The Oxford Traherne reports on their new digital collator:
The Oxford Traherne in collaboration with the Visual Geometry Group, University of Oxford, has developed a new digital collator designed for the needs of textual scholars and scholarly editors. A major new version (3.0) has been released in September 2026. […] Collation is the process of comparing different copies of the same text in order to identify variants between them, and is a crucial part of scholarly editing, both for establishing an accurate text and for understanding the history of the printing process. This has often been done in the past using an optical collator, typically consisting of a pair of plane mirrors which can be manually adjusted so that images of two different copies are quasi-superimposed by the brain, allowing differences between them to stand out. While this method has achieved good results, it is both time-consuming and tiring to the user.
[The Traherne Digital Collator] is easier to use than existing methods of optical collation, enables faster and more detailed textual comparison, and makes it possible to analyse the printed text in ways not previously possible. It has transformed the scholarly editing process, and become a standard research tool, used by major editorial projects across the world. The software employs computer vision technology to automatically resize and overlay pages of books and other printed matter, correcting for differences in scale, perspective and page curvature. It can offer a choice of several different visualizations of the variants, including transparent overlay, two-colour channels, and a toggle.
Collation should not be divorced from examination of the original volume, and we have therefore also designed associated image capture equipment. This enables the Traherne Digital Collator to be used either in libraries by displaying live images of the physical volume on a laptop for comparison with another image set, or remotely using two or more image sets. […] It is freely available to colleagues from other scholarly editing projects, and this wider network of scholars have contributed to its development with their feedback. In September 2026, we released version 3.0 of the collator which uses the familiar user interface with some improvements, and which runs directly in a browser with no installation required.
A demonstration of the software, discussion of how it is used by editors, and examples of some of the discoveries which it has enabled, can be found here, in a recording of a seminar given by Dr Austen Saunders and Professor Rob Whalen to the Traherne Online Research Network. For an account of a major scholarly project’s experience of using the Traherne Digital Collator, see the blog post by Harriet Phillips of The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Browne.
That last link is very interesting in its own right; here’s a sample:
In making Browne’s text available for readers in the present, we have to think about how it reached readers in the past. I say ‘text’, but Browne continually updated and revised his work between its first publication in 1646 and the final edition in 1672. Six editions were published during his lifetime, all of which are slightly different. Finding these changes is relatively easy, if time-consuming. But there are also differences within editions. 17th century printing was a process of many moving parts, and people. A print run of (say) 5,000 copies, which is a reasonable estimate for the first edition of Pseudodoxia, would take several days. In that time, mistakes were almost always made.
Here is page 168 in two different copies of Pseudodoxia’s 1672 edition. They look identical, but there is in fact a small difference. Browne is writing about whether or not moles are blind. In the image on the left line 32 reads ‘…instead of a callgation or dimness, we conclude a cecity or blindness.’ On the right, it reads ‘caligation’.
More at the links, including images; thanks, Leslie!