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Over the past decades, the question of what text really is has been addressed by a large number of conferences, workshops, articles, and blog posts. If there is one thing that, taken together, those contributions illustrate, it is that our understanding of text is—and has been—constantly in flux and open to many interpretations. Still, there is often a gap between how an editor conceptualizes a source text and how this text is encoded and stored on a computer: using TEI XML, editors are compelled to model their text as a single tree (a hierarchy), whether this structure corresponds with their intellectual understanding or not. Textual features that do not fit naturally into the XML data model require additional layers of code, which hinders processing, querying, and interchange. The Text-As-Graph (TAG) data model and the associated syntax TAGML are developed to express and store textual information as a network. To this end, TAG implements a hypergraph model. In the present contribution, we illustrate the benefits of TAG’s hypergraph for the modeling of features like nonlinearity, discontinuity, and overlap. In contrast to a tree model, a hypergraph accommodates these nonhierarchical structures naturally. By making them part of the data model and the syntax, a TAGML processor can process the features without having to resort to workarounds or schema-aware tools. This lowers the difficulty of working with digital editions and facilitates querying and interchange.

What is the impact of reading fiction? We analyze online Dutch book reviews to detect overall affective impact, narrative feelings, response to style and reflection. We create a set of rules that analyze the reviews and detect the impact aspects. We evaluate the detection by asking raters about the presence of these aspects in reviews and comparing these ratings to our detection. Interrater agreements are weak to moderate; however, there is a significant correlation between the model’s predictions for all impact aspects except reflection. The detected impact correlates with book genres in the way one would expect: Narrative feelings are highest for thrillers, and stylistic response is highest for literary books. We can thus estimate some aspects of the response books evoke in readers. Initial results suggest that the appreciation of style is linked to reflection in the reader. However, the concepts underlying the impact categories need further exploration.

It seems very likely that future historians will have to portray 2020 CE as an annus horribilis, not least because of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Although this might seem like a small consolation in the grand scheme of things, the same future historians will nevertheless have to acknowledge that 2020 was also the year which saw the first edition of the Computational Humanities Research Workshop, which was a real success. https://2020.computational-humanities-research.org/ The original plan had been to host the workshop in Amsterdam in the autumn of 2020, bringing physically under one roof the community of Humanities scholars with an orientation towards the computational. The global lockdown that was necessitated by the pandemic quickly wiped those happy prospects off the table. Eventually, and only thanks to the agility of the local organizers, the workshop took place as a virtual event online (18--20 November 2020). In spite of these chaotic circumstances, the organizers, presenters and audience can look back with satisfaction on a smooth series of presentations, lively discussions afterwards, and even a fully-fledged social event during the otherwise lonely evenings of the workshop.

This paper explores the potential of combining the Text-As-Graph (TAG) and the XML data models. It proposes a digital editing workflow in which users can model, edit, and store text in TAG, and subsequently export the data to XML for further analysis or publication with XML-based tools. The conversion from TAGML to XML presents several interesting challenges on a technical level as well as a philological level. Overall, we argue that there may be many pragmatic reasons to encode cultural heritage texts in XML, but we have to be mindful of the XML framework becoming synonymous with the framework in which we conceptualize text. The paper therefore dives deep into the translation from conceptual model to logical model(s) and argues in favor of understanding the affordances and limitations of the text modeling technologies we use.

This essay demonstrates how the use of the keystroke logging tool Inputlog allows for a fine-grained analysis of literary writing processes. But before the writing process can be studied, the keystroke logging data needs to be transformed into an output that is suitable for a textual genetic analysis. For this purpose, this essay investigates the potential of combining text with keystroke logging data in TEI-conformant XML. Besides discussing how revisions can be specified in the encoding, the author asks herself how traces of digital writing processes differ from analogue traces (and, taking it one step further, how keystroke logging can be used to record more details about the genesis of a text), what kind of decisions need to be made when encoding keystroke logging data, and how the peculiarities of digital authorship leave their mark on its encoding — as well as on the interpretation and argumentation that underlies the transcription. This will demonstrate that the level of detail that is recorded in keystroke logging data requires us to consider the way in which the text was typed when we design our encoding schemas. The goal of the TEI-XML encoding of the keystroke logging data is to provide transcriptions of writing processes that could be used to analyse (the sequence of) revisions and text production in each logged writing session in relation to their specific location in the text.

