Digital Editing: About Us

Scholarly Editing

The focus of our program is on scholarly editions. Scholarly editions form the foundation of research in the cultural disciplines and beyond. Their tasks include making sources such as manuscripts, typescripts, historical prints, or digital texts accessible and presenting them in a prepared form. This can be done through commentary, overviews of relationships of textual transmission, different text versions, analyses of textual genesis, or visualizations such as maps and networks.

The way sources are edited is not self-evident. It is inseparable from how we conceptualize terms like “text” and “document.” Texts can be presented as static, canonical entities, or as dynamic processes in constant flux; as contextless monoliths, or as artifacts embedded in diverse, including intermedial, contexts and practices.

Digital Editions

Scholarly editing gains a special dimension through the use of digital tools. Online publication is particularly well suited to the presentation of sources, since it allows texts to be shown in their multilayered relationships and in their materiality. This digital transformation also affects the way we imagine texts and sources. Not least, recent developments in AI and large language models can be used to produce editions and will strongly reshape scholarly editing. At the same time, the source-critical expertise of the field makes it especially well positioned to find ways of engaging with such methods in a reflective manner.

Accordingly, our focus encompasses digital editions in both a theoretically reflective and a methodologically practical sense. We develop individual editions as well as editorial methodologies, and we see ourselves as a field oriented toward interdisciplinarity and collaboration.

The subjects of our program are diverse and cover a wide range of sources. While our emphasis is on text-based editions, we regularly work with materials that go beyond “text” in the conventional sense and include multimedia contexts. We cover a broad time span, from medieval sources through the modern era to the digital age. If you are interested in such collaborations or have questions about digital scholarly editing, please feel free to contact us.

Team

• Carl Friedrich Haak
• Thomas Jäger
• Beatrice Nava
• Gabriel Viehhauser