The Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE) is calling for reviews for a issue of the journal RIDE, dedicated to Tools and Environments for Digital Scholarly Editing (DSE).

The first issue and second issue of RIDE dedicated to Tools and Environments was published in January 2020 and between December 2022 and September 2023 (rolling release).  The third issue will be edited by Roman Bleier and Stefan Dumont and we will accept reviews for this issue until the 31st of January 2024. All reviews will be peer reviewed in order to reach a high quality level of the evaluations.

To guide reviewers through the review process and to create a structure for the evaluation, we provide Criteria for Reviewing Digital Tools and Environments for DSE that are supposed to be applicable to various types of resources. The guidelines (Version 1.0) can be found here.

We kindly ask you to email us before start reviewing a tool at ride-tools (at) i-d-e.de with a suggestion of which resource you would like to review and with a short explanation of your affiliation and area of expertise. This is important in order to avoid multiple reviews of the same tool.

Background

In the introduction to his book Software takes command (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013) Lev Manovich states that “software has become our interface to the world, to others, to our memory and our imagination”. Is the same happening in the world of digital scholarly editing? Certainly we cannot ignore their fundamental role in our daily scholarly practices and in the interactions with our objects of study. Insofar as tools shape scholarly editions, they also shape scholarly editing.

A new RIDE issue is devoted to tools for digital scholarly editing. The aim of this issue is to:

• contribute to the discussion about tooling in Digital Humanities,
• bring to the forefront the instruments instead of the final products,
• provide a venue for discussing best practices in the development and usage of tools,
• list useful resources for all those involved in scholarly editing.

Beyond that, we hope that the critical examination of digital tools draws greater attention to the (scholarly) achievements that their creation and maintenance imply.

The journal RIDE was founded in 2014 to “provide a forum in which expert peers criticise and discuss the efforts of digital editors in order to improve current practices and advance future developments” (RIDE Editorial). RIDE is Open Access, reviews are published as HTML and downloadable as TEI. The third issue on digital Tools and Environments for DSE will be edited by Roman Bleier (University of Graz) and Stefan Dumont (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities).

Submission details

Reviews are accepted in English, French, Italian, and German. 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 at ride-tools (at) i-d-e.de 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. 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 RIDE guidelines for writing and submitting. Please note, that there is an special Questionnaire available for Tools and Environments.

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.

Suggestions for review

A merely alphabetically and not comprehensive list of resources suggested for review can be found here.