Dear Digital medievalist list: in view of the current discussion of collaborative transcriptions: the following workshops are likely to be of interest...

The Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editions, Birmingham, is hosting three workshops from September 22 to September 25 this year. Two are these are one day workshops:

1. Tuesday 22 September: ‘SDPublisher: a new and different XML publishing system’ This workshop will present a hands-on introduction to SDPublisher, the new XML publishing system developed by people associated with ITSEE and Scholarly Digital Editions: see www.sd-editions.com/SDPublisher . 2. Wednesday 23 September: ‘The Virtual Manuscript Room: linking resources and scholarship on the web’. This workshop will introduce the concepts behind the Virtual Manuscript Room project, and their implementation in the project, with particular emphasis on the use of metadata in the project to link together manuscript images, transcripts and resources related to them. More details of both workshops can be found at http://itsee.bham.ac.uk/vmr/ITSEEworkshops.htm .

The third is a two day workshop, on the subject of "Tools for Collaborative Scholarly Editing over the Web", on Thursday 24 and Friday 25 September. The first day, "Actions: the State of the Art" on Thursday 24 September, will be open to all: in this, representatives of projects around the world will give presentations on what they have done, are doing, or plan to do, to develop tools for collaborative scholarly editing over the Web. The second day, 'Problems and Futures' on Friday 25 September, will be a series of discussions on, firstly, three key emerging problem areas (intellectual property/scholarly authority; sustainability and interoperability), and, secondly, on the possible shapes of scholarly editing in the world to come. Attendance at this second day will be by invitation only, with numbers restricted. More details of this workshop can be found at http://itsee.bham.ac.uk/vmr/toolscfp.htm.

Attendance at all workshops is open to all (with the restriction to invitees for the Friday 25 September). We have funding from the JISC (the Virtual Manuscript Room) and from the European Science Foundation (through the InterEdition project) and so are able to offer the workshops without charge. We are interested in hearing from anyone who would like to present work they are doing in relation to collaborative editing tools on Thursday 24th, and from anyone who believes that they have something to contribute to the discussions on Friday 25th.

Limited cheap accommodation is available close to the workshop venues (in the Orchard Learning Resource Centre, Selly Oak) for those who act quickly. We may be able to offer assistance with travel and accommodation, particularly to people giving presentations on Thursday 24th and taking part in the discussions on Friday 25th.

To register, or learn more, please contact either Peter Robinson p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk (the workshops leader) or Richard Goode r.goode@bham.ac.uk (the workshops organizer).

Peter Robinson Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing Elmfield House, Selly Oak Campus University of Birmingham Edgbaston B29 6LG P.M.Robinson@bham.ac.uk p. +44 (0)121 4158441, f. +44 (0) 121 415 8376 www.itsee.bham.ac.uk