The call for nominations for the ESTS Board is open until Friday, 10 January 2025. 

There are currently up to four vacancies on the Board, which we aim to fill before the start of our next annual conference (ESTS 2025 Tours, 28-30 April). More information about the election and the responsibilities of the Board can be found here: https://textualscholarship.eu/board/2025-board-elections/ 

Nominations should be sent to the Society’s Secretary, Elsa Pereira, by Friday, 10 January 2025, and include:  

1) a brief Letter of Motivation confirming the willingness to stand for election and informing of the candidate’s background and intentions;  

2) the name of another Member of the ESTS who supports the nomination;  

3) proof of payment of the ESTS 2024 or the ESTS 2025 Membership fee. 

All paid members of the ESTS are eligible to nominate themselves. Prospective candidates not currently counted as Members in Good Standing can still make themselves eligible by paying their membership fee before the deadline and attaching proof of payment to their nomination. For more information about general ESTS Membership, please refer to: https://textualscholarship.eu/membership/  

To ensure the effective functioning of the Board, we particularly encourage applications from candidates who are committed to taking an active role on the Board. 

Genetic Criticism in Motion. New Perspectives on Manuscript Studies

Edited by Sakari Katajamäki and Veijo Pulkkinen. Associate editor Tommi Dunderlin. SKS 2023.

Available as open access at: https://doi.org/10.21435/sflit.14

The book provides a cross-section of current international trends in genetic criticism, half a century after the birth of the discipline in Paris. The last two decades have witnessed an expansion of the field of study with new kinds of research objects and new forms of archival material, along with various kinds of interdisciplinary intersections and new theoretical perspectives.

The essays in this volume represent various European literary and scholarly traditions discussing creative processes from Polish poetry to French children’s literature, as well as topical issues such as born-digital literature and the application of forensic methodology to manuscript studies. The book is intended for scholars and students of literary criticism and textual scholarship, together with anyone interested in the working practices of writers, illustrators, and editors.

The book is divided into an introduction and four sections which explore different aspects of the discipline and various literary traditions in Europe:

Sakari Katajamäki and Veijo Pulkkinen: Introduction: The Widening Circles of Genetic Criticism

I Writing Technologies

Wim Van Mierlo: Genetic Criticism and Modern Palaeography: The Cultural Forms of Modern Literary Manuscripts

Veijo Pulkkinen: A Curious Thing: Typescripts and Genetic Criticism

II Digitality and Genetic Criticism

Dirk Van Hulle: The Logic of Versions in Born-Digital Literature

Paolo D’Iorio: The Genetic Edition of Nietzsche’s Work

III Draft Reading

Mateusz Antoniuk: Dying in Nine Ways: Genetic Criticism and the Proliferation of Variants

Julia Holter: The Translation Draft as Debt Negotiation Space: Underlying Forces of the Collaborative Translation of Vadim Kozovoï’s Hors de la colline (1984)

IV Multimodality

Claire Doquet and Solène Audebert-Poulet: Text and Illustrations as Producers of Meaning: A Genetic Study of a Children’s Illustrated Book

Hanna Karhu: Use of Folklore in a Writing Process of Poetry: Rewritings of Folk Songs and References to Oral Poetry in Otto Manninen’s Early Manuscripts

Printed review copies can be requested from the publisher.

The ESTS will be holding an online symposium on 27th October 2023 dedicated to legal issues in textual scholarship. All information regarding registration, and the CfP, can be found on the symposium’s website: https://sites.google.com/view/estslegalissues/home

The CfP can also be read below:

Call for papers

Legal Issues in Textual Scholarship

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. The 5th ESTS Conference, dedicated to the theme “Private: do (not) enter” (Lisbon, 2008), lifted the veil on some of these legal issues, but the regulatory problem is multifaceted and has been accentuated with the digital turn in humanities research. The fact that copyright law is territorial, for example, makes the path towards publishing and providing international access to online digital scholarly editions of more recent or sensitive documents especially difficult to navigate. 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.

To address these issues as a research community and learn from each other’s experiences, the organisers are hosting an online symposium on 27 October 2023 that aims to reflect on the legal restrictions that may affect textual scholarship in the analogue and digital paradigms, with a special focus on textual and genetic criticism. The symposium is organised in affiliation with the European Society for Textual Scholarship as a satellite event taking place outside of its annual conference. 

The organisers of this symposium invite researchers to submit abstracts for a 20-minute contribution on topics such as (but not limited to):

• limitations to textual scholarship on the basis of copyright law and authors’ moral rights;
• data privacy, human rights issues, and other non-copyright restrictions in textual scholarship;
• authors’ rights vs. academic freedom;
• strategies for working within the limitations of European copyright law and its exceptions for teaching and scientific research;
• discussion of legal issues pertaining to past and ongoing scholarly projects;
• navigating legal restrictions in dialogue with living authors or their heirs;
• editorial handling of variant versions and publication of ne varietur works;
• legal aspects of working with unpublished materials and orphan works;
• complications from the perspective of legal deposit;
• legal issues regarding the institutional curation of documents, the digitization of source materials, and their (re)publication in  a new medium;
• overlapping policies affecting digital scholarly projects;
• legal issues with born-digital source materials;
• lessons learned from failed funding applications on the basis of legal issues.

The deadline for submitting proposals is 18 June 2023. Submissions should include the author’s name, email address, institutional affiliation and position (where relevant), a title of the proposed paper, and an abstract (200-300 words in English). Please address your proposal to Elsa Pereira <elsa.pereira@campus.ul.pt> stating “ESTS Legal Issues: proposal” in the email subject line. Abstracts will be reviewed by the members of the scientific committee. Decisions will be announced in July.

