Personal Information

Biography
Christof Schöch is a researcher at the Chair for Digital Philology, University of Würzburg, Germany. He obtained his PhD with a study of descriptive writing in the French Eighteenth-Century novel. His interests in research and teaching include the French Enlightenment, contemporary crime fiction, digital scholarly editing, and quantitative text analysis.

Publications

• Public

  Ancient or Modern? Bérardier de Bataut’s Essai sur le récit (1776) 2012

  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/174581512X13221535571777
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/ros/2012/00000030/00000001/art00004
  When François-Joseph Bérardier de Bataut first published his Essai sur le récit, ou entretiens sur la manière de raconter in 1776, the book received enthusiastic reviews and was praised for being an instructive account of the art of storytelling. This fact has not, however, prevented the book from being all but forgotten today. The present contribution proposes an examination of this text, aiming to reflect on the reasons for the Essai sur le récit’s oblivion and to demonstrate the various respects in which this oblivion appears to be unjustified. It does so by showing that while the Essai sur le récit remains strongly influenced by the classicist period, especially in the range of authors quoted and in some of the core values it attributes to narrative, it also contains quite a few more innovative aspects, especially in the very definition of narrative given and in the treatment of narrative circumstances. Attention to Bérardier’s text thus promises to contribute to a growing interest in the persistence of the classical heritage during the Age of Enlightenment, at the same time as it proves relevant to our understanding of the poetics of narrative in the French eighteenth century.
• Public

  TEICHI and the Tools Paradox: Developing a Publishing Framework for Digital Editions 2012

  DOI: 10.4000/jtei.432
  jtei.revues.org/432
  This paper presents a newly developed framework for online publishing of scholarly text editions based on the TEI Guidelines. At the core of our publishing framework is support for delivery of TEI-encoded documents in Drupal, a popular, fairly powerful, and modular content management system (CMS). In this article we present the TEICHI suite of modules for Drupal that we developed, as well as a prototype implementation. TEICHI consists of a collection of modules for displaying TEI files online (via XSLT and CSS), interacting with them (via JavaScript), as well as uploading, searching, and downloading them. To showcase the particular strengths and possible use cases of our framework, we compare our tool to other currently available systems. Here, we focus on those tools which are suitable for textual scholars new to Digital Humanities and the TEI who would like to use the powerful encoding mechanisms provided by the TEI but have relatively little technical expertise. Therefore, we compare the TEICHI framework specifically to the Versioning Machine (VM) and the Scalable Architecture for Digital Editions (SADE). We look at these tools from four perspectives: that of the user interacting with the digital edition or archive, of the editor encoding and publishing texts, of the administrator setting up the publishing tool, and of the programmer possibly modifying or enhancing the tool. Our more general aim here is to investigate, from the perspective of tool development in the area of online delivery of TEI-encoded documents, what could be called the “tools paradox”: there is evidence for textual scholars’ need of such tools, and a number of them are available; however, the existing tools are not widely adopted by scholars. Our findings suggest that tool development has to address two aims which seem to be mutually exclusive, that of “keeping it simple” and that of “going generic”. In fact, we suggest that tool developers need to find ways of turning these conflicting aims into concurrent aims if they want to build successful tools and broaden their user base.
• Public

  La Description double dans le roman français des Lumières, 1760-1800 2011

  http://www.classiques-garnier.com/editions/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage_garnier.tpl&product_id=571&category_id=24&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1&vmcchk=1&Itemid=1
  This book provides an analysis of descriptive writing in a corpus of French novels published between 1760 and 1800. L'époque des Lumières voit s'épanouir les pratiques descriptives dans la plupart des genres littéraires. La description romanesque participe de cet épanouissement sans devenir encore un élément programmatique du genre romanesque. L'époque se distingue par la coexistence de deux formes de description: l'enjeu de la première est sa légitimation, celui de la seconde concerne ses relations à la peinture. Replaçant ces enjeux dans leur contexte, le présent ouvrage propose une analyse de l'écriture descriptive dans un corpus de romans français parus entre 1760 et 1800.

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