Predicting the future of digital scholarly editions in the context of FAIR data principles

Scholarly editing, understood by researchers working in the field of literary studies as providing the best versions of works along with explanatory and contextual layers, has been operating in the digital space for some time now. We are still searching for optimal ways to utilize its advantages. In parallel, there is a growing research reflection on the issue of data in digital humanities projects and ways to create, curate, and share it. 

The proposed paper, based on the experience of creating numerous digital scholarly editions (DSEs) and analyzing the issue of research data, addresses the following questions: 1) what the digital future of scholarly editing in literary studies might look like (also outside the circle of professional researchers), 2) how scholarly digital editions can be presented as datasets, 3) in what ways reflection on data can contribute to the broad utility of scholarly digital editions in literary studies. Apart from exploring some good practices employed by the TEI New Panorama of Polish Literature (NPLP) platform we also contemplate the data-related issues that remain to be addressed by the DSE community and the challenges that we might face while tackling them. 

Answering Joris van Zundert’s warning not to drive digital editing to a state of “a mere medium shift”, we propose to view DSEss as data on various levels, which is deeply anchored in the specificity of a digital humanist project. 

Having FAIR data principles in mind, we would like to expand this approach on several cases from the TEI NPLP platform, including i.a. 19th century novels, 20th-century correspondence of Polish poets, and contemporary Polish dramas.  

For findability, a good example is the data layer related to entity descriptions (e.g., people, places, organizations) - in the editions on the TEI.NPLP.PL platform, we can search and compile all occurrences of entities and how they are referred to in the text. The principle of “accessibility” will be focused on the necessity of creating an account to use more advanced features in DSEs. We will reflect on when it is useful and when it might be skipped to provide rapid access to the content and the data.  

The most challenging principles are “interoperability” and “reusability”. Much desired by many scholars, They are the goal of data curation and sharing initiatives, while at the same time they will enable the use of digital scholarly editions in numerous other scholarly projects beyond the specific discipline and, potentially, beyond the circle of professional researchers. In our text, we would like to present future opportunities and challenges of digital scientific editions in general and of the different data layers, DSE-s in particular.