficult to edit
• Editorial histories often obscure
• Stuck in the hands of the few

Version control systems:

• Store every version of a document / project
• Store metadata about every edit: who made the change, when the change happened, what changed
• Facilitate collaboration, analysis, version management

About version control systems:

• Git, mercurial, svn, bazaar
• Open-source, community-owned
• Some centralized, some decentralized
• Used very widely by coders (over 10 million GitHub repositories)
• Starting to be used by humanists

Version Control is Useful

• Writing papers
• Collaborating
• Text collation
• Analyzing differences between texts

Features:

• Temporarily reset your project to an earlier version:

git checkout <change number>

• Revert a single change:

git revert <change number>

• Combine changesets from two versions:

git merge <branch name>

Version Control is Efficient

Fruit v1.0: apples, oranges, bananas Fruit v1.1: apples, oranges, bananas, pineapples

Ordinary filesystem:

• Fruit1.0.txt, fruit1.1.txt
• Contains redundant copies of apples, oranges, bananas.

Version control system

Git database contains parts:

• A: apples, oranges, bananas
• B: pineapples

Versions are compiled from these parts:

• v1.0: part A
• v1.1: parts A+B

Distributed Version Control

• Doesn’t privilege a central text, repository, user, or computer
• Anyone can pull changes from anyone
• Democratization of scholarly editing?

Version Control Cloud Services

• GitHub: a place for git repositories
• Also BitBucket, GitLab, etc.
• Back up your project in the cloud
• Make it open-source, allowing others to contribute

Collaboration Tools

• Forking
• Pull requests
• Comments on PRs, issues, lines

Project Management

• Issues
• Wiki
• Milestones
• Analysis

Examples

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities

GITenberg

About GITenberg

• ~45,000 books
• Anyone can edit (“crowdsourced”)
• Gitenberg.org

Git-Lit

About Git-Lit

• Open-source initiative to parse and post to GitHub 50,000 works from the British Library
• Parsing ALTO XML, generating Markdown
• Creating beautiful web-based reading editions for each
• Many will be first electronic publications
• Anyone can get involved!

Learn More

To Get Started

• Edit in the browser!
• Get a command line
• Learn basic commands
• Use plain text formats (Markdown, XML, LaTeX)
• Download git
• Get a GitHub username

Further Resources

• Try Git: https://try.github.io
• GitHub guides: account: https://guides.github.com
• This presentation: http://jonreeve.com/presentations/sts2016/
• My website: http://jonreeve.com