Genetic criticism investigates analogue drafts and manuscripts to gain insights into the author’s way of working and the creative process, as well as to gain a better understanding of the work itself. Nowadays, most literary authors compose their text in a digital environment. This has led to the fear of the end of genetic criticism (Mathijsen 2009). However, the research carried out by a number of authors shows a variety of techniques to study born-digital writing processes which proves that the digital writing process leaves sufficient traces to ensure genetic analysis (Ries (2018, 2014); Kirschenbaum and Reside (2013), Kirschenbaum (2008), Crombez and Cassiers (2017), Vásári (2019), Vauthier (2016) and Fenoglio (2009)). In the NWO-project ‘Track Changes: Textual Scholarship and the challenge of digital literary writing’ (2018-2023) we investigate the possibilities of yet another tool for enabling the study of the genesis of a digital (literary) writing process: the usage of the keystroke logger Inputlog at the moment of composition. Inputlog is developed at the University of Antwerp and allows the author to write in Microsoft Word (Leijten and Van Waes 2013). While the program is running, it records every keystroke and mouse movement in combination with a timestamp and saves the Word document at the start and end of each writing session. In this paper, I will report on my ongoing PhD-research (2018-2022) on how the keystroke logging material can yield (new) opportunities for genetic criticism, here specifically through the use of different visualizations of the writing process. The research focuses on the Inputlog material of the writing process of the novel Roosevelt by the Flemish author Gie Bogaert. 1 Bogaert wrote Roosevelt in 422 writing sessions over a period of 259 days. These writing sessions resulted in 277 hours, 14 minutes and 22 seconds of keystroke logging data and 453 Word documents that show the text in different stages of composition. This vast amount of data can be overwhelming and may obscure valuable insights on the writing process from a textual perspective. Therefore, building on existing methodologies in genetic editing, I explore the role of the scholar in making the writing process intelligible from a textual genetic perspective by means of visualizations.

Online book discussion is a popular activity on weblogs, specialized book discussion sites, booksellers’ sites and elsewhere. These discussions are important for research into literary reception and should be made and kept accessible for researchers. This article asks what an archive of online book discussion should and could look like, and how we could describe such an archive in terms of some of the central concepts of textual scholarship: work, document, text, transcription and variant. What could an approach along the lines of textual scholarship mean for such a collection? If such a collection holds many pieces of information that would not usually be considered text (such as demographic information about contributors), could we still call such a collection an edition, and could we call editing the activity of preparing such a collection?The article introduces some of the relevant (Dutch-language) sites, and summarizes their properties (among others: they are dynamic and vulnerable, they contain structured data and are very large) from the perspective of creating a research collection. It discusses the interpretation of some essential terms of textual studies in this context, and briefly lists a number of components that a digital edition of these sites might or should contain. It argues that such a collection is the result of scholarly work and should not be considered as 'just' a web archive.

In this paper we discuss the extension of established methodology with computer vision to make it possible to almost literally see into the blind spots that using established methods on large serial collections only leave. We argue that this method overcomes the dangers of implicit selection that are commonly designated as ‘cherry picking’, or selecting the ‘most important’ files. Furthermore, in using combined traditional and DH-methodology it becomes visible what is and what is not in the collection as a whole. As such it is a a replacement for traditional leafing through an archive. As a method of source criticism, this gives many more possibilities than would have been possible with established methodologies only. We illustrate our findings on our project Migrant, Mobilities and Connection on Dutch-Australian emigration 1950-1992. The main research question in the project is which factors determined the whole migration experience and what the relation was between policy, civil society and individual agency. Australia was, together with Canada, the main destination of Dutch emigrants after 1945, receiving around 160,000 migrants from 1950 to 1992. The point of departure is a registration system that was kept by the Dutch migration authorities, based at the Dutch consulates. It consists of 50,000 cards (100,000 images scanned) and contains data about the interactions between migrants and the migration officers from 1950-1992. The cards themselves contain a wealth of information that is not readily available as the writing on the cards is a mixed of manuscript and typescript that are distributed unequally over the cards. Before starting to answer the main question we had to determine first how to study Dutch-Australian emigrants with this extensive registration system that is hermetic by its size and composition. Traditionally, historians would tackle a collection like this by taking a sample from the cards and additionally study the most interesting cases. However, case selection is difficult as it is impossible to read a hundred thousand images or even leaf through them. Moreover, it is not clear how cases fit into the registration system and whether there are hidden features of the system influencing the size of files. Thus, a combination of a large archive collection of mostly undifferentiated material and methodologies not devised for distant reading, leads to blind spots for the historian and asks for additional methods to inspect the whole collection. The computer vision method we adopted measured the amount of writing on the cards. Viewed over the whole registration system, this gives a distribution of the information over the cards.Combining this with traditional sampling we were able to identify distinguishable groups of migrants (eg. by as religion, marital status or age). In the paper we will elaborate on the (non-)possibilities of relating these groups to the ‘information distribution’ as a whole and on the (non-)possibilities of distinguishing changes in policies and executive strategies of the Dutch migration authorities by using this combined methods.

This perspective paper on resource re-use intends to draw the attention of the interactive information retrieval (IIR) community to the challenges of research documentation and archiving for future use. Resources are understood as encompassing research designs, research data and research infrastructures. It proposes eight principles for improving the re-use of resources in the IIR community and presents concrete steps on how to achieve them. A five-level system for data archiving and documentation envisions increasingly open and stable documentation and access infrastructures.

One of the aims of literary research is to explain di

Prominent among the social developments that the web 2.0 has facilitated is digital social reading (DSR): on many platforms there are functionalities for creating book reviews, ‘inline’ commenting on book texts, online story writing (often in the form of fanfiction), informal book discussions, book vlogs, and more. In this article, we argue that DSR offers unique possibilities for research into literature, reading, the impact of reading and literary communication. We also claim that in this context computational tools are especially relevant, making DSR a field particularly suitable for the application of Digital Humanities methods. We draw up an initial categorization of research aspects of DSR and briefly examine literature for each category. We distinguish between studies on DSR that use it as a lens to study wider processes of literary exchange as opposed to studies for which the DSR culture is a phenomenon interesting in its own right. Via seven examples of DSR research, we discuss the chosen approaches and their connection to research questions in literary studies.

