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What future for digital scholarly editions? From Haute Couture to Prêt-à-Porter

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Abstract

Digital scholarly editions are expensive to make and to maintain. As such, they prove unattainable for less established scholars like early careers and PhD students, or indeed anyone without access to significant funding. One solution could be to create tools and platforms able to provide a publishing framework for digital scholarly editions that requires neither a high-tech skillset nor big investment. I call this type of edition “Prêt-à-Porter”, to be distinguished from “haute couture” editions which are tailored to the specific needs of specific scholars. I argued that both types of editions are necessary for a healthy scholarly environment.

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Notes

  1. For some such initiatives, see for instance, DIXiT (http://dixit.uni-koeln.de) and DEMM (https://www.digitalmanuscripts.eu). See also the journal devoted to the reviewing of Digital Scholarly Editions, RIDE (https://ride.i-d-e.de).

  2. See, for instance, the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (http://www.beckettarchive.org), or the Dante Alighieri’s Commedia project (2010) (http://www.sd-editions.com/AnaAdditional/CommediaEx/CommediaExhome.html).

  3. Some exceptions are discussed below.

  4. The very first Digital Humanities project was led by philologist Father Roberto Busa (Busa 1974); see also Robinson 2005.

  5. At least, this is my experience of working at Italian, English, and French institutions.

  6. This is the case, for instance, of the LangScape project (http://www.langscape.org.uk/index.html) (Stokes and Pierazzo 2009); it is also the case of the Vercelli Book, for which see below.

  7. For instance, the DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) at the University of Victoria (CA); MMSDA (Medieval and Modern Manuscripts Studies in the Digital Age), University of London (Institute of English Studies, King’s College London, Warburg Institute) and of Cambridge; EDEEN (École D’Éte Éditions Numériques), University of Grenoble.

  8. See, respectively: http://cceh.uni-koeln.de; https://www.kdl.kcl.ac.uk; https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/research-groups/centre-for-manuscript-genetics/.

  9. Most of the summer schools and training offered in the field, some of which have been mentioned above, are attended by PhD students and early career scholars; for instance, in 2017 the EDEEN Summer School had 85% of their places filled by early career scholars and PhD students.

  10. Peter Robinson has been particularly vocal about this issue (2010, 2016), but the subject has been debated at many conferences. The attempt to meet these needs is embodied by some of the tools presented below (TEI Publisher; EVT; Versioning Machine).

  11. For instance, see the Piers Plowman electronic edition (http://piers.chass.ncsu.edu), which offers a link to the “Critical Text” from the home page; The Excerpt from the Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa (https://byzantini.st/ChronicleME/aboutsite) also purports to be a critical edition. The editions of the Stufaiuolo, in contrast, only declare to be “scholarly editions” (Pierazzo 2015b).

  12. The edition of the Vercelli Book is available as a “beta” version (see above about “beta” publishing) at the address: http://vbd.humnet.unipi.it/beta2/#doc=DOTR&page=VB_fol_104v; more about the project at the website: http://vbd.humnet.unipi.it/; the Fourth edition of the Electronic Beowulf, edited by Kevin Kiernan, is available at the address http://ebeowulf.uky.edu.

  13. TEI Publisher is based on eXist, an XML database and is developed by eXist Solution (https://teipublisher.com/index.html).

  14. The Versioning Machine is developed and maintained by Susan Schreibman (http://v-machine.org/)

  15. EVT (Edition Visualization Technology) is developed by Roberto Rosselli Del Turco and his team; EVT 2 is available as a beta release (https://visualizationtechnology.wordpress.com) (29 march 2018).

  16. See also Posner (2012) and the discussion on how this approach is discriminatory, mainly against women.

  17. See the websites of the digital facilities of these libraries, respectively the Cambridge Digital Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/) and the Digital Scholarship (https://libraries.indiana.edu/services/digital-scholarship).

  18. See the website https://textgrid.de/en.

  19. See the website http://scholarlyediting.org.

  20. See the website https://cdrh.unl.edu.

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  1. Université Grenoble Alpes – LUHCIE, Grenoble, France

    Elena Pierazzo

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Pierazzo, E. What future for digital scholarly editions? From Haute Couture to Prêt-à-Porter. Int J Digit Humanities 1, 209–220 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42803-019-00019-3

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