Digital Editing Now: Call for digital posters

7-9 January 2016     Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)

University of Cambridge

Graduate students and early career scholars with interests in digital edition work are invited to submit proposals for digital posters relating to this field. The selected posters (a main page either in web page format, with the option of links to one or two additional pages, or in pdf) will be projected for five-minute presentations during the course of the conference. Those presenting will receive a bursary towards the costs of attendance.

Please send your proposal (maximum 200 words) to Tom Taylor (tmt24@cam.ac.uk) by Friday 23 October 2015.

In recent years, there has been a significant shift in scholarly culture and funding strategies towards digital formats for edition projects. This is driven by the potential for new forms of production, presentation and access that the digital promises. And it involves a reassessment of the conventions that have determined editorial practice in the age of print. This conference will gather interested parties together to exchange ideas about the state of digital editing and its future potential. It will also provide the opportunity to ask critical questions about the limits of the digital. How should we place ourselves relative to fundamental issues of authority/openness, durability/fluidity? Can we establish a set of ideal types for digital editorial method, or would its optimal strengths rather lie in more hybrid forms, including a productive mode of cohabitation with the print formats that it appears to want to supersede?

While the conference will be fully open in historical and disciplinary terms, the exchange that is proposed here will be focused around four key sets of concerns, which cut across differences of material and context:

1. Material texts and digital forms

What possibilities does digital editing provide to do justice to the material character of the texts it seeks to present, to their physical bedding and the means of their inscription? Can it find creative and meaningful ways of getting close to the experience of the archive? And how does it respond to the need for the kinds of durability and reliability associated with its physical counterparts?

2. Editorial agents and agencies (providers, in various roles, and users)

Digital editions are the collaborative product of a range of types of expertise. They bring different agents together (academics, archivists, information technologists) in what can be a delicate process of negotiation between systems of knowledge. At the same time, users – expert and otherwise – experience, and in some cases reconfigure, digital editions, in various ways. How can the collective agency of these networks be made most fruitful?

3. Chronology and topography (genetic and diplomatic methods)

Critical editions always have to deal with the tension between presenting the historical genesis of their material and the spatial lay-out of its iterations. How can digital functions convey the relations between the two in dynamic and enlightening fashion?

4. Digital edition and performance practices

Digital editing offers the means to open up and enliven a range of different cultural materials. How might it provide a new basis for performance practices, in both live and digitally mediated forms, and in combinations of the two? And how might this extend beyond material self-evidently for performance (music, drama) to other types of resource?