Peter Boot, Huygens Institute, The Hague, "The letters of Vincent van Gogh: web edition"

In October 2009, "Vincent van Gogh: The Letters" was published simultaneously as a six-volume book edition and a scholarly web edition. This new and innovative edition of Vincent van Gogh's complete correspondence is the product of fifteen years of research by the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute. The object was to provide a fully annotated edition of the original letters accompanied by a new English translation so as to meet the demand for a reliable source edition and serve the needs of international readers and researchers. I will discuss the genesis of the Letters Project, the depth and variety of the research, the importance of the letters both as an art-historical source and as literature, and our reasons for publishing both a voluminous book edition and a free web edition (www.vangoghletters.org).  

Nienke Bakker studied Art History and French Language and Literature at the Universities of Utrecht, Leiden and Lille. She has worked on the Van Gogh Letters project as a researcher since 2002.

With Leo Jansen and Hans Luijten, she edited the complete correspondence of Vincent van Gogh (published in 2009). Working at the Van Gogh Museum since 2000, she has published articles on 19th-century art and co-curated exhibitions, among others "Van Gogh's Letters: The Artist speaks" (Van Gogh Museum, 2009) and "The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and his Letters" (Royal Academy of Arts, 2010).

The web edition of Van Gogh's letters offers an abundance of material, both in terms of quantity and in terms of quality. One of the challenges in designing the site has been to avoid our users getting lost in these riches. How could we create an edition that allows intuitive navigation? We used three strategies to ease navigation of the site: flexibility and user control, powerful search and cross-referenced indexes.  In my presentation, I will discuss these strategies and show how the site implements them. I will also discuss how these inherently digital strategies help create an essentially different reading experience for book and web editions, creating complementary rather than competing products.

Peter Boot studied mathematics in Leiden and Dutch Literature in Utrecht. In his PhD thesis (Digitised Emblems, Modelled Annotations and Humanities Scholarship, Utrecht, 2009) he studied annotation facilities in digital editions and looked into their possible consequences for humanities scholarship.

Among his interests are digital editions (especially editions based on TEI XML), annotation technology and text analysis. At the Huygens Institute he co-ordinated the creation of the digital edition of Van Gogh's letters.