BærUt! Closing Conference

Digital Scholarly Editions Reimagined

«It’s a golden age of edition-making» – We are making more editions than ever before; just check the catalogues of digital scholarly editions; the numbers are astounding. The digital turn has sped up edition-making, with more people creating more editions in less time, and sharing them with a wider audience. We have, however, reached a crucial waypoint. What were once pioneering editions have now vanished from the World Wide Web; prestigious edition projects are struggling to stay on top of maintenance tasks and necessary upgrades; legacy editions look and perform outdated; new digital projects face a difficult-to-navigate legal space, increased administrative demands around data management, and have, at the same time, less money and time for researchers’ scholarly work. This, as we know, requires immersion, deep thinking, and the acquisition of knowledge and skills in philology, editorial decision-making and reasoning, data modelling, encoding, specialised software and applications, as well as design thinking and universal accessibility for scholarly and non-scholarly audiences alike.

For three years, the Sustainable Digital Scholarly Editions Network and Skills Hub at the University of Oslo has worked to lessen the burden of navigating the academic landscape of edition-making and has built a local community of practitioners across disciplines, institutions, and expertise. We are now approaching the end of the project and must think about the future of planning, realising, publishing, and long-term preservation of digital scholarly editions in a world where technology and user demands change rapidly, and the sphere of action is reduced by policies, bureaucracy, and cutbacks.

Instead of bemoaning times past and freezing in the headlights of a dystopian future narrative, we want to look ahead and positively reimagine what sustainable digital scholarly editions could and should be at the University of Oslo and beyond.

To do so, we will reimagine editions under three aspects: Care, Community, and Continuity.

We want Care to be understood in two ways: first, as the physical caretaking, maintenance, and human-machine interaction involved in keeping a digital representation of physical objects and human knowledge alive and relevant; second, as considering both people and purpose in pursuing collections, editions, and other data-centred research.

We want Community to be understood as a local, cross-disciplinary, and cross-institutional fellowship of scholars, digital experts, and administrators who share an interest in digital scholarly editions and work to keep knowledge, resources, and skills up to date and relevant. As a community of practice, we are a group of people who share a passion, profession, or common challenge and interact regularly to deepen our knowledge, solve problems, and improve our skills.

In a world of rapid change, we want Continuity to be understood as a cornerstone of sustainability: only through continuous active use, maintenance, active preservation and an infrastructure that is legally, technically, politically fit and has the right people to provide long-term solutions for data as well as application storage and archiving, can a scholarly product such as an edition or a database serve as a reliable source and be of use for future generations.

The conference language is English. It is open to the public and free of charge. However, we ask you to register your participation on Pindena, the University of Oslo’s registration platform.

Registration

Registration is open.

Tentative Programme

/Conference Formats

Digital Scholarly Editions at the University of Oslo and Beyond: A Status Report

The BærUt! Closing Conference wraps up three years of activities and research. During the conference, we will present a detailed report on the status quo of digital scholarly edition work at the University of Oslo and beyond. During 2024 and 2025, we have conducted 17 90-minute interviews with humanities scholars and digital experts to map the landscape of digital scholarly editions. We have learned a lot and want to share key findings with the community. The findings from the interviews, together with our experiences from three years of skill-building activities and community discussions, inform the development of a research support service for DSEs and similar digital humanities projects at the University of Oslo Library’s Department of Research Support.

Twin Talks

We have three sessions dedicated to participants’ projects and academic discussion papers.

On Day 1, we will have presentations in a format called Twin Talks. Originally coined in the context of Digital Humanities conferences, a Twin Talk is a dialogical presentation format in which a humanities scholar and a digital expert shed light on a research question or seek to resolve a conceptual or data modelling challenge together.

For our conference, we would like to slightly modify this format and invite scholars as well as digital experts to a Twin Talk, in which a philological or editorial question or problem is posed, and one or more suggestions for digital solutions or interventions, especially addressing issues of technological sustainability, are offered. These may come from fellow scholars, digital experts, or research support staff.

Panel and Roundtable Discussion

On Day 2, we dedicate the entire forenoon to a panel and roundtable discussion centred around social sustainability. We draw on the CARE principles for Indigenous Data Governance – collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics – and discuss the implications of the CARE and FAIR principles for digital scholarly editions. Technological and financial sustainability of a project is inseparable from its social sustainability, and the latter requires as careful cultivation as the former. So how can humanities scholars imagine and enact editions that will respond to these insights and challenges?

We start the session with a moderated panel discussion of three scholars who are meeting these challenges in their ongoing projects. They will give a brief overview of their project and address how social and technological sustainability intersect and what impact these have on the conceptualisation, development, and maintenance of their scholarly edition.

The panel will then open to a roundtable, where all participants continue with and contribute to the discussion. This session will be recorded, and its conclusions will be published as a blog article on the BærUt! weblog.

Research Support Service for Digital Scholarly Editions at the University Library

On the afternoon of Day 2, we will present the outcomes of the backcasting workshop from early November to the network and outline the future research support service for DSEs at the University Library. We are hoping to receive feedback from conference participants before we officially launch the new service in spring 2027.

Whitepaper: Recommendations for the Long-Term Archiving, Accessing, and Maintenance of Digital Scholarly Editions Created in Norwegian Academic and Cultural Heritage Institutions

One of the outputs of the BærUt! project is the development and publication of a joint whitepaper, "Recommendations for the Long-Term Archiving, Accessing, and Maintenance of Digital Scholarly Editions Created in Norwegian Academic and Cultural Heritage Institutions". During the conference, we will have a dedicated session for discussion and contributing to the whitepaper. Preparations for the whitepaper will begin in September (at the network meeting), and we will issue a call for contributions after the summer.

The whitepaper session will be held in the afternoon of Day 2, before the closing session.