The beginning is a foundational element in literary fiction: it is the entrance into a textual world. In this article, I analyse the genesis of the first chapter of Gie Bogaert’s born-digital novel Roosevelt (2016), which was logged with the keystroke logging software Inputlog. The beginning of Roosevelt supplies important information for the understanding of the textual world, takes on a key role in the ‘recentering’ of the reader to this world, and facilitates an immersive reading experience through the use of the second-person singular, and through making an appeal to the readers’ sensory and spatial imagination. Focusing on the textual development, I ask the question how four important aspects of the novel were implemented in the first chapter during the writing process. I will demonstrate how Bogaert experimented with explicating these aspects, but later decided to refer to them rather implicitly. Overall, this analysis demonstrates how Inputlog, in case it is used by literary authors, may facilitate textual genetic research on present-day works of literature.

For third-party annotations in the digital edition to be interoperable, we argue they should not be anchored in web pages but in the edition’s abstract information structure. We propose an ontology for the editorial domain based on FRBROO. The ontology distinguishes between the editable domain (works that can be edited) and the edited domain (the result of editing), as well as between the different FRBR levels. The edition’s website, with the help of RDFa (RDF triples expressed by means of HTML attributes in the hierarchical HTML structure) can identify fragments of works and expressions and describe their relations. Annotation tools and other clients can use that information to identify the targets of annotation and perform other types of intelligent processing. We discuss what this facility might mean for annotation in the context of digital editions. We also note that the same functionality is desirable in the context of other types of cultural heritage material, such as newspapers and audio-visual archives.

This research presents an alternative approach for applying the text analysis program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to non-English text: using machine translation (MT) to translate the text into English and then apply the English LIWC dictionary, rather than applying a translated LIWC dictionary to the original texts. We evaluate the alternative method using the output from two open-source MT systems and Google Translation on a set of TED Talk subtitle data. The method is tested on three language pairs: Dutch-English, German-English and Spanish-English. Provisionally, MT seems to lead to better results in the three language pairs than language-specific dictionaries., Link to the slides: https://slides.com/yuyingye/deck-bc15f3/

In the NWO REPUBLIC project, we are creating digital access to the corpus of the Resolutions of the States General of the Dutch Republic (1576-1796). This corpus contains the decisions made in the States General each day for a 220 year period. The resolutions were recorded using a standard structure and contain many standard formulations for aspects of the decision making process, including the source of the topic that was decided on (a formal request, a missive, etc.), whether a decision was reached and what that decision was. We discuss different techniques we use to identify formulaic expressions and how we iteratively build a corpus-specific phrase model with which we can identify 1) the dates and attendants of each meeting, which are followed by all the resolutions of that day, 2) resolution boundaries, e.g. where they start and stop in the running text, so we know which text belongs to which resolution, 3) different types of opening phrases that correspond to different types of sources (e.g. requests, missives, reports, etc.), and 4) the decision paragraphs that state what decision, if any, was reached. We discuss how we built ground truth to evaluate the phrase model and the fuzzy searching and extraction process. Finally, we discuss how this approach generalised to other corpora and text genres.

What makes some novels literary? There is little agreement within literary studies on this question. The two main approaches focus either on text-intrinsic factors (e.g., aesthetic, stylistic), or text-extrinsic social factors (e.g., author prestige, critics). Until now, there has not been a comprehensive study taking both text-intrinsic and social factors into account. The project The Riddle of Literary Quality examines both factors by connecting literary texts to the appreciation of those texts: can we identify textual characteristics that are connected to readers’ literary appraisal of texts? In this paper, we describe the development of The National Reader Survey and present some results. The National Reader Survey is a large online survey of Dutch readers with about 14,000 respondents; its purpose is to collect readers’ literary appraisal of texts. We asked readers to rate both read and unread novels on a scale of 1–7 for their literary and overall quality. The agreement amongst respondents on which recent Dutch language novels are of high literary quality and which are not was greater than expected. Motivations respondents gave for their ratings show that the notion of literary quality is a familiar one and respondents most commonly relate it to two elements: the first is the text itself—style, structure, plot and layers; and the second is genre—if a novel is considered a ‘genre’ novel (e.g., suspense, romantic, fantasy), its chances of obtaining a high rating on literary quality are small. These results indicate how entwined social and text-intrinsic factors are. We also touch upon project results which make use of the survey data.

An automated way to measure a text's perspective is essential to a computational analysis of literary style and narrative. However, no such measure of narrative perspective exists to date. We aim to provide such a measure by taking two approaches to operationalise narrative perspective. The first measure is a machine learning approach, the second is based on computing the ratio of combinations of pronouns. Our research demonstrates that narrative perspective can be predicted with high accuracy and provides a reflection on the advantages and pitfalls of both methods.

