About the event
BærUt! Network and Skills Hub for Sustainable Digital Scholarly Editions is proud to call for participations for our two-day long closing conference, titled "Digital Scholarly Editions Reimagined: Care, Community, Continuity", 23-24th of November 2026.
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 reimage 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 the consideration of 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, a profession, and a 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, and politically fit and has the right people to provide long-term solutions for data as well as application storage and archiving, can a digital scholarly product such as an edition or a database serve as a reliable source and be of use for future generations.
You can read more about the event here.
Call for Participations
Each of the two days of the conference will have a different structure.
Twin Talks
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.
We have three sessions dedicated to participants’ projects and academic discussion papers.
How can you contribute?
Send in an abstract of about 500 words presenting your research or editorial question, problem or challenge, and what aspect you would like to receive a response to. We will then try to match your proposal with a digital expert from the network.
Do you already have a digital expert partner for your Twin Talk? Submit both abstracts together (250 words each) and provide contact information of your partner(s).
Logistics:
Participating in the Twin Talks session requires the humanities scholar to prepare a 15-minute talk in writing, to be sent to the digital expert in advance of the conference, allowing at least 2 weeks for the digital expert's preparation of a response. During the live session, both partners will present their paper and response (30 mins together), followed by a plenary discussion (10 mins).
We believe this format is best suited for ongoing projects or those in the late stages of planning. We invite all network members to submit in this category, regardless of discipline, institutional affiliation, or role.
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 with 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.
How can you contribute?
To contribute as a panellist to the Panel, send an abstract of 500 words describing how technological and social sustainability intersect in your project and especially how you intend to negotiate and resolve tension between the CARE and FAIR principles, as well as the mundane day-to-day decision-making in a scholarly edition project.
To contribute as a discussionist to the Roundtable, you are required to familiarise yourself with the CARE and the FAIR principles and their implementation at the University of Oslo (and beyond), and we suggest that you familiarise yourself with chapters 7 (Digital Archival Ethics: Representation, Access, and Care in Digital Environments) and 11 (Preserving the Walt Whitman Archive) from the book Futures of Digital Scholarly Editions (2025), or the articles Beyond Data Feminism. Towards Ethical Data Work in the (Digital) Humanities (2026) and Building a Sustainable Commons: Why Community Governance is the Bedrock of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, or the introduction and chapter 6 (Tact) from the book The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of Maintenance (2025)/Le soin des choses. Politiques de la maintenance (2022). Let us know what you want to prepare or if you have alternative suggestions.
Logistics:
Participating in the Panel requires preparing a 10-minute presentation and reflections on three selected aspects of technological and social sustainability related to your project. These will be communicated beforehand. The total panel discussion time is 60 minutes.
Participating in the Roundtable requires reading and reflecting on a small selection of literature, as well as actively contributing to the discussion. Both the panel and the roundtable will be moderated, and the moderators will actively engage you in the discussion.
We believe the Panel format is best suited for ongoing or mature projects which concern themselves with questions of integrating Indigenous and minority people’s rights and interests.
The Roundtable format is best suited for those genuinely interested in understanding the inherent non-scholarly challenges of digital scholarly editions in tomorrow’s world and perhaps plan edition projects where these questions become relevant. We invite all network members to submit in this category, regardless of discipline, institutional affiliation, or role.
We want to record the panel and roundtable discussions (audio) as a starting point for a blog article. The recording will be deleted after the article is published. As an active participant, you gain co-authorship of the article. If you want to reserve yourself from your contribution being used for the article, let us know!
Submit your Abstract/Indicate your Participation
Please submit your abstract using this link below to Nettskjema https://nettskjema.no/a/634692, and indicate whether it is for the Twin Talks or the Panel. If you plan to participate in the Roundtable discussion, please indicate so and choose texts to prepare or suggest alternatives.
The deadline for submissions is September 14th, 2026.
Questions? Do not hesitate to contact us at baerut-admin@ub.uio.no.