Two New Works, Collegia, and Notes in the Margin

Scholia went live on 2 August. Since then the library has gained two major works—Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Hobbes's Leviathan—and the platform has learned to do a few things it couldn't do at launch.

New texts

Hegel — Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807)

The first edition, in three parallel layers, 50 sections each:

Diplomatic — 1807 orthography exactly as printed, long-s (ſ) preserved, the printer's sic readings left uncorrected.
Modernized German — modern orthography, produced from checked-in decision tables rather than by hand-editing, so every normalization is traceable to a stated rule.
English translation — Scholia's own, written 1:1 sentence-parallel to the modernized German, so the two layers line up sentence by sentence in the reader.

The source is the Deutsches Textarchiv's double-keyed TEI transcription (not OCR) of System der Wissenschaft. Erster Theil, Bamberg und Würzburg 1807. The German layers and the tables that generate them stay under the DTA's CC BY-SA 4.0; the English translation is ours.

Both the 1807 pagination and the standard Gesammelte Werke 9 concordance are carried as margin references, so a citation in either system can be found on the page.

Hobbes — Leviathan (1651)

The first edition from the EEBO-TCP transcription, in two layers across 56 sections:

Diplomatic — the 1651 text as printed, including the twice-printed page numbers (247, then 247b) that have confused citations for centuries.
Modernized — spelling only, never the word. naturall → natural, soveraign → sovereign, vv → w, u/v and i/j normalized. Archaic morphology and diction stay: hath, doth, thou, spake, bewray. Where Hobbes himself mixes variants, such as injust and unjust, honour and honor, both stay as printed.

Hobbes's own marginal notes are preserved as marginal notes, which required a new feature of its own into the platform.

New features

Collegia

Writers can now form a collegium and submit an article to it for feedback, instead of to the editorial team. These are groups or rooms where you can invite friends, acquiantances and colleagues to review each other's work. A collegium has:

Two review modes. In writing-circle mode every member reviews every submission. In classroom mode only the stewards do. It's the same machinery, a different distribution of who's expected to respond.
Stewards who run the group: settings, membership, invite links, closing rounds. A collegium always keeps at least one.
Public or private visibility, with a discovery list for public ones, invite links (rotatable and revocable) and join requests for the rest.

Reviews are feedback-only. A collegium can't publish or gate an article. When the last member leaves, the collegium is soft-deleted; nothing is destroyed.

Creation of collegium is capped to one per user, and five for members.

Notes in the gutter

Early modern books put a running apparatus in the margin—Hobbes's Leviathan is full of it—and until now Scholia had nowhere to put those notes. They are now first-class: authored in the curated text, stored separately from the body, and rendered in the reader's gutter beside the sentence they annotate, rather than being flattened into the prose or exiled to a footnote.

Page references you can tell apart

Scholarly texts often carry several numbering systems at once—Kant's A and B editions, Hegel's 1807 pages alongside the GW 9 concordance, the Academy edition volumes. Margin numbers now carry a per-system prefix (B 344, 9.53, AA III 42) so it's clear which system a number belongs to. The copy-text's own pagination stays bare.

Editor improvements

The article editor explains where the bibliography comes from: it's generated from the works you cite, not typed by hand.
The link button came back to the editor toolbar. It had quietly gone missing.

Fixes

Reader: sentences no longer stack incorrectly when a translation is the primary layer.
Reader: the notes card shows its action buttons on mobile again.
Routing: a bad book, article, or series slug now returns a proper 404 page instead of an error state.
Mobile: the browser's "install this app" prompt is disabled.
Server: hardening of string values across the API by adding typed enums and verification scripts.

Scholia also gained its first Scholiast member this month! Membership supports the transcription, curation, translation work behind every text above, as well as the software development — thank you!

More is to come! We knocked a few texts out of the recent survey, but many more to go!