Literary novels are said to distinguish themselves from other novels through conventions associated with literariness. We investigate the task of predicting the literariness of novels as perceived by readers, based on a large reader survey of contemporary Dutch novels. Previous research showed that ratings of literariness are predictable from texts to a substantial extent using machine learning, suggesting that it may be possible to explain the consensus among readers on which novels are literary as a consensus on the kind of writing style that characterizes literature. Although we have not yet collected human judgments to establish the influence of writing style directly (we use a survey with judgments based on the titles of novels), we can try to analyze the behavior of machine learning models on particular text fragments as a proxy for human judgments. In order to explore aspects of the texts associated with literariness, we divide the texts of the novels in chunks of 2--3 pages and create vector space representations using topic models (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and neural document embeddings (Distributed Bag-of-Words Paragraph Vectors). We analyze the semantic complexity of the novels using distance measures, supporting the notion that literariness can be partly explained as a deviation from the norm. Furthermore, we build predictive models and identify specific keywords and stylistic markers related to literariness. While genre plays a role, we find that the greater part of factors affecting judgments of literariness are explicable in bag-of-words terms,even in short text fragments and among novels with higher literary ratings. The code and notebook used to produce the results in this paper are available at https://github.com/andreasvc/litvecspace.

In this article we aim to provide a minimally sufficient theoretical framework to argue that it is time for a re-conception of the notion of text in the field of digital textual scholarship. This should allow us to reconsider the ontological status of digital text, and that will ground future work discussing the specific analytical affordances offered by digital texts understood as digital texts. Following from the argument of Suzanne Briet regarding documentation, referring to Eco’s understanding of ‘infinite semiosis’, and accounting for the reciprocal effects between carrier technology and meaning observed by McLuhan, we argue that the functions of document and text are realized primarily by their fluid nature and by the dynamic character of their interpretation. To define the purpose of textual scholarship as a ‘stabilisation’ of text is therefore fallacious. The delusive focus on ‘stability’ and discrete ‘philological fact’ gives rise to a widespread belief in textual scholarship that digital texts can be treated simply as representations of print or manuscript texts. On the contrary—digital texts are texts in and of themselves in numerous digital models and data structures which may include, but is not limited to, text meant for graphical display on a screen. We conclude with the observation that philological treatment of these texts demands an adequate digital and/or computational literacy.

Attentiveness to physical appearance is seen as an important motif in chick lit. However, this has never been researched in an actual comparison with literary novels. Our goal is to make a comparison between the two genres concerning the importance of physical appearance of characters. In this article, as a first step in researching this topic, we consider the task of identifying sentences that contain descriptions of a character’s physical appearance in a set of novels in both genres. We manually annotate sentences where the appearance of a character is described. We then apply a machine learning methodology and manually written lexical–syntactic queries to automate the extraction of these sentences. Contrary to our expectations, the queries outperform the classifier. When we use a combination of the two automated methods, the extraction of physical descriptions from chick lit is more successful. This suggests that such descriptions are more uniform in character.

Most contemporary literary writers compose their texts in a digital environment, using a word processor. This digital environment hides the writing operations (Mathijsen 2009; Vauthier 2016). In the project ‘Track Changes: Textual Scholarship and the challenge of digital literary writing’, a collaboration between the Huygens ING and University of Antwerp, we use the keystroke logging tool Inputlog to collect data about the writing processes of contemporary authors without interfering the writing process itself (Leijten & Van Waes 2013). The data from Inputlog allows us to reconstruct the digital literary writing processes. The output of Inputlog is twofold. It saves the document as it is at the beginning of the writing session and at the end of each writing session, resulting in a ‘session-version’ for each session. But it also registers every keystroke and mouse movement in combination with a timestamp. This dual output offers a challenge for the analysis of the writing process. In analogue text versions, the process of the writing is visible in the strikethrough words, additions and substitutions. But for those contemporary writing processes logged with Inputlog, the process data needs to be combined with the session-versions in order to visualise the revisions and to see the transformation from one ‘session-version’ to the next ‘session-version’. In this paper I will present how I combine the session-versions and the logging data in TEI-XML, paying attention to an extra aspect gained from the Inputlog-data: time. As every keystroke is complemented with a timestamp, the writer can potentially be ‘followed through the document’. In doing this, I will focus on the writing processes of one Dutch and one Flemish writer as case studies to examine the central question: How and in what sequence were the narratives constructed?

