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Scottish Universities Press

Against infrastructure: global approaches to digital scholarly editing

Chapter of: Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century

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Metadata
TitleAgainst infrastructure
Subtitleglobal approaches to digital scholarly editing
ContributorRaffaele Viglianti(author)
Gimena del Rio Riande(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.4
Landing pagehttps://books.sup.ac.uk/sup/catalog/book/sup-9781917341073/chapter/5
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightRaffaele Viglianti and Gimena del Rio Riande
PublisherScottish Universities Press
Published on2025-04-29
Long abstractDigital scholarly editions are one of the oldest forms of output of digital humanities research projects, and arguably one of the most prolific. Like all digital humanities projects that result in the creation of digital output—typically a website—digital editions are not immune to what Smithies et al. call the 'digital entropy of software and digital infrastructure'. This has a cost that grows with the complexity of the system needed to publish digital editions and this cost is often not only financial; it may also include the ability to access institutional or public infrastructure. The principles of minimal computing have informed new ways of undertaking digital humanities work, focused on use of open technologies and ownership of data and code. The latter in particular entails independence from institutional infrastructure and the network of surveillance that is a feature of many commercial platforms of the modern web. This chapter discusses the current extent of minimal computing as an influence on digital editing, and which aspects of the concept have taken stronger root. Specifically, we will consider how, when applied to digital publishing, minimal computing principles intersect with a recent resurgence of static websites and related technologies. Deriving static sites from an end-of-life project is the clear choice when access to infrastructure becomes limited. What would it take to adopt them from the start to avoid infrastructural constraints? Through this discussion, the chapter articulates the need for a low-infrastructure future of the "global” digital edition.
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Raffaele Viglianti

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3094-139X

Raffaele Viglianti is a Research Programmer at MITH. He holds a PhD in Digital Musicology from the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, where he also contributed to several major digitisation and text encoding projects. Raff’s research is grounded in digital humanities and textual scholarship, where ‘text’ includes musical notation. More specifically, he seeks to advance textual scholarship by finding new and efficient practices to coherently and digitally model and edit (publish or make available) text and music notation sources as digital scholarly resources. In adopting and developing new research methods, he deliberately takes a multicultural perspective by engaging with multilingual content, facing the diverse realities of the constraints in accessing and creating digital scholarly content, and by adopting a global approach to teaching and learning. Raff is currently an elected member of the Text Encoding Initiative technical council and the Technical Editor of the Scholarly Editing journal.

Gimena del Rio Riande

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8997-5415

Gimena del Rio Riande is Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas y Crítica Textual of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and Universidad del Salvador. She holds an MA and PhD in Romance Philology (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), and her main academic interests deal with Digital Scholarly Editing, Digital Humanities, and Open Research Practices in the Humanities. She serves as Ambassador of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in Latin America, coordinates the Laboratorio de Humanidades Digitales (HD LAB, CONICET) and edits the first Hispanic Digital Humanities journal, the Revista de Humanidades Digitales (RHD). She also serves as president at Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales (AAHD) and member of the Board of Directors of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).