Skip to main content
Scottish Universities Press

The scholarly data edition: publishing big data in the twenty-first century

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

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
    Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
      Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
      Cannot generate record: Missing PDF URL
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
    • EBSCO Host
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
    • ProQuest Ebrary
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
TitleThe scholarly data edition
Subtitlepublishing big data in the twenty-first century
ContributorGábor Mihály Tóth(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.11
Landing pagehttps://books.sup.ac.uk/sup/catalog/book/sup-9781917341073/chapter/12
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightGábor Mihály Tóth
PublisherScottish Universities Press
Published on2025-04-29
Long abstractIn the last decade, big textual datasets in the humanities have become increasingly more available in the form of raw data. The challenges these datasets raise are twofold. On the one hand, most humanities scholars are not equipped with skills in text and data mining. This remains a barrier to study big data in the humanities. On the other hand, the traditional genre of digital edition is not suitable for publishing and unlocking big data; similarly to printed editions, digital editions often attempt to create highly curated, almost perfect, surrogates of texts with critical accuracy. However, in the context of big data, traditional critical accuracy is not attainable; it is impossible for an editorial team to apply this principle when working with a corpus of tens of millions of words. The principle of critical examination of texts as defined by previous scholarship is equally unattainable with big data. In short, many of the editorial principles and techniques used to produce analogue and digital editions can hardly be applied when creating an edition featuring truly big data.  Hence, in this chapter, I argue that to make big data available and explorable for the scholarly community, we need a new genre: the scholarly data edition. Throughout the chapter I elaborate the concept of scholarly data edition by outlining the editorial responsibilities and standards that it involves.
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Gábor Mihály Tóth

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4301-1581

Gábor Mihály Tóth was born in Hungary. After studying philosophy and medieval studies in Budapest, he moved to England. In 2014 he completed a PhD in early modern history at the University of Oxford, Balliol College. Following his doctoral studies, he was an assistant professor in digital humanities at the University of Passau in Germany. He was a visiting researcher at Yale University and then at the University of Southern California. At the moment, he is a research associate at the University of Luxembourg’s Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH). His research focuses on the application of data science to study and publish historical sources. Specifically, he has two research areas: information culture in early modern Europe and collective memory of genocide survivors. His chapter in this volume was inspired by his digital monograph, In Search of the Drowned: Testimonies and Testimonial Fragments of the Holocaust (Yale Fortunoff Archive, 2021, lts.fortunoff.library.yale.edu). In 2023 he was awarded the Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History by the Digital History Seminary of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.