C21 Editions: Editing and Publishing in the Digital Age

C21 Editions建议探索并为数字学术编辑和数字出版的未来做出直接贡献。当学者们提到“学术版”时，他们通常指的是经过专业策划的文本资源或集合，旨在为一套特定的材料带来一些秩序感或意义。学术编辑和为公众带来这种努力的出版实践对文化和社会非常重要，提供了理解我们自己以及我们周围世界的过去、现在和未来所需的人工制品和洞察力。数字人文科学的主要成就之一是其社区在将学术版本引入数字和基于网络的平台方面所发挥的作用，通过更多的传播和访问来提高其研究、教学和社会价值。然而，尽管自卫生署出现以来的30年左右取得了所有成就，但在日益数字化的世界中，数字学术版现在面临着过时的危险。大多数现有的数字版本和出版平台模仿书籍的结构，以页面为基础的结构呈现静态内容。在确实存在一些互动性的地方，它通常以指向其他资源的基本超链接的形式存在。很有可能很快，许多数字学术版就会沦为早期网络的古董。当我们审视数字学术编辑的实践时，我们会发现明显缺乏机器学习技术来支持文化材料的管理和分析。在如何最好地保存和分享对我们在21世纪了解文化和社会至关重要的出生数字资料方面，也明显缺乏共识和技术指导。例如，我们有理由预计，未来的历史学家和普通公众将希望前总统唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)的推文有一个经过严格策划的版本，并利用他的信息要么得到回应，要么得到推动的网络政治、媒体和社会话语的海洋来进行语境分析。然而，现在，已经有了现成的框架或平台来创建、展示和维持这样一个版本。这正是C21版本旨在补救的：通过与专家和利益相关者团体的合作，该项目将为未来学术数字版本的开发建立方法和原则。此外，它将根据目前未出版的材料制作两个影响很大的数字版本，从而展示和支持实现这种未来的版本。这两个版本都将被用来帮助开发和测试该项目拟议的编码数字文本的数据标准和机器辅助编辑工具包。这两个版本、数据标准和工具包将与爱尔兰国家图书馆等公共机构共同开发，并向其他学者和机构免费提供。本质上，C21版本将作为对Joris van Zdert的回应，后者呼吁理论家和实践者“强化方法论话语”，以“以学术上可行和计算上容易处理的方式实施一种真正代表文本流动性和文本关系的超文本形式”。他警告说，如果没有这种对话，“我们把数字学术版的理由归结为仅仅是媒介的转变，我们把它的表现力限制在印刷文本的表现力上，我们无法探索数字文本表示、分析和交互的计算潜力。”

C21 Editions proposes to explore and make a direct contribution to the future of digital scholarly editing and digital publishing. When academics mention "scholarly editions", they are typically referring to expertly curated textual resources or collections, designed to bring some sense of order or meaning to a particular set of materials. Scholarly editing, and the publishing practices that bring such efforts to the public, are hugely important to culture and society, providing the artifacts and insights necessary for understanding ourselves and the past, present, and future of the world around us.One of the major achievements of the digital humanities is the role its community has played in bringing scholarly editions to digital and web-based platforms, improving their research, pedagogical, and societal value through greater dissemination and access. However, despite all that has been achieved in the three or so decades since DH emerged, the digital scholarly edition is now in danger of becoming obsolete in an increasingly digital world. Most existing digital editions and publishing platforms mimic the structure of books, presenting static content in a page-based structure. Where some interactivity does exist, it is usually in the form of basic hyperlinks to other resources. It is quite possible that very soon, many digital scholarly editions will have been reduced to a curio of the early web.When we look at the practice of digital scholarly editing, there is a marked lack of machine learning techniques designed to support the curation and analysis of cultural materials. There is also a marked lack of consensus and technical guidance on how best to preserve and share born-digital materials essential to our understanding culture and society in the twenty-first century. For example, it is reasonable to expect that future historians and the general public will want a critically curated edition of the former President Donald Trump's tweets, contextualised using the sea of online political, media and social discourse that his messages either responded to or prompted. However, right now, there is now readily available framework or platform for creating, presenting, and sustaining such an edition.This is precisely was C21 Editions aims to remedy: by engaging with experts and stakeholder groups, the project will establish the methods and principles for developing the scholarly digital editions of the future. Furthermore, it will demonstrate and support the realisation of such future editions by producing two high impact digital editions based on materials which are currently unpublished. Both editions will be used to help develop and test the project's proposed data standard for encoding born-digital texts and a toolkit for machine-assisted editing. The two editions, data standard and toolkit will be developed in conjunction with public bodies such as the National Library of Ireland and made freely available to other scholars and institutions.In essence, C21 Editions will operate 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."