Digital Hub Bootcamp series kicks off with digital scholarly editing workshop

8 November 2021

The innovative field of Digital Scholarly Editing was the focus of the first workshop in the College’s new Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub Bootcamp series, a range of term-time workshops that aims to boost digital skills, personal development, and introduce and demystify new technologies. The Bootcamp series is curated by Dr Janina Schupp, SOUTHWORKS Career Development Fellow for the Hub.

Digital Bits of Paper? An Introduction to Digital Textual Editing was hosted by Jesus College Professorial Fellow and Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History Dirk Van Hulle, with guest speakers Emma Huber, Subject Librarian and DH Instructor at the Taylor Institution Library and Joshua Schäuble, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Textual Editing and Theory (OCTET), Digital Scholarship at Oxford, and the University of Antwerp.

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Professor Dirk Van Hulle with Professor Howard Hotson from the Centre for Digital Scholarship at Oxford

 

The event explored how digital scholarly editions are made, how they can be used, and what support and resources are available. Emma discussed the training programme provided by Taylor Editions for academics looking to explore scholarly digital editing. The practical online course, which is freely available to all University members, covers topics such as choosing a text, digitising images, transcription, encoding, quality assurance and publication.

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(From left) Emma Huber, Subject Librarian and DH Instructor at the Taylor Institute Library and Joshua Schäuble, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp.

 

Joshua talked about the new virtual research environment – Manuscript Web – which facilitates the scholarly work of editing modern manuscripts, and visualizing connections between them, including Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology based on AI algorithms. He used the example of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) to show how the algorithm can be taught to read hand-written notes – words, sentences and paragraphs – and connect these to passages in both the draft and published versions of a manuscript. This not only enables fresh perspectives on how a writer researches and develops ideas, but also allows scholars to make complex manuscripts available in a hugely expanded yet relatively simple way.

Over forty University colleagues and students attended the in-person workshop, much to the delight of Dr Janina Schupp, our SOUTHWORKS Career Development Fellow of the Digital Hub, who organises and curates the programme of activities: “It was brilliant to experience such a high-demand for the start of our digital skills training and to see Jesus College shine as a centre for the development and discussion of cutting-edge digital research.”

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Attendees at our first Digital Hub bootcamp workshop enjoy refreshments and post-event networking

 

Future Digital Bootcamp events include object scanning, public engagement training, digital filmmaking, podcasting, VR and AR technology, and data mining and analysis. Janina says, “These workshops are designed to provide a unique training opportunity that leads seamlessly into the public-facing activities after the Cheng Kar Shun Digital Hub officially opens.”

 

 

About scholarly digital editing

Like traditional print-based scholarly editing, digital scholarly editing shares the goals that it should be critical i.e. it engages with the text in a reflective and critical way; it includes the object of study and it focuses on all the historic documents, all the versions of a text, whether that be a poem, prose text or play for example. However, a digital scholarly edition departs from the usual constraints of space, page layouts and sections, and enables textual notes and editorial commentary to be expanded; sections of text can be linked together and multimedia content can be added. Essentially, it is reconceiving the traditional approach of textual criticism and scholarly editing.