Despite passionate pleas, born-digital materials are still underrepresented within the field of textual scholarship (e.g. Lebrave 2013; Van Hulle 2014). Notable trailblazers (Kirschenbaum (2008; 2013), Ries (2010; 2018), but also Vauthier (2016), Fiormonte and Pusceddu (2006), Crombez and Cassiers (2017)) have shown that digital writing processes do leave traces behind, and quite rich traces at that. However, the conventions of word processing programmes are such that immediate correction (Sofortkorrektur) has become invisible (Matthijsen 2009). Related to this issue is the way in which the medium affects the writing process: from studies into non-literary texts, we know that digital writing processes are different from paper-based processes. There is much more rewriting during composition (see Van Waes & Schellens 2003; Goldberg et al 2003). Our project addresses these issues by combining textual scholarship with a cognitive writing process approach. Using the keystroke logging programme Inputlog (Leijten & Waes 2013), we are able to catch all traces of digital writing and editing processes.. In our pilot study, we have logged 9 writing sessions of Dutch author Walter van den Berg. This encompasses all his writing for one short story. These sessions will be used as the basis for this paper. Using Lindgren & Sullivan’s (2006) taxonomy, revisions will be manually labeled and interpreted. I will make a distinction between 'fresh' changes (immediately deleting and replacing newly produced text at the 'point-of-utterance') and revisions taking place in older parts of the text. The key questions I will cover in my talk are: How interpretable are point-of-utterance traces in keystroke logging files? Can we see moments of invention (Ferrer 2011) through iteration as well as 'Sofortkorrektur' at the point-of-utterance? How do point-of-utterance revisions differ from revision of text created earlier? I hope this small study will contribute to our understanding of digital creative writing processes. Short biography Floor Buschenhenke (1978) is a PhD Student at the NWO-funded project Track Changes: Textual scholarship and the challenge of digital literary writing (2018-2023), a collaboration between the Huygens ING (KNAW) in Amsterdam and the University of Antwerp. She has published three volumes of poetry and previously worked as an editor and language trainer. Bibliography Crombez, Thomas and Cassiers, Edith (2017). ‘Postdramatic Methods of Adaptation in the Age of Digital Collaborative Writing. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 32(1): 17–35. Ferrer, Daniel (2011). Logiques du brouillon : modèles pour une critique génétique. Paris: Éd. du Seuil. Fiormonte, Domenico, and Pusceddu, Cinzia (2006). The Text as Product and Process. History, Genesis, Experiments. In , E. Vanhoutte and M. de Smedt (Eds.) Manuscript, Variant, Genese – Genesis. Gent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, pp. 109-128. Goldberg, Amie, Russell, Michael and Abigail Cook (2003). The Effect of Computers on Student Writing: A Meta-Analysis of Studies from 1992 to 2002. The Journal of Technology, Learning and Assessment, 2(1): 3-51. Kirschenbaum, Matthew (2013). The .Txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary. DHQ, 7(1). Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2008) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press Lebrave, Jean-Louis (2013). Computer forensics: la critique génétique et l’écriture numérique. Genesis, 44: 137-147 Leijten, M., & Van Waes, L. (2013). Keystroke Logging in Writing Research: Using Inputlog to Analyze Writing Processes. Written Communication 30(3), 358-392 Lindgren, Eva, and Kirk PH Sullivan (2006). Analysing online revision. In: K.P.H. Sullivan & E. Lindgren (Eds.), Computer keystroke logging and writing: Methods and applications, (pp. 157-188). Oxford: Elsevier. Mathijsen, Marita (2009). Genetic textual editing: the end of an era. In: Was ist Textkritik? Zur Geschichte und Relevanz eines Zentralbegriffs der Editionswissenschaft. Beihefte zu Editio 28. Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 233-240. Ries, Thorsten (2010). "Die geräte Klüger als ihre Besitzer": Philologische Durchblicke hinter die Schreibszene des Graphical User Interface: Überlegungen zur digitalen Quellenphilologie, mit einer textgenetischen Studie zu Michael Speiers ausfahrt st. nazaire. Editio 24: 149-199. Ries, Thorsten (2018). The Rationale of the Born-Digital Dossier Génétique: Digital Forensics and the Writing Process: With Examples from the Thomas Kling Archive. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 33(2): 391–424. Van Hulle, Dirk (2014). Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing. London: Bloomsbury Van Waes, Luuk, and Schellens, Peter Jan (2003). Writing Profiles: The Effect of the Writing Mode on Pausing and Revision Patterns of Experienced Writers. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(6): 829–53. Vauthier, Bénédicte (2016). Genetic Criticism Put to the Test by Digital Technology: Sounding out the (Mainly) Digital Genetic File of El Dorado. Variants, 12-13: 163–86.

The digital scholarly editions that textual scholars and digital humanists produced for over two decades have often been accompanied by claims about their revolutionary nature. Technological innovations are prone to induce such claims, as the case of the compact disc audio carrier exemplifies. However, on closer inspection we are hard pressed to identify the revolution that such innovations bring about. Arguments that textual scholars have put forward to claim fundamental differences between print and digital scholarly editions turn out to be weak. Some, therefore, claim that in fact no essential changes exist between print and digital text, nor between print or digital textual scholarship. However, none of the arguments takes into account the most striking difference between print and digital text, which is the performative potential of the latter. Digital text is endowed with a performative aspect through software code. However, current digital scholarly editions adhere almost exclusively to a representational philosophy in which the idea of text as a static materialized object is unaltered digitally remediated, that is: they are mostly static digital objects mimicking static print books. Perceived primarily as infrastructure underpinning digital scholarly editions, executable program code has until now largely been ignored by textual scholarship as a methodological means. Code, as will be explained, is the very embodiment of the ontological difference between print and digital text—it is text performing. This ontological shift and the emergence of a performative digital textual heritage do justify explorations of the methodological affordances that code creates for textual scholarship. As an example of such an exploration the idea of the computational scholarly edition is introduced (as opposed to the "merely digital” scholarly edition) and a tentative implementation is presented. Finally it is argued that, rather than to extradite them, it is more productive to embrace digital and computational exploratory niches in textual scholarship.

