Dear colleagues,

We are excited to share our finalised programme for the online symposium on Legal Issues in Textual Scholarship that will take place at the end of next month (27 October 2023)! This event is free, but registration is required to obtain access to the event’s Zoom link. Please register before 22 October. 

Through the practice of editing culturally and historically relevant documents, textual scholars are regularly faced with legal restrictions to their scholarly endeavours – including both copyright and non-copyright restrictions such as the privacy and moral rights of authors. In practice, these added difficulties and legal uncertainties cause funding agencies, libraries, and archives to prioritise the digitisation and publication of less legally problematic materials – which threatens to cause a bias in our output as a research field. In an effort to move forward as a research community, the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS) is organising an online symposium on Legal Issues in Textual Scholarship to address these obstacles, and reflect on the legal restrictions that may affect textual scholarship in the analog and digital paradigms.

We will start the day by exposing some of the problems textual scholars are facing today when they work with copyrighted materials, establishing a legal framework for our discussion, and examining the impact generative AI may have on the field — now, and in the foreseeable future. After lunch, we will continue with a series of shorter papers by authors sharing their professional experiences dealing with copyright holders and their heirs, digitising cultural heritage materials in research and pedagogical contexts, and the use of born-digital source materials. Finally, we will end the day with reflections on the Copyright Act itself, and on how we may navigate these restrictions, and work within the legal boundaries that are set for us.

• For more information on the symposium, including short introductions for all speakers, and abstracts for their talks, please visit the event’s website.
• To register for this event, please follow this link.

We hope to see you there!

All the best, 

Wout Dillen and Elsa Pereira, Organizing Committee 

Programme

(All times CET)

10:00-10:20 | Opening Remarks

10:20-12:00 | Panel I

• 10:20 |  Dirk Van Hulle (University of Oxford): From the Golden Age of the Literary Manuscript to the Ice Age of Copyright 
• 11:00 |  Paweł Kamocki (CLARIN ERIC): The Times and How They Are a-Changin’. Textual Scholarship and Copyright Law Today and in the AI-Generated Future

12:00-13:30 | Lunch Break

13:30-15:30 | Panel II

• 13:30 |  Elsa Pereira (University of Lisbon): Authors’ Heirs Obstructing Textual Scholarship in Portugal
• 14:00 |  Maia Ninidze (Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University): Digitisation of the Archives Belonging to the Heirs of the Classic Georgian Authors
• 14:30 |  Veijo Pulkkinen (University of Helsinki): A Double-Edged Sword: Digital Forensics and Research Permissions in the Study of Born-Digital Manuscripts
• 15:00 |  Wout Dillen (University of Borås): As Open as Possible, as Closed as Necessary. Navigating Legal Issues in a Course on Digitising (and Publishing) Cultural Heritage Materials

15:30-15:45 | Coffee Break

15:45-17:30 | Panel III

• 15:45 | Wim Van Mierlo (Loughborough University): William Wordsworth, the Death of the Author, and the 1842 English Copyright Act
• 16:30 | Fatiha Idmhand (University of Poitiers / ITEM – CNRS/ENS): Manuscripts of Contemporary Authors and Copyright: Exploring the Possibilities?

17:30 | Closing Remarks

About the Event

This online symposium constitutes the first in a series of satellite events organised by the European Society for Textual Scholarship outside of the society’s annual conference. It is co-hosted by the Universities of Borås and Lisbon, and supported by HUMINFRA.