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Call for papers for Variants

/ Elsa Pereira / Leave a comment

Participants of the 20th Annual Conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship are warmly encouraged to submit a full-paper version of their talk to Variants, the Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship. As always, scholars who did not attend the ESTS 2025 conference are also welcome to contribute to our journal.

Variants is a diamond Open Access journal that publishes high-quality research in textual scholarship and is maintained by and for the ESTS community. The journal always welcomes spontaneous submissions, but also puts out targeted calls for papers after relevant conferences to invite presenters to develop their talks into full-length articles for publication. Submissions that fall within the scope of the journal will be considered for the next available issue and included in our external single-blind peer review process. 

Papers submitted in response to this call will be considered for Variants 20, scheduled for publication in 2026. We expect to receive the full papers at the end of this summer. The suggested length of submissions for Variants is approximately 7000 words, excluding references and appendices, and should be written in English. For more details, please check out our page with Information for Authors. 

If you are interested in submitting a paper for Variants, please send an Expression of Interest to <variants@textualscholarship.eu> by Friday 6 June. In your message, please include: 

  • The name(s) of the author(s);
  • A preliminary title for the contribution;
  • A preliminary abstract of approximately 200 words; and
  • At least two suggestions for possible reviewers.

If you are basing your contribution on your conference paper, you are free to repurpose the title and abstract you submitted to the conference to the extent that it is still relevant. 

For the reviewers, please include their name, affiliation, and work email address. The reviewers you suggest must be relevant to your field and unlikely to decline an invitation for purely conflict of interest reasons. Please be aware that these reviewers are suggestions and that the editors of the issue may or may not decide to contact one or more of your suggestions in the review process. 

The preliminary timeline for the publication process for this issue looks as follows:

  • 6 June 2025: Expression of Interest
  • 1 September 2025: Full paper deadline
  • December 2025: conclusion of reviewing process
  • Spring 2026: revision and copyediting stages
  • Fall 2026: Publication 

If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to send a message to <variants@textualscholarship.eu>. 

We very much look forward to receiving your Expression of Interest and reading your full submissions!

On behalf of the Editorial Board of Variants,

Wout Dillen (General Editor)

Elsa Pereira (Associate Editor)

Stefano Rosignoli (Review Editor)

Call for Papers: ESTS 2025

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The twentieth annual conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship

For more details, including how to submit, visit the conference website here.

Venue: Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, University of Tours

Dates:  28-30 April 2025

Manuscripts in the Age of Print

For its twentieth annual conference, the ESTS invites everyone to the heart of the Val de Loire to discuss manuscripts, visit beautiful castles, and enjoy the quality of its wines.

The conference topic is inspired by the newly awarded ERC project PRIMA, which focuses on manuscript production, circulation, and consumption in Ancient Regime Europe.

Call for papers is out! Deadline for application on the 22nd of November 2024

Call for papers

The invention and relatively rapid dissemination of print in 15th- and 16th-century Western Europe did not replace manuscript culture. Whether in the form of draft manuscripts, letters and journals, note-taking, margin annotations, manuscript dissemination to escape control, or documentary records, the two media—print and manuscript—continued to coexist, intertwining and influencing each other in complex ways across the globe. In various regions, from Europe to Asia, Africa, and the Americas, manuscripts remained central to intellectual, cultural, and religious practices, often complementing or resisting the spread of print. Although recent scholarship has addressed this dynamic in specific contexts, manuscript production is still rarely considered as a distinct phenomenon in the early modern and modern periods across different cultures. This oversight neglects the profound impact manuscripts had on intellectual and cultural life worldwide, where they served as vessels for innovation, subversion, and the preservation of alternative voices. Moreover, it overlooks the materiality of manuscripts, which developed in specific local and regional contexts, conveying unique physical characteristics that shaped both the form and content of the works themselves.

The conference will explore these and other uses of manuscripts, welcoming contributions that address:

  • Manuscript production and circulation during the early modern and modern periods
  • Modern codicology and handwriting studies
  • Print-to-manuscript and manuscript-to-print transitions and their coexistence 
  • Hybridization of the two media across different periods and regions
  • Digital representation and analysis of such documents, including Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) and quantitative codicology
  • Study and assembling of public and private archives and libraries 
  • Scholarly editing of manuscripts and hybrid documents
  • Textuality of texts transmitted through manuscripts
  • Social networks and manuscript production (e.g., how social relationships, patronage, and collaboration among scribes, authors, and intellectuals influenced manuscript production and content)
  • Cross-cultural manuscript traditions (e.g., interactions between different manuscript practices and production centers, including trade, diplomacy, and scholarly exchanges across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and other regions)
  • Censorship and media circulation

We also welcome contributions that examine the global persistence of manuscript culture alongside print in the early modern and modern periods, taking into account the diversity of manuscript traditions worldwide. This includes exploring how manuscripts remained essential for knowledge transmission, record-keeping, and resisting dominant discourses, even as print technologies became increasingly prevalent.

Other topics such as the theory and practice of textual scholarship and digital textual scholarship will also be welcomed.

Contributions to the ESTS Conference may take the following forms:

Research Papers
Individual scholars are welcome to submit proposals for papers which may then be selected for panels. 20 minutes in length. Please supply an abstract of 250 words (max) + bio of 100 words (max).