The call for nominations for the ESTS Board is currently open, until Monday 20 March 2023.

There are currently up to four vacancies on the board, which we aim to fill before the start of the next Annual Conference (ESTS 2023, Canterbury, 13-14 April). More information about nominations can be found here: https://textualscholarship.eu/board/2023-board-elections/.

All paid members of the ESTS are eligible to nominate themselves or others. If you registered for the Annual Conference last year (ESTS 2022, Oxford), you are already a paid member. If you are not currently a member but would like to take part in the nominations, you will be able to pay the membership fee before the deadline and attach proof of payment to your nomination. For more information about general ESTS membership, please refer to https://textualscholarship.eu/membership/. Please also be advised that we currently offer a discounted rate for membership fees for 2023, that will be valid until 30 May 2023. Until then, students and unaffiliated members pay a fee of 30 EUR, while regular members pay a fee of 35 EUR. 

Nominations should be sent to our Society’s Secretary Wout Dillen (wout.dillen@hb.se) by Monday 20 March 2023, and should include 1) a reference to another Member of our Society who supports the nomination; 2) a confirmation of the candidate’s willingness to stand for election, and 3) a brief letter of motivation. 

The ESTS Board will consider all valid nominations, keeping in mind the purpose of the association as well as overall geographical representation of members of the Board, and more general aspects of diversity. Given the current composition of the Board, we especially encourage proposals from women, people of color, and other minorities in Europe. To ensure the effective functioning of the Board, we particularly encourage applications from candidates who are committed to taking an active role on the Board. 

The programme for the 2023 ESTS conference is now live! Registration and information regarding accommodation can be found at the conference website, http://bit.ly/ESTS-2023

We look forward to seeing everyone in April!

The Association for Documentary Editing will be meeting in person for the first time in four years in Washington, DC, June 22-25 2023. The theme of the conference is Modalities of Text and Editing. The website for the conference can be found here, and the call for papers can be found here.

From the call for papers:

The Association for Documentary Editing (ADE) will meet in person, for the first time in four years, on June 22–25, 2023. The conference will be held in Washington, DC, and most sessions, streamed live online, will revolve around the theme “Modalities of Text and Editing.” The Program Committee invites proposals for presentations and panels on this theme or any topic related to the editing, publication and recovery of historical or literary texts.

With the proliferation of digital editions and the diffusion of digital technologies in every area of editing, the multimodality of both texts and editions is increasingly defining editors’ work. Multimodal texts have always been a part of editing. Editors have long grappled with how to represent diverse texts and unique textual elements such as the long “s” in early modern print form, drawings in field books, poetry mixed with prose, and musical notes in a diary. The diverse actors whose texts we edit, including those with limited literacy or using distinct languages and dialects, require our attention to and navigation through many textual modes.

Both to accommodate the multimodality of the textual artifacts and to maximize their accessibility to widespread audiences, editors increasingly use multimodal digital and print tools in the editing and publication process. Some editions still feature letterpress volumes; others publish solely in digital form. Even within digital editions, the “mode” of editing varies depending on the tools we use: Omeka with rich Dublin Core metadata, TEI with robust tagging features, crowdsourced editions with highly involved audiences, or new tools being developed by individual projects or digital publishing cooperatives. These choices affect our work processes, the functionality and design of the editions, and the points of access and accessibility for people who use them.

The conference organizers aim to assess and expose the affordances and limitations of the editing processes in which we engage as a community, as well as the ways our texts (broadly defined) are multimodal artifacts themselves.

Presentations may address these, or many other, questions:

• How has the concept of the “text” been opened by digital tools, and how might this broaden our process of editing and understanding of the text?
• How does multimodality widen our readership? In what ways does multimodality change access for our audience members, particularly when considering the limitations of digital interfaces for visually or motor-impaired individuals?
• In what ways does multimodality affect the process of recovery?
• The term “born digital” has become its own form of modality, but what does “born digital” signify?
• Has multimodality changed how we teach texts in the classroom and how we train the next generation of editors?

C-SPAN has expressed interest in recording portions of the conference for later broadcast. They are especially interested in sessions relating to US presidents, first ladies, or vice presidents, so we invite proposals on any of these topics.

We also encourage submissions from individuals from underrepresented backgrounds and those working on topics currently underrepresented in the field of scholarly editing. We welcome proposals from projects and individuals in all disciplines and at any stage of their careers, including those who engage in public history, archival management, or the advancement of knowledge beyond the academy. Submissions for individual papers, panels, roundtables, posters or poster sessions, and alternative presentation modalities are welcome.

The Centre for Creativity Research is running a series of seminars on the theme “Spaces of Creativity, Creating Space”. The inaugural event of this academic year will take place on Thursday 17th November 2022. The invitation can be read below. It includes a Zoom link for the event.

You are invited to participate in the series of online seminars

Spaces of Creativity, Creating Space

Thursday 17 November 2022

18.00 (6 p.m.) Warsaw time  /  17.00 (5 p.m.) London time   /   11.00  (11 a.m.) Chicago time

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2187583567?pwd=Rmh3NGZxRVc0eHpqOU5JbHgxSXdhZz09

Meeting ID: 218 758 3567

PROGRAMME

1. “Spaces of Creativity, Creating Space” – the new series of seminars. General Introduction.

2. Kathryn Sutherland (University of Oxford)

Keynote “In little room: Jane Austen’s manuscripts as performance space”

Abstract

3. Discussion

4. Centre for Creativity Research: forthcoming events

Prof. Mateusz Antoniuk

Head of the Centre for Creativity Research