NeST - An integrated platform for easily creating FAIR-savvy SSH Digital Editions

NeST is a digital platform for publishing and managing SSH digital editions, both critical and diplomatic, fully aligned with the FAIR principles. It has been developed in Italy in the context of the H2IOSC initiative by Net7 for the Institute for the History of Philosophy and Science in the Modern Age (ISPF) of CNR, both members of the Italian node of OPERAS. Funded through the Next Generation EU programme, H2IOSC is an Italian infrastructural project to create advanced services for researchers in the Humanities, Heritage, and Social Sciences disciplines. NeST is a web platform where researchers can collect heterogeneous materials and use integrated tools to build a digital edition. NeST provides a complete and easy-to-use workflow, starting from the management of the sources, both textual and visual. It facilitates text entry and editing in user-friendly ways, via a WYSIWYG interface, maintaining at the same time full compliance with XML-TEI, a widely adopted standard in terms of text encoding. Texts already available in XML-TEI can be directly imported into the researcher workspace. Similarly to text management, the platform also supports text digitization. In this case, the reference standard is IIIF, which not only optimizes image delivery and standardizes descriptive metadata, but also enables the organization of individual reproductions into ordered sequences through the IIIF manifest (manifest.json). Such organization, based on unique identifiers, enables the creation of reference systems between the pages encoded in XML-TEI and the corresponding images. NeST supports both the import of existing IIIF manifests and the easy creation of new ones through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for uploading images of scanned texts. The configuration of the digital edition presentation is the final step, in which the researcher defines the possible visualizations of the materials collected so far. Depending on how the resources have been prepared and linked, the outputs of the digital edition may include facsimile with facing text, text with critical apparatus, or multiple parallel texts. In addition, the XML-TEI transcriptions and the newly created IIIF manifests can be annexed to the digital edition. The platform, accessible at https://nest.cnr.it/, has been tested by creating the scholarly digital edition of the “Scienza nuova” of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico. The “Scienza nuova” is a work that has three different editions: the first of 1725, the edition of 1730 and, finally, that of 1744. The last two editions present a rather similar layout, albeit with different variants, and can be easily aligned, a peculiarity that made Vico an excellent case study for piloting NeST. NeST is now available to researchers who need to create complete digital editions in a simple and effective way. The use of standards such as XML-TEI and IIIF ensures interoperability and the long-term reusability of research outputs. The NeST front-end integrates a powerful text search engine, making resources easily findable and accessible. Finally, each digital edition can be assigned a DOI, making NeST a FAIR-savvy tool for modern, sustainable, born-digital SSH research.