ESTS 2025 CFP Deadline Extension

For those of you who were still hoping to submit an abstract for our upcoming ESTS 2025 conference (28-30 April in Tours, France), we have good news: the deadline has just been extended until 1 December 2024 AoE (Anywhere on Earth)!

This year’s theme is titled Manuscripts in the Age of Print, but as usual: abstracts on general textual scholarship and (digital) scholarly editing related themes are also welcome. You can find the CFP here at ESTS, or visit the conference’s official website for more information: https://cesr-ests2025.sciencesconf.org/?lang=en.

Please help us forward this information to anyone who may be interested, or who had thought they had run out of time to submit something.

We look forward to reading your submissions, and hope to see you in Tours!

Legal Issues in Textual Scholarship (27 October 2023): Programme & (free) registration

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.

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

Vacancy: Faculty Consultant at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents

via Katie Blizzard

The Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents (IEHD) seeks consultants to join its faculty and develop online and in-person training in editing and publishing historical documents. Topics covered will include but are not limited to the following: 

  • collecting and cataloging documents
  • selecting which documents to publish
  • digitizing
  • transcribing and proofreading
  • encoding
  • creating metadata 
  • designing, researching and writing annotation 
  • conceptualizing, organizing, and designing a publication (whether print or digital)

The IEHD has offered introductory training to small groups of scholars since 1972, and now seeks to expand its audience to include archivists, librarians, teachers, undergraduate students, genealogists, and family historians by creating a free online course to be called Fundamentals of Publishing Historical Documents. We are also designing advanced in-person workshops for further training and skills development. 

The IEHD seeks to fill four faculty consultant positions. Faculty will help develop the online Fundamentals course, which will be launched in 2021. The faculty will work with other members of the IEHD in a series of four in-person curriculum workshops at the University of Virginia to conceptualize and develop the Fundamentals course. Each faculty member will be responsible for designing several modules and will contribute to the development of other faculty’s modules. The workshops will take place in summer and fall of 2020, and winter and summer of 2021.

Recognizing that not all who practice editing call themselves editors, we are committed to creating a faculty diverse in disciplinary background. Such a faculty will include practitioners outside the traditional field of editing, as well as practitioners focusing on underrepresented subjects and materials. We thus encourage not only scholarly editors to apply, but also public historians, archivists, and other individuals with experience in the preparation, publication, and promotion of historical records. Preference will be given to candidates with experience teaching in-person or online courses and with demonstrated experience using multiple publication platforms.

To be considered for this position, please send a cover letter and CV via email to Jennifer Stertzer at jes7z@virginia.edu. Deadline for applications is March 27, 2020.

The IEHD is funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Through this program, the NHPRC seeks to increase the number and diversity of historical documentary editors, disseminate knowledge about documentary editing, and build the capacity of attendees as leaders in their own editorial projects and in the related fields of documentary editing, digital history, and digital humanities.

Variants 14

As was already announced on the Society’s Twitter and Facebook pages, we are happy to present the research community with a new issue of Variants, the annual, peer-reviewed journal of The European Society for Textual Scholarship!

Variants 14 is the second issue in the series that is published in Open Access via the OpenEdition platform (previously revues.org) at https://journals.openedition.org/variants. The issues was edited by Wim Van Mierlo, Wout Dillen, and Elli Bleeker – with Stefano Rosignoli functioning as the issue’s Review Editor.

With the publication of this issue, Wim has now officially resigned from his position as the General Editor of Variants, passing his duties on to Wout (as General Editor) and Elli (as Associate Editor). The new editors wish to thank Wim for his long and much appreciated service on the issue’s editorial board, and for his efforts (together with Aurélien Berra) to make the journal more accessible to the general public by moving it to an Open Access publication venue.

We look forward to presenting the issue at the 2019 edition of our annual conference (28-29 November 2017) – where we will also invite our Members (and other textual scholars and scholarly editors) to submit a paper for Variants 15. We hope to see you there!

CFP: DH_Budapest_2019

Via Gábor Palkó

DH_Budapest_2019

Venue: Centre for Digital Humanities at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE.DH)

Dates: 25-27 September 2019

Call for Papers

Deadline: 31 May 2019

Notification of Acceptance: 15 July 2019

The Centre for Digital Humanities at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE.DH) calls for abstracts for its second annual conference which will take place in Budapest, 25–27 September 2019 – in collaboration with the COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary Historyproject and the DARIAH Central European Hub. While last year the conference seeked to survey the current state of research in digital humanities in general, this year DH_Budapest_2019 will keep a narrower focus on theories and practices of distant reading.page1image1012014000

The term distant reading (i.e. using computational methods of analysis for large collections of texts) is meant here in a general sense: regardless of genres and disciplines on the side of the used or built corpus, and regardless of computational methods adopted or developed during the research. We encourage speakers to present their work where innovative, sophisticated, data-driven, computational methods play a key role in a scientifically relevant research.

