Establishing a framework for scholarly editing and publishing in the 21st century

Workshop, 9-10 March 2015

Location: Orient-Institut Beirut 

Conveyors: Till Grallert, Astrid Meier, Torsten Wollina

Abstract

Over the last two decades the humanities and their prime object of study as well as their product, the written text, have undergone major transformations that, for a large part, have come from outside, from the realm of engineers and technologists and that are encapsulated in two terms:digital and the internet. The challenge is how we, scholars in the humanities, can actively shape this epistemic shift happening all around us in order to create opportunities for a better understanding of human societies as well as to foster broader access to cultural artefacts and our results. Finally, we are interested in the new forms of participation and collaboration in our researchfrom crowd sourcing to distributed editing. For this it is necessary to become familiar with, if not fluent in, the languages and logics of the new episteme. The workshop aims at exactly that by bringing together people involved in the D and the H of digital humanities—scholars and technologists—to discuss the technical possibilities to improve editorial processes as well as its product(s) and how do we guarantee wide and easy access to our scholarship for the academic community and the wider public.

The goal of this workshop is to discuss with editors, publishers, and (proespective) users of our editions scalable long-term solutions and workflows that contribute to the following aims:

1. to radically improve, simplify, and streamline the process of producing editions of predominantly Arabic source texts as well as scholarly texts written in several languages employing Latin and Arabic alphabets;
2. to produce various forms of presentation—printed books, ebooks, websites, PDFs etc.—with similar content and from a single master text in a highly automated environment;
3. to build a system that allows future scholarly re-use of our texts—be it computer linguistics, automated indexes, natural entity recognition or linked-data applications.