Details

The conference Open Up Digital Editions focused on the use and reuse of digital editions, and thus on the central importance of scholarly edited source collections as a basis for research. While the focus in recent years has primarily been placed on the development of innovative technical platforms and new methodologies, fundamental questions of accessibility and the long-term usability of meticulously edited and digitally processed source materials have long remained somewhat in the background. However, these issues have become urgent also from the perspective of funding institutions such as the SAHS. In his welcome address, Beat Immenhauser summed up the risks for digital editions: «Lack of funding, missing international connections, unsustainable archiving solutions, and poor implementation of FAIR data principles could lead to editions being irrelevant for subsequent research and the re-use of data.»

A vibrant community

The conference impressively demonstrated that an extremely active, interdisciplinary and international community has emerged in recent years to discuss the meaning and implementation of the FAIR data principles in digital editions. At the conference, over 100 participants discussed the challenges, in particular with regard to the long-term accessibility of digital editions, and put forward promising suggestions for making digital editions and the research data they contain more accessible and (re)usable.

The FAIR principles and digital editions

The common interest in implementing FAIR principles in digital editions across disciplinary, institutional, and national boundaries does not necessarily imply a consensus on what FAIR principles mean in the context of digital editions. A pressing but largely unanswered question for many is the extent to which FAIR principles also apply to the presentation layer of digital editions, and what a FAIR interface should look like. This is particularly challenging as the long-term accessibility of front-ends raises different issues from the application of FAIR principles to data. However, there seems to be a broad consensus that FAIR is important not only for text and image data, but also for tools, workflows, and methods developed in the context of edition projects. As Elena Pierazzo pointed out, the accessibility of tools and the knowledge of how to use them in a meaningful way are crucial to lowering the barriers to future digital editions. This is important because it enables researchers with fewer financial resources to realise digital editions - an important prerequisite for promoting research diversity in times of digital change.

Standardisation of data versus diverse usage scenarios

Discussions about standardisation are often marked by a seemingly insurmountable contradiction: scholars emphasise the specific requirements of encoding historical textual, musical or visual sources, while infrastructure representatives stress that low standards impede data reusability, meaningful storage, and interoperability. This tension is exacerbated by the community standard for encoding text and image data, TEI/XML. While its complex rules for encoding text and image sources are well suited to humanities projects, ambiguities within this set of rules pose challenges to reusability. More promising, however, are approaches promoting standardisation processes based on TEI/XML that are driven by specific and diverse usage scenarios: promoting standards within existing research communities is an approach that has proved to be highly productive in the case of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). Another effective approach could be the creation of source-specific templates based on TEI, as in the case of eDITEM in the Netherlands. 

Three major challenges

In order to improve the future use and reuse of digital editions in a sustainable way, three challenges seem particularly important: 

First, to promote a process-oriented approach right from the conception phase of research projects, which always takes into account the entire data life cycle of data. Research platforms that have emerged from digital edition projects in recent years, such as e-editiones, RISM Online or ch18Net, play an important role here. Not only do they provide technical infrastructure, but they also perform important coordinating role within their respective communities and can thus contribute to the promotion of standards. 

Secondly, the conference highlighted that such research platforms often lack long-term institutional anchoring. How to deal with this situation, particularly from the perspective of institutions such as universities, libraries, archives, and repositories, emerged as an important issue. Coordination and agreement on responsibilities between these institutions therefore seems particularly important, especially with regard to the important issue of long-term preservation. Perhaps the ORD Strategy Council could provide guidance on this issue in the future.

Finally, the conference showed that there is a great need for knowledge exchange on the implementation of the FAIR principles and the appropriate use of new methods, technical tools, and workflows. It remains an important goal of the Research and Infrastructure Support Center RISE at the University of Basel and the Center for Digital Editions ZDE at the University Library Zurich to provide support in this area.

References

The Book of Abstract of the conference as well as many presentation documents can be downloaded via the Zenodo Community: Search Open Up Digital Editions conference 2024 (zenodo.org)