Digital Critical Edition of Apocryphal Literature: Sharing the Pipeline

The emerging field of Digital Scholarly Editing, concerned with the application of the digital paradigm to textual criticism, offers a range of software solutions for assisting critical editors in their task of documenting textual variation. But how to go from a disparate set of tools and resources to an integrated pipeline, one in which the data travels seamlessly from one format to another while meeting the requirements of each component? In this paper, we explain how we build and share an integrated processing pipeline that takes us from manuscript transcriptions in TEI XML format to a graph representation of textual variation, which constitutes the basis for the editorial work and the creation of the actual edition. With Docker Compose as the only technical prerequisite, running the pipeline is only one command away: the environments needed to run each software component are set up automatically, the processing begins, and at the end, a web server is launched which displays the automatically-built variant graphs ready for manual analysis using a dedicated online tool, Stemmaweb. This is an example of how technological advances are exploited to alleviate the technical burden put on editors.