Call for reviews

The Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) is calling for reviews dedicated to Digital Text Collections (DTCs) in the Humanities. For the most recent issue dedicated to the topic see here.

We are inviting reviews of digital text collections from all humanities disciplines: literature, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies, historical sciences and others. The term “text collection” is used in a broad sense here and includes all kinds of text sets, including for instance linguistic corpora and digital archives.

To guide reviewers through the review process and to create a framework for the evaluation of DTCs, we provide Criteria for Reviewing Digital Text Collections that are supposed to be applicable to various types of humanities text collections. The guidelines (Version 1.0) can be found here: http://www.i-d-e.de/criteria-text-collections-version-1-0

If you are interested in reviewing a DTC, we kindly ask you to email us beforehand at ride-tc (at) i-d-e.de with a suggestion which resource you would like to review and with a short explanation of your affiliation and area of expertise. Before you decide which DTC to review, please check the pages on suggestions for review and projects currently under review Of course you can come up with your own suggestion.

For more information about the writing process see the submission details below.

Background
Text is probably the most popular object of study in digital humanities as constantly new releases of digital text collections and steady methodological inventions to engage with textual data demonstrate. To date, there has been very little critical discussion about questions of reliability and sustainability of digital text resources, their methodological frameworks and the transfer of methods between single disciplines when building text collections in Digital Humanities. However, the development of common best-practices when creating and working with digital text collections is a major factor to keep the work of the text-centered digital humanities successful now and in the future. Beyond that, we hope that the critical examination of digital text collections draws greater attention to the (scholarly) achievements that the creation and enrichment of textual data sets imply.

The journal RIDE was founded in 2014 to provide a framework of evaluation for digital scholarly editions and is now extending its scope to the broader field of digital text collections. RIDE is Open Access, reviews are published as HTML and downloadable as TEI. All reviews will be peer reviewed in order to reach a high quality level of the evaluations. We believe that this is important because the evaluation of digital scholarly resources usually requires a double expertise in digital methods as well as in individual disciplines. This is also to increase the credit for reviews.

The RIDE-section on Digital Text Collections is managed by Ulrike Henny-Krahmer and Frederike Neuber.

Submission details

Reviews are accepted in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. The length of the review can vary depending on how much the resource offers that is worthy of discussion (approximately 2000-5000 words).

Please submit your review as an editable text file (preferably, but not necessarily docx to facilitate the conversion to TEI). Please send illustrations as separate image files (jpg or png) and leave a note in the text as a placeholder for each image. In addition to the text, we collect keywords (up to five per review). Each review should be accompanied by a short abstract in English, independently of the language used in the main text.

For further information please check the general RIDE guidelines for writing and submitting. The questionnaire mentioned in the submission checklist has been designed for scholarly digital editions so far. We will keep you informed about how to proceed with the questionnaire for this special issue.

All reviews will be peer reviewed in order to reach a high quality level of the evaluations. We believe that this is important because the evaluation of digital scholarly resources usually requires a double expertise in digital methods as well as in individual disciplines. This is also to increase the credit for reviews.