Versioning Machine 2.0

The Versioning Machine is a software tool designed by a team of programmers, designers, and literary scholars at Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) for displaying and comparing multiple versions of texts. The display environment seeks not only to provide for features traditionally found in codex-based critical editions, such as annotation and introductory material, but to take advantage of opportunities of electronic publishing, such as providing a frame to compare diplomatic versions of witnesses side by side, allowing for manipulatable images of the witness to be viewed alongside the diplomatic edition, and providing users with an enhanced typology of notes. The Versioning Machine debuted at the 2002 ALLC/ACH (Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing/Association for Computers and the Humanities) Conference in Tübingen, Germany, July 2002. Version 2.0 was released September 2003.

The Versioning Machine 2.0 has several new features. In the previous release, it was only possible to encode texts using the Text Encoding Initiative's parallel segmentation method (i.e. all witnesses are recorded in one apparatus). With Version 2.0, the VM will parse individually-encoded witnesses. However, with this method of encoding not all the VM features work. The Image applet now allows users to view all the images in one witness set together. And lastly, all VM features now work in Netscape 7.0 for PC.

For further information about installing and using the VM, including detailed instructions on the various encoding methods possible, please see the VM documentation