Designing a User Interface for the DSE 2.0: New Opportunities, New Challenges

The creation of a Digital Scholarly Edition (DSE) is a demanding process in which the scholar is engaged on several fronts: preparing the text and related paratexts, taking care of the critical and commentary apparatus, curating the images (if available), configuring the browsing software, and more. However, the end user is unaware of all the work behind the scenes and is often not familiar with what a TEI document is, or the image format used: what he or she sees is, in fact, the edition. Despite the fact that the visual impact of a DSE, and its navigation and use, are central to the user experience, there seems to be little interest in designing a better user interface (UI) for DSEs. In this paper I offer some thoughts on the current state of research and the challenges that will arise in the near future, using the evolution of the Edition Visualisation Technology (EVT) software as an example of a progressive adaptation to new UI requirements due to recent developments in DSE capabilities.