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

Events

International Symposium on the Future of Digital Editing & Publishing, University College Cork, June 2023.

Building Digital Editions with the TEI, taught by James Cummings and Patricia O'Connor, University College Cork, June 2023. 

C21 Editions Expert Workshop on Designing Digital Editions for Social Media Content, University College Cork, June 2023.

C21 Editions Expert Workshop on The Future of Digital Editing & Publishing, Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow, July 2022.

Conference, Seminar & Workshop Contributions

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.

Pidd, Michael & Michael Kurzmeier, IRC-AHRC Collaboration in the Digital Humanities reporting and networking event, facilitated by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Irish Research Council (IRC), June 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.

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

Kurzmeier, Michael, and Órla Murphy participated in the Shared Data Storage Service Pilot series of workshops, part of IRLDAT, funded under the National Open Research Forum (NORF), December 2022.

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.

Pidd, Michael, IRC-AHRC Collaboration in the Digital Humanities reporting and networking event, facilitated by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Irish Research Council (IRC), December 2021.

Other

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

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

Project Team

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

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

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

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

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

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