C21 Editions

Scholarly Editing and Publishing in the Digital Age

The aim of the C21 Editions project is to investigate and advance the practices of scholarly digital editing by researching and prototyping data standards that accommodate born-digital content such as social media, while also further integrating the curatorial and statistical aspects of DH by examining how computer-assisted analytical methods can be embedded into edition making. In doing so, the project will produce a range of valuable scholarly and public resources, specifically, two high impact digital editions and the reproducible frameworks on which they are based.

Tete d’une Femme Lisant by Pablo Picasso. Cubism brings different views together in the same picture. In the early 20th century it resulted in artworks that looked radically different to what viewers had experienced before.

When academics mention “scholarly editions”, they are typically referring to expertly curated textual resources or collections, designed to bring some sense of order or meaning to a particular set of materials. Scholarly editing, and the publishing practices that bring such efforts to the public, are hugely important to culture and society, providing the artifacts and insights necessary for understanding ourselves and the past, present, and future of the world around us.

One of the major achievements of the digital humanities is the role its community has played in bringing scholarly editions to digital and web-based platforms, improving their research, pedagogical, and societal value through greater dissemination and access. However, despite all that has been achieved in the three or so decades since DH emerged, the digital scholarly edition is now in danger of becoming obsolete in an increasingly digital world. Most existing digital editions and publishing platforms mimic the structure of books, presenting static content in a page-based structure. Where some interactivity does exist, it is usually in the form of basic hyperlinks to other resources. It is quite possible that very soon, many digital scholarly editions will have been reduced to a curio of the early web.

When we look at the practice of digital scholarly editing, there is a marked lack of machine learning techniques designed to support the curation and analysis of cultural materials. There is also a marked lack of consensus and technical guidance on how best to preserve and share born-digital materials essential to our understanding culture and society in the twenty-first century. For example, it is reasonable to expect that future historians and the general public will want a critically curated edition of the former President Donald Trump’s tweets, contextualised using the sea of online political, media and social discourse that his messages either responded to or prompted. However, right now, there is now readily available framework or platform for creating, presenting, and sustaining such an edition.

This is precisely was C21 Editions aims to remedy: by engaging with experts and stakeholder groups, the project will establish the methods and principles for developing the scholarly digital editions of the future.

Websites

Project Duration

August 2021 — July 2024

Project Team

  • Michael Pidd (Principal Investigator, UK — University of Sheffield)
  • Dr James O’Sullivan (Principal Investigator, Ireland — University College Cork)
  • Professor Bridgette Wessels (Co-Investigator — University of Glasgow)
  • Dr Órla Murphy (Co-Investigator — University College Cork)
  • Sophie Whittle (Postdoctoral Research Associate — Digital Humanities Institute)
  • Matthew Groves (Senior Research Software Engineer — Digital Humanities Institute)
  • Dr Michael Kurzmeier (Postdoctoral Research Associate — University College Cork)