Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network

Projektinformationen

DIXIT

ID Finanzhilfevereinbarung: 317436

Abgeschlossenes Projekt

Startdatum 1 September 2013

Enddatum 31 August 2017

Finanziert unter

• Specific programme "People" implementing the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technological development and demonstration activities (2007 to 2013)

Gesamtkosten € 4 040 671,03

EU-Beitrag € 4 040 671,03

Koordiniert durch

UNIVERSITAT ZU KOLN
Germany

Final Report Summary - DIXIT (Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network)

DiXiT is an international network of high-profile institutions from the public and the private sector that are actively involved in the creation and publication of digital scholarly editions. It offers a coordinated training and research programme for 12 early stage researchers and 5 experienced researchers in the multi-disciplinary skills, technologies, theories, and methods of digital scholarly editing.

Scholarly editing has a long-standing tradition in the humanities. It represents a strand of crucial importance within disciplines such as literary studies, philology, history, philosophy, library and information science, and bibliography, to name but a few. Moreover, the analysis, transmission, editing and re-vitalization of works of cultural heritage that textual scholars and scholarly editors perform is a scholarly endeavour in and of itself. It is remarkable that scholarly editors were among the first within the humanities to realize the potential of digital media for performing research, for disseminating their results, and for bringing research communities together. Hence, digital scholarly editing is one of the most mature fields within the emergent terrain of Digital Humanities posing several challenges. One reason is that scholarly editing is clearly cross-disciplinary. Another reason results from the fact that the skills, technologies, and methods of digital scholarly editing have been in flux as the tools and standards have improved, creating possibilities for digital scholarly editions that former generations of editors could only dream about.

Digital scholarly editing is perhaps the area where the convergence between the humanities and cutting edge digital technologies is most obvious. But there has been no dedicated post-graduate programme that was able to provide the resources and the training to form a future generation of scholars combining both high skills and the deep knowledge needed to face present and future challenges of digital scholarly editing. Therefore, DiXiT seeked to train a new generation of scholarly experts that is able to explore this new genre and to better understand the relationship between the goals of traditional scholarly editions and new computational methods and technologies. And it is to this end, that DiXiT has brought together many of the most highly thought-of European institutions and researchers in this area for collaboration with the private sector and cultural heritage institutions.

The international DiXiT consortium has been established by leading institutions in the interdisciplinary field of critical digitization and editing, chosen to cover both the heterogeneity and the differing approaches towards tackling the challenge of how to best convey our textual heritage to multiple audiences. Ten full partners represent nine different countries reflecting different academic and philological traditions. A variety of associated partners contribute to the network important knowledge, expertise and resources representing private sector enterprises related in areas as diverse as software engineering, the commercial digitisation sector, the publishing industry, the cultural heritage sector and important public knowledge projects and initiatives. The DiXiT programme is deeply embedded in a wide range of existing networks, associations and learned societies. Moreover, DiXiT contributes to the construction of research infrastructures in Europe through its close cooperation with DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, in order to enhance and support digitally-enabled research and teaching across the humanities and arts.

DiXiT research topics and related methodologies are grouped into three work packages. These Work packages are covered by training events and conferences as well as by the research projects of the fellows:
• Under the WP1 (Concepts, Theory, Practice) goals, functions and usability of digital scholarly editing are examined, assessed and mapped in a typology of existing and future editions.
• Under WP2 (Technology, Standards, Software) research projects are concerned with tools and the technological infrastructure supporting digital scholarly editions.
• Under WP3 (Academia, Cultural Heritage and Society) the focus lies on the relationships and interdependences between academia, cultural heritage and society.

Among the highlights of the project, the six DiXiT main conventions and conferences have been a great success. They were embellished by a multitude of additional workshops that were supported by DiXiT and hosted all over Europe to the benefit of a wide variety of external participants. These events have attracted and actively involved a broad international community of scholars at all career stages. DiXiT partners have created a robust research and training programme in the core skills of digital scholarly editing, reaching researchers from some 300 European institutions. The consortium involved some 800 researchers in Europe and beyond through some 25 events. Participating researchers came from almost all European countries and many non-European countries; DiXiT training events and conferences were held across 11 European countries including two online summer schools in Spanish reaching out to Latin America.
Another main achievement of DiXiT has been the development and coordination of training and research capacities in the field of digital scholarly editing by bringing together skills and competences by the leading experts and institutions, their expertise ranging from textual scholarship, literary studies, philology and other areas of the humanities to e-publishing developments, digital libraries and information systems, computer science and software engineering.
The DiXiT network consists of ten leading academic and research institutions along with 22 partner institutions from the commercial and cultural heritage sectors that together represent a wide variety of technologies and approaches to European digital scholarly editing.
DiXiT not simply establishes an inter-European network bridging disciplines, cultures, and national boundaries; rather, the output produced by the DiXiT fellows substantially contributes to the needed investigations into the key issues of the field. The results are and will be vigorously disseminated via monographs (PhD publications), journal articles, online tutorials, conference presentations and proceedings, reviews and blog posts. The connections forged will continue to result in events and conferences that attract scholars and stakeholders from the cultural heritage and commercial sectors, thus raising the quality and potential profit of editorial processes and products. These activities will help to realize the full potential of processes like critical digitization, scholarly examination, and textual criticism to create information resources that are reliable and stable points of reference with a strong impact on the academic world and an immediate impact on business and society.

More information on the project website: http://dixit.uni-koeln.de/; the fellows’ blog: http://dixit.hypotheses.org/ and on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DiXiT_EU.