Our project studies the implications of the largely digital creative processes of present-day literary writers for textual scholarship's theories and methodologies. This poster presentation examines a born-digital literary story and shows how keystroke logging data provided by Inputlog can help interpret revisions made during the writing process. It focusses both on small revisions and on the construction of the beginning of the story (incipit) and tries to examine whether the small revisions can be linked to the changes made in the opening passage. We will study both the versions of the text and the process data from Inputlog; we cannot only see which revisions were made to create the ultimate incipit but also when – in the complete writing process.

Born-digital documents are a challenge for the field of textual scholarship. Technological obsolescence, privacy concerns and overwriting practices hinder access to and reconstruction of born-digital writing processes (Kirschenbaum 2009; Richle 2007; Ries 2018; Bénédicte Vauthier 2019). When several textual stages have taken place within the same digital document, that has not been saved as different versions, it is no longer possible to distinguish phases based on the characteristics of separate documents (such as De Biasi’s typology of genetic materials). The medium also affects writing itself. Digital text is produced, evaluated and revised in smaller cycles than on paper, making it more recursive (Goldberg, Russell, and Cook 2003; van Waes and Schellens 2003). Also, there is a greater attention to the ‘cosmetic’ side of the document - spelling and other formal matters are revised continuously. This begs the question if and how we can make meaningful phase demarcations within a continuous, fluid process taking place in a single Word document. Within our larger research project, Track Changes: Textual Scholarship and the challenge of digital literary writing, we are using the keystroke logging software Inputlog to document the work processes of literary writers (Leijten and van Waes 2013). This provides us with large quantities of fine-grained data that require computational filtering and analyses. A reconceptualisation of ‘phases’ can help us on our quest for new analytical tools to better handle the challenge contemporary writing poses. In this talk, I will propose a number of complementary methods to analyse the born-digital writing process. My case study is the writing process of the novel Roosevelt, by the Flemish author Gie Bogaert, registered by Inputlog. I will attempt to use the amount and types of revision, the chronology, the linearity of text development, and the usage of metamarks as indications of writing phases.

Stand-off markup is widely considered as a possible solution for overcoming the limitation of inline XML markup, primarily dealing with multiple overlapping hierarchies. Considering previous contributions on the subject and implementations of stand-off markup, we propose a new TEI-based model for encoding, that still uses the regular TEI elements, but in a stand-off manner. Our light notation moves the bulk of markup into a separate element, grouping layers of related textual features encoded via existing TEI elements (eg. or ) into individual elements; furthermore, our proposed notation provides a schema for referencing the transcription using the xml:id attribute. This approach is illustrated through a variety of examples. Our proof-of-concept transformation package works directly on the stand-off markup, without the necessity of reducing it back to inline TEI for parsing, querying and visualizing.

Over the last decades, with technological advancements such as growing digitalization and the development of social media platforms, the act of reading has transformed into an interactive experience (Cordón-García et al., 2013; Merga, 2015), where the Internet plays a key role (Murray, 2018). Social reading platforms like Goodreads and Wattpad are online environments where millions of people from all over the world come to share their love for the written word. Members come together to discuss what they have read and what they judge as good or bad literature, they recommend books to one another, and even try their hand at writing fiction. While a growing number of studies have been dedicated to this phenomenon (Nakamura, 2013; Ramdarshan Bold, 2016), so far only a few have adopted computational methods (Faggiolani and Vivarelli, 2016; Thelwall and Kousha, 2017) and none has combined these methods with empirical approaches to the study of literature and its effects. As the online environment is very different from the literary field as we know it, showing new types of complex interactions, we need to explore social reading and writing from both social and content perspectives. Social questions that should be investigated include interaction among users, questions of power (sources of literary authority), the effects on literacy and on reading behaviors, the changing system of social values (and of aesthetic evaluation). Content questions include questions about style, about the distribution and originality of comments, about the affective, reflective or social nature of content. With this panel, we will showcase the potential of studying social reading through the combination of multiple and interrelated approaches: from purely statistical, data-driven, and stylometric analyses, through qualitative and quantitative surveys of key users and a theory-driven qualitative taxonomy of reading valuation, towards a combination of the empirical and the computational, supported by a sound theoretical/methodological awareness. The substantial variety of case studies in four languages (English, German, Italian, and Dutch) will reflect the diversity of social reading, which can and should be studied from multiple points of view as well as with an array of methodological tools.

