Digital Scholarly Edition from A to Z: Call for Participation to a Collaborative Booksprint
Organized by: Anne Baillot (DARIAH), Julie Giovacchini (CNRS) and Mareike König (German Historical Institute Paris)
Location: Institut historique allemand, Paris
Cooperation parter: Open Science Lab of the TIB Hannover, Lambert Heller
Date: March 4th (1PM) to 6th (5PM) 2026
Application deadline: September 10th 2025
Information: dh [at] dhi-paris.fr
The aim of this three-day collaborative book sprint is to produce an open-access handbook for the use of those wishing to set up a digital scholarly edition.
Digital scholarly editions of heritage texts are becoming increasingly popular. They offer a format that is more accessible, more open, and richer in possibilities for exploitation, dissemination and querying. At first glance, a digital edition seems less expensive than the traditional printed format, and appears to offer significant added value in the context of grant applications. Unfortunately, many digital edition projects fail to achieve satisfactory results, or even fail altogether for not understanding the format’s constraints and due to a lack of awareness of the technological and scientific prerequisites. Many researchers contemplating such an edition don’t know where to start, or which choices are crucial to the project’s success. With this bookspring, we aim at providing them with a reference resource for the entire scholarly digital edition pipeline.
Goal and content
This book sprint will bring together specialists in the field of digital scholarly editing, with the aim of collaboratively writing a clear, practical summary for prospective editors. The resulting handbook will summarize prerequisites and constraints, and address all the questions to be clarify upstream and downstream to produce a high-quality digital edition:
- which format to choose, depending on the constraints of the scientific project, the corpus under consideration, and the skills of the partners
- what is the difference between a digital collection and a digital edition
- what budget, technical infrastructure, tools, formats and technical standards to adopt, depending on the objectives of the project
- what training is required for members of the editorial team, and how to divide labour within the editorial team
- how to deal with the issue of metadata and data, how to connect the digital edition with the underlying data
- how to ensure project completion, work plan and timetable
- what ethical issues need to be resolved (working conditions, data ownership, distribution conditions and digital accessibility)
- what are the legal issues involved in digital editing, how to manage copyright, which licenses to choose for data and published content, what legal obligations must be met
- how to guarantee the long-term durability and accessibility of a digital edition
Work program
The three booksprint days will bring together specialists that are willing to make best practices accessible to all researchers and heritage professionals wishing to embark on the production of a digital scholarly edition. The working group will begin by dividing the guidebook into chapters, and setting up teams and a drafting schedule for the duration of the writing sprint. Writing will preferably be done in English, but it is also possible to write parts in French, which will be translated into English during the session. The guidebook will therefore initially be presented in English. Translations into other languages are welcome and can be realized at a later stage.
The booksprint will last three days from March 4, 1:00 pm to March 6, 5:00 pm 2026. It will take place in Paris at the German Historical Institute, where several rooms have been reserved to enable work in small groups. The technical infrastructure for the book sprint, including the assignment of DOIs for the individual chapters, will be provided by the Open Science Lab at the TIB Hanover.
Participants are asked to bring their own laptops. Coffee and lunch breaks will be provided on site; partial funding may be available for travel and accommodation costs (depending on the funding)
Participation procedure
If you would like to contribute to this book sprint, please send a motivation letter, a selection of your publications and/or projects on the relevant topics, and an indication of your funding, in particular whether your home institution will cover the cost.
Application deadline: September 10, 2025
Send your application in a single PDF file to dh [at] dhi-paris.fr.
Image: Unknown miniaturist from Bolognia — Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Rep. II 9b (CCXLIII), fol. 81v, public domaine, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27416534.
Version française de l’appel : https://dhiha.hypotheses.org/3711
Deutsche Fassung des Call: https://dhdhi.hypotheses.org/11680
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
dhiparis (28. Juli 2025). Digital Scholarly Edition from A to Z: Call for Participation to a Collaborative Booksprint. Digital Humanities am DHIP. Abgerufen am 12. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/14fxk


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