C21 Editions is an international collaboration between University College Cork, the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, and the University of Glasgow. The project seeks to explore and make a direct contribution to the future of digital scholarly editing and digital publishing.

Funded under the UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities, a joint initiative of the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), C21 Editions received a total award value of approx. €650,000, spread across the Irish and UK institutions. 

The project's grant numbers are IRC/W001489/1 and AH/W001489/1.

About the Project

C21 Editions operates as a response to Joris van Zundert, who calls on theorists and practitioners to "intensify the methodological discourse" necessary to "implement a form of hypertext that truly represents textual fluidity and text relations in a scholarly viable and computational tractable manner". He warns that, without that dialogue, "we relegate the raison d'etre for the digital scholarly edition to that of a mere medium shift, we limit its expressiveness to that of print text, and we fail to explore the computational potential for digital text representation, analysis and interaction". Engaging with various experts and stakeholders, the C21 Editions project is working to establish the methods and principles for the digital editions of the future, demonstrating what might be possible through a series of prototypes built on experimental new practices.

The Irish element of the project is led by Dr James O'Sullivan (Principal Investigator) and Dr Órla Murphy (Co-Investigator), both from the Department of Digital Humanities at UCC. Michael Pidd (Principal Investigator), Director of the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, and Prof. Bridgette Wessels (Co-Investigator), professor in sociology at the University of Glasgow, lead UK-based research activities.

The project runs for three years, 2021-2024.

Selected Outputs

Publications

O'Sullivan, James, and Michael Pidd, "The born-digital in future digital scholarly editing and publishing", in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, vol. 10, December 2023.

Whittle, Sophie, O'Sullivan, James, and Michael Pidd, "AI and the Editor", in The Future of Text vol. IV, ed. Frode Alexander Hegland, November 2023.   

C21 Events

International Symposium on the Future of Digital Editing & Publishing, University College Cork, June 2024.

Expert workshop on Developing AI in Social Contexts, Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence, Sorbonne Université, April 2024.

Intensive training seminar on Building Digital Editions with the TEI, James Cummings and Patricia O'Connor, University College Cork, June 2023.

Expert workshop on Designing Digital Editions for Social Media Content expert workshop, University College Cork, June 2023.

Expert workshop on The Future of Digital Editing & Publishing, Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow, July 2022.

Conference, Seminar & Workshop Contributions

Whittle, Sophie, "AI, Chaucer, and The Pardoner's Tale", Developing AI in Social Contexts, Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence, Sorbonne Université, April 2024.

Kurzmeier, Michael, James O’Sullivan, Michael Pidd, Órla Murphy, Bridgette Wessels, and Sophie Whittle, "Building a Digital Edition from Archived Social Media Content", Digital Humanities 2023, Graz, July 2023.

Kurzmeier, Michael, James O’Sullivan, Michael Pidd, Órla Murphy, and Bridgette Wessels, "Preservability and Preservation of Digital Scholarly Editions", IIPC General Assembly (GA) and Web Archiving Conference (WAC), Hilversum, May 2023.

Kurzmeier, Michael, James O’Sullivan, Michael Pidd, Órla Murphy, and Bridgette Wessels, "A Quantitative Analysis of Digital Scholarly Editions", DHd2023: Open Humanities, Open Culture, Trier, March 2023.

Kurzmeier, Michael, "Making archived social media data accessible for research", School of Computer Science & Information Technology Seminar Series, University College Cork, March 2023.

Kurzmeier, Michael, "Digital Scholarly Editions: Past, Present and Future", Digital Arts & Humanities Research Colloquium, University College Cork, September 2022.

Kurzmeier, Michael, "Archiving and Publishing Your Work", Cork/San Francisco Peer In Programme, a transatlantic professional development initiative delivered by Sample-Studios in partnership with San Francisco Artist Studios, September 2022.

Kurzmeier, Michael, James O’Sullivan, Órla Murphy, Michael Pidd, and Bridgette Wessels, "A Quantitative Analysis of Digital Scholarly Editions", Digital Humanities Congress, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, September 2022.

O’Sullivan, James, Michael Pidd, Órla Murphy, Bridgette Wessels, with Michael Kurzmeier, "Perspectives on the Future of Digital Editions & Publishing", Digital Humanities 2022, Tokyo, July 2022.

Other

Deborah Thorpe interview with James O'Sullivan for a series on preserving digital scholarship, published in The River-side:
https://theriverside.ucc.ie/2023/11/02/preservation-online-publications-3/

Transcriptions of 46 interviews with theorists and practitioners working in the field of digital scholarly editing on topics relating to the future of digital scholarly editions:
https://www.dhi.ac.uk/data/c21editions

Manifesto for Digital Editions, translated from German into English by Michael Kurzmeier:
https://c21editions.github.io/manifesto-for-digital-editions/

Bibliography of writings relating to digital editing and publishing:
https://www.zotero.org/groups/4376701/c21editions/library

Visualizing digital scholarly editions:
https://cora.ucc.ie/handle/10468/13525

UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Events

O'Sullivan, James, Michael Pidd, Bridgette Wessels, Órla Murphy, Sophie Whittle, Matthew Groves, AHRC-IRC Digital Humanities Conference, Belfast, February 2023.

Pidd, Michael & Michael Kurzmeier, IRC-AHRC Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Reporting and Networking Event, Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Irish Research Council (IRC), June 2023.

Pidd, Michael, and James O'Sullivan, AHRC-IRC Digital Humanities Workshop on Sustainability and Infrastructure, Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Irish Research Council (IRC), December 2022.

Pidd, Michael, IRC-AHRC Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Reporting and Networking Event, Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Irish Research Council (IRC), December 2021.

Project Team

University College Cork

Dr James O’Sullivan (Principal Investigator, Ireland)
Department of Digital Humanities, University College Cork

Dr Órla Murphy (Co-Investigator, Ireland)
Head of Digital Humanities, University College Cork

Matthew Roche (Research Assistant)
Department of Digital Humanities, University College Cork

Dr Michael Kurzmeier (Postdoctoral Research Fellow)
Department of Digital Humanities, University College Cork

Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield

Michael Pidd (Principal Investigator, UK)
Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield

Dr Sophie Whittle (Research Associate)
Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield

Matthew Groves (Research Software Engineer)
Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield

University of Glasgow 

Prof. Bridgette Wessels (Co-Investigator, UK)
School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Glasgow