This paper presents an ethnography of twelve years of software engineering that helped shaping and supporting digital textual scholarship at a Dutch humanities research institute. The study shows that internal and external digital and computational developments are persistently accompanied with a promise to deliver significant scaling benefits for the scholarly editing process: powerful OCR (e.g. Kahle et al. 2017) will speed up transcription, automatic alignment (e.g. Haentjens Dekker and Middell 2011) will dramatically reduce the turnaround of collation, stemmatic analysis will be much facilitated by tools such as StemmaWeb (e.g. Andrews and Macé 2013), and digital publishing platforms will significantly broaden access to scholarly editions (e.g. Beaulieu, Van Dalen-Oskam, and Van Zundert 2012). After critical assessment this ethnography finds that such digital developments indeed bring clear benefits and new affordances to textual scholarship. However, it also finds that such attempts to computationally support textual scholarship consistently fail to produce the promised reduction of cost and turnaround associated with scholarly editions. A primary cause for this is that ultimately all textual editing at a particular level requires hermeneutic scholarly intervention. That is, it requires expert scholarly interpretation and judgement which ultimately cannot be outsourced to any current computational algorithm. This expert authority has been claimed by some (for instance Bordalejo 2018) as an argument to conclude that computer science and digital humanities have no bearing on textual scholarship. This study suggests however—as do others (e.g. Thaller 2018)—that there are solid methodological grounds to actually intensify the interplay between textual scholarship and computation (Van Zundert 2019). To benefit from a computational approach, however, the focus of this interplay needs to be broadened. Current digital work in textual scholarship can be characterized mainly as structural modeling and computer supported collaborative work (CSCW, cf. Greif 1988). This type of computing takes text-as-data and non-hermeneutic processes as its objects of automation. I argue that these approaches should be augmented by an approach that specifically examines the computability of hermeneutic scholarly tasks. This is a tremendous challenge for both computer scientists and textual scholars. A challenge, however, that we need to rise to, to ensure the viability of textual scholarship in the next decades. –JZ_20190601_1319 ## References Andrews, Tara L., and Caroline Macé. 2013. “Beyond the Tree of Texts: Building an Empirical Model of Scribal Variation through Graph Analysis of Texts and Stemmata.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 28 (4): 504–521. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqt032. Beaulieu, Anne, Karina Dalen-Oskam, van, and Joris Zundert, van. 2012. “Between Tradition and Web 2.0: ELaborate as a Social Experiment in Humanities Scholarship.” In Social Software and the Evolution of User Expertise: Future Trends in Knowledge Creation and Dissemination, edited by Tatjana Takševa, 112–129. Hershey PA (USA): IGI Global. 10.4018/978-1-4666-2178-7.ch007. Bordalejo, Barbara. 2018. “Digital versus Analogue Textual Scholarship or The Revolution Is Just in the Title.” Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures 7 (1): 7–28. https://doi.org/10.1353/dph.2018.0001. Greif, Irene, ed. 1988. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings. San Mateo (CA, USA): Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc. Haentjens Dekker, Ronald, and Gregor Middell. 2011. “Computer-Supported Collation with CollateX: Managing Textual Variance in an Environment with Varying Requirements.” In Supporting Digital Humanities 2011. Kopenhagen (DE). P. Kahle, S. Colutto, G. Hackl, and G. Mühlberger. 2017. “Transkribus - A Service Platform for Transcription, Recognition and Retrieval of Historical Documents.” In 2017 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), 04:19–24. Kyoto: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDAR.2017.307. Thaller, Manfred. 2018. “On Information in Historical Sources.” A Digital Ivory Tower (blog). April 24, 2018. https://ivorytower.hypotheses.org/56#more-56. Van Zundert, Joris 2019. “Why the Compact Disc Was Not a Revolution and Cityfish Will Change Textual Scholarship, or What Is a Computational Edition?” Ecdotica, in print.

Dutch writer Jan Wolkers (1925-2007), whose recently published biography Het litteken van de dood caused considerable uproar in the Netherlands, remains famous as a highly authentic voice in post-war Dutch Literature. His fame is partially based on his touching and sexually explicit bestseller Turks Fruit (1969). This novel was turned into a successful movie only four years later, visited by over 3,3 million people in the Netherlands. Inspired by this success, in 1979 plans were made for a movie-adaption of Wolkers’ debut novel Kort Amerikaans (1962). Confronted with the dialogues in the draft scenario for the movie, Wolkers decided to radically rewrite his first novel. The rewritten version, which was only partly used for the movie, to a high extent shows a restyled representation of the autobiographical main character: Wolkers ‘reinvented’ his younger self to make it more corresponding to his by that time established public ‘posture’: that of a highly authentic, rebellious writer of the sixties. Next to that, in the new version of the novel some of the ‘round’ characters were minimized and much of the original staging of the novel, set within the context of the final year of the Second World War, was adapted. In Wolkers’ biography, as well as in the broader context of Dutch literary studies, the thorough rewriting of the novel remains largely unnoticed. In my paper I will address the benefits of studying the versions of Kort Amerikaans in their complex interrelation, treating the different manifestations of the ‘work’ as a fluid text with an ongoing textual variation.

This piece mushroomed from a simple enough looking suggestion to write a review about Mirador, a viewer component for web based image resources. While playing around and testing Mirador however, a lot of questions started to emerge–questions that in a scholarly sense were more significant than just the functional requirements of textual scholars and researchers of medieval sources for an image viewer. These questions are forced upon us because of the way Mirador is built, and by the assumptions it thereby makes–or that its developers make–about its role and about the larger infrastructure for scholarly resources that it is supposed to be a part of. This again led to a number of epistemological issues in the realm of digital textual scholarship. And so, what was intended as a simple review resulted in a long read about Mirador, about its technological context, and about digital scholarly editions as distributed resources. The first part of my story gives a straightforward review-like overview of Mirador. I then delve into the reasons that I think exist for the architectural nature of the majority of current digital scholarly editions, which are still mostly monolithic data silos. This in turn leads to some epistemological questions about digital scholarly editions. Subsequently I return to Mirador to investigate whether its architectural assumptions provide an answer to these epistemological issues. To estimate whether the epistemological “promise” that Mirador’s architecture holds may be easily attained, I gauge what (technical) effort is associated with building a digital edition that actually utilizes Mirador. Integrating Mirador also implies adopting the emerging standard IIIF (international image interoperability framework); a discussion of this “standard-to-be” is therefore in order. Finally the article considers the prospects of aligning the IIIF and TEI “standards” to further the creation of distributed digital scholarly editions.

