The aim of the C21 Editions project is to advance the practice of scholarly digital editing by researching and prototyping data standards that will enable editions to accommodate born-digital content, such as social media, and methods that will enable editors to benefit from machine-assisted insights, such as Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Specifically, this project will:
- Explore how born-digital materials, such as social media content, electronic literature and online virtual world, might be accommodated by editing practices and publishing platforms which are feasible and replicable right across the digital humanities community. This needs to consider new data standards and frameworks for scholarly editing that are conceptually different to the codex oriented approaches that have dominated text-centred activities to date. It must accommodate some of the unique characteristics of born-digital materials, such as their size and volume, non-linear inter-relationships, multimodality, durability, and authenticity (since they can be easily reproduced, changed and republished).
- Demonstrate how machine-assisted insights such as Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, computational linguistics, data visualisation, and record linkage can improve edition making and digital publishing by increasing the speed, accuracy, and variety of time-consuming editorial tasks such as annotating, glossing and connecting texts, as well as enabling editors to intuitively approach their curated materials through close and distant ways of reading. This needs to consider how edition making can take place in dialogue with other, open knowledge resources on the web through the affordances of domain ontologies, APIs, and linked data. We must also consider how the tools of machine-assisted editing can be made open, reproducible, and easily usable for editors with limited technical expertise.
In addressing these two topics, C21 Editions will look to lay the foundation for a major advance in the state of-the-art across both digital scholarly editing and digital publishing, problematising what scholarly editing and publishing paradigms and practices are needed in order to create and share critical editions of born digital primary sources, what such editions should and can contain, what they should look like, and how they should function and be used compared with conventional digital editions and print publishing. Sustainability will be central to this project’s outcomes, and so it will also examine how such outputs can be created and maintained in practice in terms of technology and skills requirements, and what role digital cultural heritage repositories should play as custodians.
Through prototype-based case studies, the project will demonstrate the extent to which theories of digital editions might be actually implemented in a flexible, reproducible, open, and sustainable manner.