Working with Text in a Digital Age

Publishing Text for a Digital Age
March 27-30, 2014
Tufts University
Medford MA
perseus_neh (at) tufts.edu

Call for contributions!

As a follow-on to Working with Text in a Digital Age, an NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Digital Humanities and in collaboration with the Open Philology Project at the University of Leipzig, Tufts University announces a two-day workshop on publishing textual data that is available under an open license, that is structured for machine analysis as well as human inspection, and that is in a format that can be preserved over time. The purpose of this workshop is to establish specific guidelines for digital publications that publish and/or annotate textual sources from the human record. The registration for the workshop will be free but space will be limited. Some support for travel and expenses will be available. We particularly encourage contributions from students and early-career researchers.

Textual data can include digital versions of traditional critical editions and translations but such data also includes annotations that make traditional tasks (such as looking up or quoting a primary source) machine-actionable, annotations that may build upon print antecedents (e.g., dynamic indexes of places that can be used to generate maps and geospatial visualizations), and annotations that are only feasible in a digital space (such as alignments between source text and translation or exhaustive markup of morphology, syntax, and other linguistic features).

Contributions can be of two kinds:

1. Collections of textual data that conform to existing guidelines listed below. These collections must include a narrative description of their contents, how they were produced and what audiences and purposes they were designed to serve.
2. Contributions about formats for publication. These contributions must contain sufficient data to illustrate their advantages and to allow third parties to develop new materials.

All textual data must be submitted under a Creative Commons license. Where documents reflect a particular point of view by a particular author and where the original expression should for that reason not be changed, they may be distributed under a CC-BY-ND license. All other contributions must be distributed under a CC-BY-SA license. Most publications may contain data represented under both categories: the introduction to an edition or a data set, reflecting the reasons why one or more authors made a particular set of decisions, can be distributed under a CC-BY-ND license. All data sets (such as geospatial annotation, morphosyntactic analyses, reconstructed texts with textual notes, diplomatic editions, translations) should be published under a CC-BY-SA license.

Contributors should submit abstracts of up to 500 words to EasyChair. We particularly welcome abstracts that describe data available already available under a Creative Commons license. 

Dates:

January 1, 2014:  Submissions are due. Please submit via EasyChair.

January 20, 2014:  Notification.