Dear colleagues,

** Apologies for cross-posting **

We're happy to inform you about the Working Group "Visualizing and Investigating Differences In Texts" (VIDIT), and we are warmly inviting you to join.

VIDIT aims to build a global community of scholars, developers, and designers interested in studying and visualizing variation in historical and literary texts. We focus on using visualization to investigate and represent textual variation and make collation software outputs more accessible and informative. Our two main goals are:

Developing a shared vocabulary for describing textual variation;
Creating best-practices guidelines for visualizing it.

These objectives are pursued through two dedicated subgroups, coordinated by Elena Spadini and Brett Barney (Shared Vocabulary) and Carlotta Defenu and Christopher Ohge (Best Practices). The first subgroup meetings are planned on the following dates:

Best Practices → 22 October 2025, 2pm GMT / 3pm CEST / 8am CST: <https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83234533130?pwd=0kEYdScObC9x3E2Jm9VHrlTlbMEAIG.1>
Shared Vocabulary → 29 October 2025, 2pm GMT / 3pm CEST / 8am CST: <https://unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/65312703924?pwd=fxBpUhqFlJa2U4uOWfazaNGxQ8kVym.1>

Curious to learn more or to get involved?

Visit our website at https://wg-vidit.github.io/ — it's still under construction, but it is growing alongside our community.
For more details about our objectives and subgroups, see the About-page on our website: https://wg-vidit.github.io/about/
For communication, you can join our Discord server (<https://discord.gg/v3qzm52tWD>), where members connect, share resources, and collaborate. Dedicated channels for the Best Practices (<https://discord.gg/UzRE9ZJ583>) and Vocabulary (<https://discord.gg/ugXtRvrqAk>) subgroups make it easy to follow the discussions that interest you most;
Explore our public Zotero library (https://www.zotero.org/groups/5918162/visualisationtextvariation) and feel free to suggest additions.

We hope that anyone interested will join the first subgroup meetings and help shape our shared goals. If you’re unable to attend the first subgroup meetings but are keen to stay in the loop, make sure to join our Discord channel(s) and mailing list, and keep an eye out for future emails from us.

VIDIT welcomes scholars, students, developers, and designers to collaborate on advancing digital textual scholarship. Our community spans literary studies, book history, software development, and UI/UX design, and each perspective enriches our collective work. Expertise is not required – curiosity and engagement matter most.

Best wishes,

The VIDIT-coordinators,

Beatrice Nava, Carlotta Defenu, Christopher Ohge, and Elli Bleeker