Introducing Kōdōn, a Minimal Computing Library for Publishing Digital Commentaries

The purpose of this presentation is to present Kōdōn, a JavaScript library (https://github.com/AjaxMultiCommentary/kodon), inspired by minimal computing principles, which enables the creation and dissemination of digital commentaries. Originally developed for a multi-commentary on Sophocles’ Ajax (https://multi.ajmc.ch/), Kōdōn has later been generalised to support the online publication of virtually any commentary, and especially born-digital ones.

The design of Kōdōn was heavily inspired by the Wax minimal computing framework. Wax’s key insight was that the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) protocol could be represented by the file system, so rather than requiring a server to transform large images files with each request, pre-planned sizes and slices of images could be generated once by a script and stored successively in directories that map to IIIF-protocol URL paths. With Kōdōn, we extend this pre-planning and pre-generation to the textual parts of a commentary application. Kōdōn-based applications run by default from static text, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, thus greatly reducing the minimal requirements for publishing online a new commentary.

In order to run, a Kōdōn commentary requires two basic pieces of information: a) a collection of commentary glosses, represented as Markdown and b) the critical text of the commented work, encoded as TEI/XML. We rely on Canonical Text Services Uniform Resource Names (CTS URNs) to link commentary glosses to the portion of text being commented upon. Notably, users do not need to generate the citation URNs manually. Kōdōn comes with a simple tool for selecting a range in the critical text and determining its URN. This functionality enables commentary editors to select text and copy-paste its URN without needing to type out the long URN string themselves.

In closing, we would like to emphasize that Kōdōn can also be used in the classroom as a means to teach students some basic yet useful notions of digital publishing, which include minimal computing principles, Markdown and XML encoding, and potentially version control.

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