Panel sessions
We also invite groups of scholars (3 speakers) to submit proposals for thematically linked research paper panels. 90 minutes in length (3 x 20 minute papers + Q&A). Please supply 3 abstracts of 150 words (max) each + bios of 100 words (max) for each speaker. The organisers will give preference to panels that reflect the diversity of our field.

Roundtable
We also invite groups of scholars (up to 6 speakers) to submit proposals for thematically linked roundtable sessions. 90 minutes in length (10 mins per speaker + Q&A). Please supply an overall abstract of 350 words (250 words) for the roundtable + bios of 100 words (max) for each speaker.

Poster sessions
We will run a poster session as part of the main conference program. Topics of interest include all topics listed above. The poster session is an opportunity for researchers to discuss their early/ongoing work with attendees. Please provide an abstract of a maximum 250 words.

ESTS 2024 Conference Announcement and CfP

/ adellelhay / Leave a comment

The nineteenth annual conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship will take place this year at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 2-4 October 2024. The Call for Papers can be read below.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Textual scholarship, artificial intelligence, corpora and intelligent editions

The nineteenth annual conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS 2024)

Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest 2-4 October 2024

CfP deadline 1 June 2024

Although the deep learning-based AI revolution in human language processing began at least a decade ago, the emergence of generative AI through ChatGPT has far exceeded even experts’ expectations. Will AI make textual scholarship and our editing practices smarter? Will we be able to produce intelligent editions, in print or online, without the “help” of computers in the third decade of the 21st century?

In this context, it is worth considering the opportunities and threats of the computer as a cultural artefact in the production of scholarly editions, or in textual scholarship in general, from the Index Thomisticus (Roberto Busa) to Winchester Philology (Thorsten Ries) and the technology of the Semantic Web. The conference also addresses the role of corpora and corpus linguistic methods in the humanities, such as computer-based analysis and annotation of poetic texts.

Papers on the following or related topics are welcome:

  • What is an Intelligent Edition?
  • Who is the (digital) edition for?
  • Can editions become more inclusive?
  • What challenges is textual scholarship facing?
  • Is there a future for print?
  • Textual Scholarship and/as data
  • Editorial Interfacing
  • (Digital) Research Infrastructure and Future-proofing the Edition
  • Editing and Deep Learning
  • Corpus linguistics as Method and Tool
  • Annotation and Commentary in the Age of Google

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

  • Scholarly editing, textual scholarship and/as research data – in the age of FAIR data management.
  • Versioning, persistent identification, standardization, metadata schemes, data mining, search tools, search platforms. Named entity recognition, data enrichment, linked open data.
  • Scholarly editions on display. Displaying scholarly editions.
  • Arrangement of philological data on the printed surface of paper and on the computer displays, marking-up, sign systems in print and on the screen, relation of the visual arrangement of the source and the edition; lists, glossaries, annotations, marginalia and footnotes: what they disclose and what they hide. Digital interfaces, responsive design and visual stability/instability. Digitizing scholarly editions and printing digital ones.
  • Rule based digital tools, automatic collation, data visualization; intertextuality detection, stylometry and authorship attribution: old and new methods. Deep learning (HTR, LLM), digital research infrastructures.
  • Corpus linguistic methods and tools in poetic research: canonical and non-canonical poetic genres, characteristics of lyrical and narrative poetry (e.g. grammatical and semantic patterns, poetic styles and devices, literary periods), quantitative and qualitative methods.
  • Electronic literature and the challenges of textual scholarship.
  • Born-digital and digitized sources and the challenges of textual scholarship.
  • The audiences of digital and printed editions.

Contributions to the ESTS Conference may take the following forms:

  • Research Papers
    Individual scholars are welcome to submit proposals for papers which may then be selected for
    panels. 20 minutes in length. Please supply an abstract of 150 words (max) + bio of 100 words
    (max).
  • Panel sessions
    We also invite groups of scholars (3 speakers) to submit proposals for thematically linked research paper panels. 90 minutes in length (3 x 20 minute papers + q&a). Please supply 3 abstracts of 150 words (max) each + bios of 100 words (max) for each speaker. The organisers will give preference to panels that reflect the diversity of our field.
  • Roundtable
    We also invite groups of scholars (up to 6 speakers) to submit proposals for thematically linked roundtable sessions. 90 minutes in length (10 mins per speaker + q&a). Please supply an overall abstract of 250 words (250 words) for the roundtable + bios of 100 words (max) for each speaker.
  • Poster sessions
    We will run a poster session as part of the main conference program. Topics of interest include all topics listed above. The poster session is an opportunity for researchers to discuss their early/ongoing work with attendees. The posters presented are to be between sizes A3 and A2; Please provide an abstract of maximum 250 words.

Proposals are to be submitted on the registration link by 15 May 2024.

Proposals are to be reviewed by early June.

Further information

Should you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at the email address below:
dh-conference@btk.elte.hu

Organisers

The Organising Committee

ESTS – The European Society for Textual Scholarship

ELTE-DH – Department of Digital Humanities, Eötvös Loránd University

ELTE-MIKTI – Institute of Hungarian Literature and Cultural Studies, Eötvös Loránd University

ELTE-DiAGram – Research Group in Stylistics