The editorial team of Variants: The Journal of the European Society for TextualScholarship, is proud to finally present you with its double Issue (15–16) titled“Textual Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century”. The title of this Issue was taken from the sixteenth annual ESTS conference of the same name, which took place in Málaga, Spain on 28–29 November 2019 where it was hosted by the Department of English, French and German Philology at the University ofMálaga.

In this paper we explore layered conceptions of access and accessibility as they relate to the theory and praxis of digital scholarly editing. To do this, we designed and disseminated a qualitative survey on five key themes: dissemination; Open Access and licensing; access to code; web accessibility; and diversity. Throughout the article we engage in cultural criticism of the discipline by sharing results from the survey, identifying how the community talks about and performs access, and pinpointing where improvements in praxis could be made. In the final section of this paper we reflect on different ways to utilize the survey results when critically designing and disseminating digital scholarly editions, propose a call to action, and identify avenues of future research.

In a way, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be regarded as the digital scholarly edition’s new paratext: not exactly part of the edited text itself, it still has an undeniable impact on the way the user reads and understands the edition. This makes the interface an important place for the editor to convey her views on the materials the edition has to other. Therefore, this paper focusses on the role the editor of the digital scholarly edition plays in guiding the user through its data, and helping her shape her interpretation of those data – arguing all the while that it is exactly in the interface that these interactions take place. Starting from Mats Dahlström’s proposal for digital scholarly editors to leave Ariadne threads to guide their users through the textual labyrinth of their digital scholarly editions, this paper suggests that Dante’s Divine Comedy might make a more appropriate allegory for the editorial model. Taking a cue from Dante’s ‘Virgil’ character, the editor may prefer to remain in the background of the edition, encouraging the user to be fully immersed in the edition’s data – only to quietly step more and more in the foreground as the user moves deeper and deeper into the edition and could arguably use more explicit guidance. After taking a more theoretical approach to this topic, the paper illustrates the kind of editorial decisions that may be involved while designing a digital scholarly edition by taking the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) as a case study. Walking the reader through the many tools and functionalities the BDMP has to other, this paper explains how this editorial model would apply to the project, focusing especially on the changes the edition’s graphical user interface underwent as it was redesigned in November 2015.

As the papers in this volume testify, digital scholarly editing is a vibrant practice. Scholarly editing has a long-standing tradition in the humanities. It is of crucial importance within disciplines such as literary studies, philology, history, philosophy, library and information science, and bibliography. In fact, digital scholarly editing represents one of the longest traditions in the field of Digital Humanities — and the theories, concepts, and practices that were designed for editing in a digital environment have in turn deeply influenced the development of Digital Humanities as a discipline. By bringing together the extended abstracts from three conferences organised within the DiXiT project (2013-2017), this volume shows how digital scholarly editing is still developing and constantly redefining itself.

DiXiT (Digital Scholarly Editing Initial Training) is one of the most innovative training networks for a new generation of scholars in the field of digital scholarly editing, established by ten leading European institutions from academia, in close collaboration with the private sector and cultural heritage institutions, and funded under the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. The partners together represent a wide variety of technologies and approaches to European digital scholarly editing.

The extended abstracts of the convention contributions assembled in this volume showcase the multiplicity of subjects dealt with in and around the topics of digital editing: from issues of sustainability to changes in publication cultures, from the integrity of research and intellectual rights to mixed methods applied to digital editing — to name only a few.

Litteraturbanken (The Swedish Literature Bank) is a freely available digital collection of Swedish literary works, ranging from medieval to contemporary literature. It is the result of a cooperation between literary and linguistic scholars, research libraries, and editorial societies and academies. The collection consists not only of digital facsimiles, but of ocr’ed, proof-checked and TEI-encoded transcriptions as well, including EPUB and HTML versions of texts, and in addition scholarly presentations and didactic introductions to works and authors in the collection. It is also being used as a publishing platform for ongoing Swedish scholarly editing projects. Litteraturbanken currently comprises more than 2.000 works, mounting up to more than 100 million of machine-readable words. Litteraturbanken‘s main weak spot is transparency; it does not openly provide satisfactory ways to ensure the editors accountability for the edited texts and images. As a whole, however, Litteraturbanken is an impressive endeavour and paves the way for fruitful cooperation and massive data exchange with e.g. computational linguistics and bibliographic databases.

One of the great advantages the digital medium has to offer the field of scholarly editing is that it makes its products much easier to distribute. No longer bound to a shelf, the Digital Scholarly Edition has the potential to reach a much wider audience than a printed edition could. To a certain extent, however, the nature of the materials textual scholars are working with dictates the perimeters within which this dissemination can take place. When working with modern manuscripts, for instance, copyright restrictions may limit the extent to which a project can distribute its resources. In an academic climate where open access is not only becoming a standard, but in some cases even a requirement for receiving funding, such limitations may be perceived as problematic. In this article, we argue that even within the boundaries of copyright restrictions there can still be room to produce and distribute the results of textual scholarship. Therefore, the article zooms in on the way in which different Digital Scholarly Editions of copyrighted materials deal with this issue, using the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP; www.beckettarchive.org) and Woolf Online (www.woolfonline.com) as case studies. To conclude, we investigate other strategies that may be used to share as much research data as we are allowed to, e.g. by sharing metadata and ancillary data, or by using the fair use doctrine to circumvent the problem. Case studies used for this aspect of the article include ModNets (www.modnets.org), the BDMP Encoding Manual (www.beckettarchive.org/encodingmanual), the Lexicon of Scholarly Editing (http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/lse), and the Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET; www.fweet.org).

As is the case with so many first drafts, some of Beckett's manuscripts still contain gaps: zones in the text that are either left completely blank, or are otherwise indicated to be filled in at a later stage in the writing process. Such gaps are interesting milestones for any genetic critic, because they may indicate a hesitation on the author’s part during the writing process: a name not yet decided on, a word or phrase that needs fine-tuning, etc. In Beckett’s case, these gaps are especially significant, because they feature so prominently in his published works as well: from the startling “(Hiatus in MS.)” in his early novel Watt to the phrase “and here a word he could not catch” in his last prose text Stirrings Still, narrative pauses, interruptions, and false starts have undoubtedly become a leitmotif throughout Beckett’s oeuvre. Encoding Beckett’s own hiatuses for a digital edition of his manuscripts, however, poses a problem. While the TEI’s <gap> element may intuitively seem like the perfect match, the description of the <space> element is in fact more closely related to the textual feature we wish to encode. And although these gaps/spaces will invariably differ in appearance (a blank space; an indented string of characters; a symbol of some kind; etc.) and motivation (inadequacy; indecisiveness; etc.), the TEI does not yet allow either of these elements to be classified further through the @type attribute. Using the manuscripts of Beckett’s Malone meurt as a case study, this paper makes a case for the TEI’s <space> element to be added to the att.typed class (a feature request for which was approved while writing this paper), and makes a first attempt at a typology of Beckett's use of hiatuses in his manuscripts.