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ACDH Lecture 11.2

In My Beginning is My End

The Long and all Too Short History of Digital Scholarly Editions

with Susan Schreibman, Professor of Digital Arts and Culture at Maastricht University, Co-Director of DARIAH

When: Tuesday, November 4th 2025; 16:45 - 18:15

Where: hybrid

  • Onsite: Austrian Academy of Sciences
    Baeckerstrasse 13, 1010 Vienna, Austria
    Seminarraum 1 (accessible via the courtyard)
  • Online: YouTube Live-Stream

Registration is closed

While Digital Scholarly Editions (DSEs) have been a mainstay of digital humanities scholarship since the 1990s, their long-term sustainability and preservation tends to be quixotic, precarious, and institutionally not well supported. The result: the vast majority of this scholarship simply disappears. And it has been disappearing for decades.

Years of reports, white papers, symposia, and scholarly articles bemoan the lack of infrastructural support for digital humanities scholarship. Many consider the issues around sustainability to be first and foremost a technical issue, advocating for the development of editions to be created with a sustainability plan in mind (Hughes, 2021). Others argue that sustainability is not only a technical issue, but a theoretical and philosophical one (Drucker, 2021; Tucker, 2022). There is widespread discussion of how funding models and funding streams mitigate against long-term access of digital scholarship as we are typically funded for novelty and the creation of new resources (Maron and Pickle, 2014; Bergstrom et al 2024; Maron et al 2013).

This product-focused approach neglects the broader spectrum of valuable contributions made throughout the research process (Tasovac et al. 2023). This is why increasingly there is recognition that workflows, methodologies, and intermediate outputs are equally deserving of preservation and recognition: “it is not just the product, however incomplete, that [should be] seen as worthy of preservation for current and future generations, but also equally the process (or indeed processes) for producing it” (Viola 2023: 59).

As Mary Queen of Scots is reputed to have embroidered onto a pillow in the years prior to her death, ‘In my end is my beginning’, or as TS Eliot reframed this in his late poem, ‘Four Quartets’: ‘In my beginning is my end’, in the digital humanities community we have come to realise that decisions made at the inception of our digital projects play an outsized role in their afterlife. While, thankfully, the vast majority of us do not need to think about our imminent demise at the end of a literal chopping block, the metaphorical one looms large for the digital scholarship we create.

The lecture will explore the roles that Research Infrastructures (RIs) could play in facilitating the “digital afterlife” of DH projects: the period during which DH projects as complex research outputs continue to generate scholarly, societal or cultural value after direct funding or active development come to an end. In this context, one of the most pressing questions is: what should be archived, and for how long? Should everything be preserved as is the case with scholarly articles in journals anticipating that scholarship will, ultimately, find its audience? Or should we take an archival approach in which the data is curated and retained (The National Archives, [n.d.]; Sabharwal, 2015; Spek & Links, 2013) based on expert judgement. These questions underscore the importance of taking a systematic approach, (OECD 2023; Ribeiro 2021; Bolliger and Griffiths 2020; Edmond et al. 2020). This talk will explore possible solutions through combined efforts of conceptual rethinking, technological solutions, and strategic advocacy. 

Works Cited

  • Bergstrom, Tracy, Oya Y. Rieger, and Roger C. Schonfeld. “The Second Digital Transformation of Scholarly Publishing: Strategic Context and Shared Infrastructure.” (2024).
  • Bolliger, Isabel K., and Alexandra Griffiths. 2020. “The Introduction of Esfri and the Rise of National Research Infrastructure Roadmaps in Europe.” In Big Science and Research Infrastructures in Europe, edited by Katharina C. Cramer and Olof Hallonsten, 101–27. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
  • Drucker, Johanna. “Sustainability and complexity: Knowledge and authority in the digital humanities.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36, no. Supplement_2 (2021): ii86-ii94.
  • Edmond, Jennifer, Toma Tasovac, Frank Fisher, and Laurent Romary. 2020. “Springing the Floor for a Different Kind of Dance: Building Dariah as a Twenty-First-century Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities.” In Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research, edited by Jennifer Edmond, 207–34. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.
  • Hughes, Lorna M. “Li e and Kicking: The Impact and Sustainabilit of Digital Collections in the Humanities’.” Clare Mills, Michael Pidd and Esther Ward.. Studies in the Digital Humanities. Sheffield: HRI Online Publications (2014).
  • Maron, Nancy L., and Sarah Pickle. “Sustaining the digital humanities: Host institution support beyond the start-up phase.” Ithaka S+ R 18 (2014).
  • Maron, Nancy, Jason Yun, and Sarah Pickle. Sustaining our digital future: Institutional strategies for digital content. Ithaka S+ R, 2013.
  • Ribeiro, Margarida. 2021. “Towards a Sustainable European Research Infrastructures Ecosystem.” In The Economics of Big Science, edited by Hans Peter Beck and Panagiotis Charitos, 7–13. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  • Sabharwal, Arjun. Digital curation in the digital humanities: Preserving and promoting archival and special collections. Chandos Publishing, 2015.
  • Speck, Reto, and Petra Links. “The missing voice: archivists and infrastructures for humanities research.” International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 7, no. 1-2 (2013): 128-146.
  • Tucker, Joanna. “Facing the challenge of digital sustainability as humanities researchers.” Journal of the British Academy 10 (2022): 93-120.
  • Viola, Lorella. 2023. The Humanities in the Digital: Beyond Critical Digital Humanities. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

about Susan Schreibman

Pia Sommerauer ACDH Lecture 11.3 Language, perspectives, and generalization: the language of (large) language models

Susan Schreibman is Professor of Digital Arts and Culture at Maastricht University and Co-Director of DARIAH.

She works at the intersections of computationally-based teaching and research in the interplay of the digital archive, cultural innovation, and participatory engagement design, processes and projects. 

A focus of her research is in the design, critical, and interpretative analysis of systems that remediate publication modalities and manuscript culture from the analogue world, while developing new born-digital paradigms.

Her areas of specialisation include Digital Humanities, Media Studies, Literary Modernism, and Irish Cultural Studies.

Learn more about Susan Schreibman:

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