Call for Papers: Legal Issues in Textual Scholarship

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.

2023 Board Elections

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. 

CfP: The Association for Documentary Editing 2023

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.

Online Seminar: Professor Kathryn Sutherland

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

organized by the

Centre for Creativity Research

(Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Faculty of Polish Studies)

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

Usually we think of literature as occupying immaterial space, but a writer’s manuscripts take us into the workshop where creation happens. They are physical objects and they are highly emotive objects. Inside the spaces where they were written they have enhanced embodiment. You cannot substitute a house for a manuscript, but both spaces may represent the interior life of the writer who inhabited them. By reconnecting the act of composition with the space of writing, the creative act takes on greater physicality while the house itself becomes an imaginary space. This paper will probe the link between materiality and creativity by considering the space of writing, which is both the tiny sheets of paper onto which Austen wrote and the family sitting room, the place where she wrote. It argues that the two together shaped the way she wrote—both how she conceived her stories and the spaces within which her characters move and interact. Using evidence from forensic bibliography and literary criticism it attempts to ground the imagined in its materials.

Professor Kathryn Sutherland is Senior Research Fellow, St Anne’s College, Oxford.

Her most recent book is Why Modern Manuscripts Matter (Oxford University Press, 2022), a study of the politics, commerce, and the aesthetics of heritage culture in the shape of authors’ literary manuscripts.

3. Discussion

4. Centre for Creativity Research: forthcoming events

Prof. Mateusz Antoniuk

Head of the Centre for Creativity Research

Slovenská literatúra (“Slovak Literature”): Call For Papers

The literary science review Slovenská literatúra (“Slovak Literature”) is announcing a call for papers for 2023. The papers will be published in the upcoming single-topic issue Digitálny výskum literatúry v historickej a teoretickej perspektíve (“Digital Literary Research From a Historical and Theoretical Perspective”). The editorial staff accepts scientific papers focusing on the results of analyses of digital literary collections and corpora, the methodology of their composition, and the questions of their usability that rely on information technology. Further potential areas of focus include the digital humanities connected to literature and its research, the topic of source processing, the methodology of digitizing sources and making them available, as well as the presentation of specific digital research outputs. 

Deadline for the submission of abstracts (1,200–1,600 characters, written in Slovak or English): 31 October 2022

Decision on the provisional acceptance of the paper: by 15 November 2022

Deadline for the submission of final papers (max. 36,000 characters): 15 February 2023

The papers will be subject to an independent review process

Slovenská literatúra (Slovak literature, ISSN 0037 – 6973) is an open-access and double blind peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava since 1954. It provides a scientific publishing space for the field of literary Slovak studies (theory of literature, poetics, history of Slovak literature and its contexts) for domestic and foreign literary scholars and experts from other related disciplines. It is a key journal in the field of literary Slovak studies.
Since 2017, the journal has been fully accessible electronically under open access. It is indexed with and included in:  DOAJ, Elsevier SCOPUS, WOS-ESCI, CEJSH, ERIH PLUS, CEEOL, Slavic Humanities Index, MLA.

Information: https://www.sav.sk/?lang=en&doc=journal-list&journal_no=52

Submit manuscript: https://journals.savba.sk/index.php/slpi/information/authors

Variants 15: Call for Submissions

Dear Colleagues,

As the editors of Variants, the Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, we would like to invite you to submit an essay for the fifteenth edition of our journal. Variants is an Open Access journal, published by OpenEdition publishers. The journal will carry the title of our most recent ESTS conference in Málaga: “Textual Scholarship in the 21st Century”, and we especially welcome extended versions of papers that were presented at the conference. But essays outside of the conference are welcome too, on any aspect of textual scholarship such as the theories and practices of (digital) scholarly editing, tool development, genetic criticism, codicology and palaeography, philology, manuscript studies, etc.

Full papers are due by Friday March 13, 2020. If you are interested in submitting an essay, please send an expression of interest by Friday January 10th, that includes a brief description of the essay’s topic (approximately 50 to 100 words) to variants@textualscholarship.eu. If you’re interested in submitting a review, please send an email to rosignoli.stefano@gmail.com by December 31st, motivating the publication of a review on a given edition or monograph on textual scholarship.

For authors who are comfortable writing in LaTeX, we have prepared a template that is available on GitHub (https://github.com/WoutDLN/variantx-for-authors) and as an Overleaf template (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/submission-template-to-variants-for-authors/znsqffgrvshv). But we accept submissions, in .docx and its open source equivalents as well.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to forward them to us!

We look forward to receiving your submissions,

The Editorial board of Variants,

General Editor, Wout Dillen
Associate Editor, Elli Bleeker
Guest Editor, Laura Esteban Segura
Review Editor, Stefano Rosignoli

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