A three-day marathon, a sprint, a coffee in the spring sun
by Anne Baillot
On March 3rd-6th, twenty experts in Digital Scholarly Editing gathered at the beautiful German Historical Institute, located in the heart of Paris. Their goal: to write together - in just three days! - the first draft of a Handbook of Scholarly Editing. Why would they do such a thing, and is it at all feasible ?
The answer to the “why” also explains why ATRIUM was a partner in organising this event. While there exist a series of recommendations, how-tos, white books, none of them is explicitly conceived for the less expert users of digital scholarly editions: beginners, students, non-specialists, and reviewers who oftentimes know the area of expertise, but have little to no knowledge of the digital scholarly standards. Prior to the book sprint, the organisers drafted “User stories” delineating the usages potential readers could make of the book.
Indeed, while Digital Scholarly Editions have become quite ubiquitous in the humanities and heritage practice, it is in fact yet one more scholarly output that is lacking academic recognition. Providing tools for their better recognition is in line with the missions of the ATRIUM Peer Review Framework.
The chosen setting for proceeding with this was, at the very least, quite experimental. The booksprint is a demanding format: experts convene for several days to write collaboratively the first draft of a book. Lambert Heller, who has a long experience in organising successful booksprints, guided the group through this process.
The first afternoon was dedicated to the definition of the topics, chapters, and structure of the book. From there, the participants started writing in blocks of 90 minutes, rotating after each coffee break. Overall, all of them have contributed to almost all chapters.
While it extends to an intellectual marathon to contribute to 6 chapters in 3 days, the goal of this rotation is twofold: first, by mixing expertises and points of view, it ensures clarity of the overall argumentation. Second, it makes it possible to improve the overall coherence and to avoid overlaps. Chapters 2 and 3 have been reconfigured, subchapters moved around several times, in order to achieve such coherence.
As an on-site event, communication between the participants - especially to make sure concepts were defined in the same way by everyone, that there were no redundancies, no contradictions -was essential. Still, we were able to accommodate some external participants who joined online and provided valuable input on content and illustrations.
After a final coffee in the sunny yard of the German Historical Institute, the last 90 minutes of writing were for sure the most intense phase, everyone wanting to polish the most they could before leaving. By then, all had embraced this unusual, creative, intense way of writing - even the participants who had to overcome writing blockades and were at first uncomfortable writing in English.
And now? No more coffee in the sun in Paris, no more sprint, but a semi-marathon: we intend to publish a first version in May to present it at the Humanistica conference in Paris. That means: finish writing in March, reviewing in April, editing in May. On your marks, set, go!