Reading serves many ends. Some readers report that works of fiction provide an imaginative escape from the rigors of life, others report reading in order to be intellectually challenged. While various characterizations of readers’ engagement with prose fiction have been proposed, few have been checked using representative samples of readers. Our research reports on reader self-descriptions observed in a representative sample of 501 adults in the Netherlands. Reader self-descriptions exhibit regularities, with certain self-descriptions predicting others. Contrary to existing theories which posit two types of readers characterized by non-overlapping concerns (identifying readers and distanced readers), we find that while some readers attend to plot structure or read in order to be intellectually challenged, reader self-descriptions overlap more than received theories predict. We hypothesize that some readers have cultivated more reading techniques than others, with educated or experienced readers tending to report deriving additional experiences from reading.

In this paper I will claim that current general purpose computer languages are fundamentally unsuited for the expression of hermeneutic aspects of scholarship and that it is up to digital humanists to find a solution for this problem if scholarship is to computationally express sophisticated scientific interpretations. Hermeneutics is the theory of interpretation. Classically textual criticism has been the technique associated with hermeneutics (cf. Van Zundert 2016). Theory of interpretation and textual criticism combined produce the hermeneutic method: a reflexive mode of interpretation that is invoked by initial textual criticism. The act of textual criticism establishes the semiotic surface of a text, hermeneutics takes the result of this criticism as a form of reading instructions and asserts an intersubjective meaning of the text (cf. Eco 1981). Criticism is thus concerned with establishing the factuality of an inscription while hermeneutics reflexively determines a situated meaning. Scholars may thus perfectly well argue different but valid meanings on the basis of the same underlying textual criticism. Exactly this pluralism is a quintessential property of scholarship (Small 2013:3). Current general purpose computer languages (Java, Ruby, C, Python, etc.) do not support formal expressions for the hermeneutic reflexive part of interpretation. In part this is due to the nature of first order logic in which they are rooted. Predicate logic, which eventually traces back to Aristotelian syllogism, allows for the formal expression of factual assertions ("Aristotle is a man"; 'a = b'). In this sense predicate logic corresponds to the level of textual criticism. But first order logic based computer languages are interpretationally weak: they cannot compute simultaneously with different interpretations of the underlying fact. While scholars may assert "Aristotle may be a man, but he may also be a fictional person", a statement in first order logic such as 'a = b && a = c' is always false. It follows that current general purpose computer languages cannot fully remediate scholarly argument into computable statements. To really be able to compute over scholarly argument computable expressions are needed for hermeneutic relations—i.e. pluriform interpretations of an asserted fact: 'a may_be c && a may_be b'. Modal logic (Orgun & Ma 1994) incorporates some similar interpretational notions ('a is possibly b' and 'a is necessarily b'). However, no usable and widely supported implementations of modal logic based computing languages exist. Therefore, to render interpretational statements truly computable, digital humanists themselves will have to extend their thinking towards the logical foundations of the computer languages they use. Especially the collaborative intellectual exercise of elucidating a domain specific computer language for scholarship could yield the hermeneutic relations (verbs c.q. operators) current general purpose computing languages lack. Together with existing work to turn computing into a tool fundamentally geared towards humanistic research (Thaller 2018), and combined with public test data and assignments, such work may become the blueprint for implementations in the form of a shared task in the digital humanities (Reiter 2016), which might eventually result in a hermeneutical DSL or hermeneutically augmented variants of general purpose computing languages. ---- References Eco, U. (1981) ‘The Theory of Signs and the Role of the Reader’, The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 14(1), pp. 35–45. doi: 10.2307/1314865. Orgun, M. A. and Ma, W. (1994) ‘An Overview of Temporal and Modal Logic Programming’, in Proceedings. Temporal Logic, First International Conference, ICTL ’94, Bonn: ICTL, pp. 1–36. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221160663_An_Overview_of_Temporal_and_Modal_Logic_Programming (Accessed: 13 July 2018). Reiter, N. (2016) An Initiative for Shared Tasks in the Digital Humanities, GitHub. Available at: https://github.com/SharedTasksInTheDH (Accessed: 13 July 2018). Small, H. (2013) The Value of the Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thaller, M. (2018) ‘On Information in Historical Sources’, A Digital Ivory Tower, 24 April. Available at: https://ivorytower.hypotheses.org/56#more-56 (Accessed: 16 June 2018). Van Zundert, J. J. (2016) ‘Screwmeneutics and Hermenumericals: the Computationality of Hermeneutics’, in Scheibman, S., Siemens, R., and Unsworth, J. (eds) A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, Oxford, etc.: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, pp. 331–347. Available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118680605.ch23/summary (Accessed: 26 July 2016).