Hello everyone, the code for Aracne2 has been on GitHub for a few months now — a modular CMS for editing and publishing TEI corpora. A companion volume, published by FedOA Press, covers its origins, architecture and features in detail. Code (MIT): https://github.com/orazionelson/aracne2 Site and documentation: https://orazionelson.github.io/aracne2/ Volume: https://doi.org/10.6093/978-88-6887-439-1 The underlying idea is to take a corpus from raw transcription to a citable digital edition without forcing the person editing the text to become a sysadmin as well. In brief: – schema-aware XML editor, with validation per document and across a whole collection; – staged editorial workflow with versioning and a clean split between working copy and published copy; – named entities linked to authority files (Wikidata, VIAF, GeoNames, ORCID, GND and others); – bibliography with BibTeX/CSL-JSON/Zotero import and DOI resolution; – facsimiles and zones for text-image alignment; – XSLT-driven public site generator, with configurable indices and search portals; – LOD and OAI-PMH for harvesting, deposit to Zenodo, Dataverse, Internet Archive and git forges; – audit log and fixity, plus policy pages aimed at projects preparing for a CoreTrustSeal review. Architecturally, there are two distinct data layers: PostgreSQL for platform state (users, roles, plugins, audit), eXist-db for TEI documents, stored natively and queried in XQuery. Python/FastAPI backend, Vue 3 frontend, fully containerised. Every integration is a plugin that mounts without a restart, so a deployment can stay minimal or grow along with the project. The AI side is there but optional and can be switched off: in-editor assistance (explaining validation errors, normalising bibliography, tagging named entities), local RAG over the TEI P5 Guidelines, and a read-only MCP server that lets an external assistant query the corpus. Anyone who cannot or would rather not send their texts to a cloud service can run the whole thing locally with Ollama. Aracne2 is the third iteration of a line of tools that began in 2008 with MaRa, the scripts written to mark up the Angevin Registers, continued with Aracne (2016-2026, built entirely on eXist-db), and arrives at this rewrite. The FedOA Press volume reconstructs that trajectory at length. It is all free: you can download it and try it locally with a handful of commands. Aracne2 is open to experiment and ready to be put to the test on new projects — reports, criticism and proposals are all welcome.
