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, "Applying the TEI to Video Games and Digital Fiction", Electronic Book Review, forthcoming.

O'Sullivan, James, "The Application of Machine Learning and Word Embeddings in Digital Scholarly Editing", forthcoming.

O'Sullivan, James, "The future of digital editing and publishing according to its practitioners", forthcoming.

O'Sullivan, James, "Minimal Computing for Digital Scholarly Editing and Publishing", forthcoming.

Kurzmeier, Michael, O'Sullivan, James, Pidd, Michael, and Matthew Groves, "A Proposed Data Structure for Critical Editions of Social Media Content", forthcoming.

O'Sullivan, James, and Sophie Whittle, The Future of Digital Editing & Publishing, in Twenty-First Century Digital Editing & Publishing, James O'Sullivan, Michael Pidd, Órla Murphy, Bridgette Wessels, Michael Kurzmeier, and Sophie Whittle (eds.), Scottish Universities Press, 2025.

O’Sullivan, James, Michael Pidd, Órla Murphy, Bridgette Wessels, Michael Kurzmeier, and Sophie Whittle (eds.), Twenty-First Century Digital Editing & Publishing, Scottish Universities Press, 2025.

Kurzmeier, Michael, James O’Sullivan, Michael Pidd, Órla Murphy, and Bridgette Wessels, Visualising the Catalogue of Digital Scholarly Editions, in Journal of Electronic Publishing, vol. 27, issue 1, 2024.

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

C21 Events

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

O'Sullivan, J. (ed.), International Symposium on the Future of Digital Editing & Publishing: Programme & Book of Abstracts, University College Cork, June 2024.

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

Current Trends in Research & Creative Publishing, University College Cork, May 2024.

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

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

Designing Digital Editions for Social Media Content, University College Cork, June 2023.

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

Conference, Seminar & Workshop Contributions

Pidd, Michael, "C21 Editions and Machine-Assisted Approaches to Editing Chaucer", Digital Scholarly Editions (Micro)communities of Practices, The Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Sept 2024.

Whittle, Sophie, "Reimagining The Canterbury Tales for the classroom: A student-led approach to AI edition-making", Digital Humanities & Artificial Intelligence, University of Reading, June 2024.

Whittle, Sophie, "Reimagining The Canterbury Tales in the digital age: A machine-assisted prototype edition of The Pardoner’s Tale", DHI Lunch, University of Sheffield, June 2024.

Wessels, Bridgette, "The use of AI in Higher Education: Digital Scholarly Editions and Pedagogical Agency", International Symposium on the Future of Digital Editing & Publishing, University College Cork, June 2024.

Whittle, Sophie, "GenAI & Chaucer teaching editions: The role of the editor and learning community alongside machine translation", International Symposium on the Future of Digital Editing & Publishing, University College Cork, June 2024.

Whittle, Sophie, "Inclusivity in medieval digital edition-making: Reimagining The Canterbury Tales for the university classroom", UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association Annual Conference, University College Cork, June 2024.

Whittle, Sophie, "C21 Editions: Working alongside AI to produce an edition of The Pardoner’s Tale", 13^th International Conference on Middle English, University of Malaga, May 2024.

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

Whittle, Sophie, "A digital teaching edition of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale: The role of the editor, linguist and student alongside AI methods", LingLunch, University of Sheffield, March 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

A Report on Two User Design Workshops for the Development of a Digital edition of Born-digital Content, Michael Kurzmeier, James O’Sullivan, Michael Pidd, Órla Murphy, and Bridgette Wessels, forthcoming.

The Scholarly Editor’s AI Source Book, Sophie Whittle, Michael Pidd & Matthew Groves, Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, forthcoming.

Whittle, Sophie, "A Chaucer AI Co-Pilot? Reflections on the Implications of LLMs for Learning about Medieval Texts and Beyond", DH-AI, University of Reading, September 2024.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin speaks to the C21 Editions project about the role of social media in writing, podcast featuring Bridgette Wessels and Annemarie Ní Churreáin, produced by Rosie O'Byrne, UCC 98.3FM, June 2024:
https://zenodo.org/records/14975688

A Conversation about the C21 Editions Project, podcast featuring James O'Sullivan and Bridgette Wessels, produced by Rosie O'Byrne, UCC 98.3FM, June 2024:
https://zenodo.org/records/14975668

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, and 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