We invite submission of abstracts on subjects from a variety of fields related to digital humanities and social sciences concerning but not limited to following topics:

  • Corpus building using markup languages
  • Automatic and manual corpus annotation
  • Named entity recognition (NER) and named entity linking (NEL)
  • Wikification, wikiDATA linking
  • Stylometry, authorship attribution
  • Vector spaces and neural networks as distant reading tools
  • Network modelling, prosopographical networks
  • Distant reading of historical sources
  • Digital literacy, digital pedagogy

For more information and the conference’s full CFP, please visit the DH_Budapest_2019 website.

CFP: ExLing 2019

via João Dionísio

Abstract submission is now open for the ExLing 2019 workshop (proposals on any experimental aspect of textual scholarship, namely in  connection with digital humanities, are welcome).

ExLing 2019 – 10th Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics (https://exlingworkshop.com/) takes place at the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, 25-27 September 2019, under the auspices of Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa.

As a privileged space for debate among researchers applying experimental and computational methods to the study of language, all experimental disciplines and subjects with reference to the study of language are welcome, including speech production, speech perception, experimental phonetics, experimental morphology, experimental syntax, experimental semantics, cognitive linguistics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, discourse analysis, textual studies, applied linguistics, and language therapy.

Abstracts for oral and poster presentations can be submitted here:
https://exlingworkshop.com/exling-2019/submissions-2019.html

Abstract submission closes on June 1, 2019.
Notification of review results will be sent by June 20.

ExLing 2019 has six confirmed keynote speakers:
Paolo Canettieri – Cognitive philology
Bart Geurts – Evolutionary pragmatics
Jonathan Harrington – Empirical analyses of sound change
Caroline Heycock – Syntactic theory and variation
Jon Sprouse – Experimental syntax</br/>
Marc Swerts – Linguistic adaptation

CFP ESTS 2019

As announced at the Member’s Meeting at ESTS 2018 in Prague, the Society’s 16th annual conference will be held in Málaga, Spain and take place from 28 to 29 November 2019. This year’s theme will be ‘Textual Scholarship in the 21st Century’, and its Call for Proposals has just been put online, with the deadline for submissions set on 31 May 2018. For more information on this CFP, please refer to the conference page.

Please distribute widely. We look forward to receiving your abstracts, and welcoming you in Málaga!

ESTS Bylaws: New Proposal

Dear Members and old Members of the European Society for Textual Scholarship,

As was communicated at previous board meetings, our Board has been working on a redrafting of our Society’s bylaws. The new proposal is now approved by the Board, and ready to be communicated to the Membership – you will find it attached. As stated in our (previous and newly proposed) bylaws, Members in good standing (i.e. who have paid their Membership dues for 2017/Alcalá or later) reserve the right to vote on changes in the bylaws. That is why we now forward our proposal to see you have any objections to our proposal.

Those who are eligible are invited to respond to the proposed bylaws by forwarding their objections to the Society’s secretary (wout.dillen@uantwerpen.be) within the next two months (i.e. until 18 December 2018). Minor changes that are suggested by the Membership will be discussed by the Board, who will decide whether to adopt or reject the change. Major changes will be added to the draft and returned for consideration by the Membership. In this process, the Board reserves the right to decide what constitutes a ‘minor’ or ‘major’ change. After the period of two months has passed, the Bylaws will be considered as approved by the Membership, unless the Board decides to extend the initial period with a further month.

Although we will accept objections to the bylaws until 18 December, we would strongly encourage Members to respond to this document before this year’s Annual Members’ Meeting takes place (on Saturday 17 November 2018), where the board will reserve a slot for discussing any major changes that may have already come up, directly with the Membership.

We thank you for your input, and look forward to discussing the newly proposed bylaws with you in Prague!

All the best, on behalf of the ESTS board,

Anne Baillot
Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas
Wout Dillen (secretary)
Jan Gielkens (treasurer)
Sakari Katajamäki
Roland S. Kamzelak</br/>
Anthony Lappin
Elena Pierazzo
Wim Van Mierlo (president)

Link to the proposal: https://textualscholarship.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/bylaws-of-the-european-society-for-textual-scholarship.pdf

Elections: ESTS Board

Dear Members of the ESTS,

As was announced during the General Assembly of our fourteenth annual conference in Alcalá de Henares last November, it is our pleasure to inform you that our Board currently has three vacancies to fill. Therefore we would like to invite anyone who is interested in joining our Board to send in their applications for these positions.

Please find the full Call for Nominations attached.

We look forward to receiving your applications!

Click to access ests-board-elections.pdf