Keynote lecture: Mats Dahlström, associate professor at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, the University of Borås

TITLE: Light and shadows : digitization, digital facsimiles and scholarly editing​

However you define the field of digital humanities (DH), it usually revolves around digital and in particular digitized objects, often housed at and digitized by a memory institution such as a library. Such digital reproductions are present and important for a number of DH projects, including digital scholarly editions (DSE). The digital facsimiles are not only used as mere illustrations supporting a scholarly text transcription, but can also serve as research tools and as instruments for accountability and accessibility. Nevertheless, the critical inquiry of scholarly editors is directed towards text transcriptions, whereas digital images are more taken at face value, as objective representations of the source documents. So there seems to be room for an increased critical understanding of such images as interpretations based on scholarly informed deliberation. Partly, this “face value” approach is fostered by a view on library digitization as a kind of mass digitization, with projects such as
Google Books as a paradigm, where there is little room for scholarly considerations during the image capture. As a result, image capture is portrayed as a fairly trivial and straight-forward task that can be more or less automated. But there are in fact many types and levels of library digitization, suggesting a map of variety with mass digitization in one corner and what I should like to label “critical digitization” in another corner. For this latter type of digitization, libraries are facing opportunities, problems, ideals and methods that are in many ways
similar to those of scholarly editing. This affinity gains momentum, furthermore, from recent trends in digital scholarly editing such as documentary editing and material philology. So the two fields are perhaps approaching a point where they not only meet but even merge. What happens if and when scholarly editions turn into digital libraries, and when critically digitized library collections increasingly take on the form of ‘editions’?

In my talk, I will address some of the scholarly issues and considerations libraries face when digitizing their holdings – considerations that echo those of scholarly editors and that can have a significant bearing on the value and (re)usability of the digital objects when placed within the context of digital editions. Examples from digitized library collections will be used to support a discussion on authenticity, accessibility, openness, (re)usability, social engagement and collaborative efforts.

Bio:

Mats Dahlström (b. 1964) is an associate professor at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, the University of Borås. For 20 years he has been an active researcher on digitisation, scholarly editing, bibliography, text encoding and new media. He is a member of the Scandinavian scholarly editing community and publishes regularly on the digital humanities scene. He also consults and supervises profession-based as well as academic projects on cultural heritage digitization, primarily within the framework of libraries and archives. He is a member and supervisor within the Marie Skłowdowska-Curie ITN “DiXiT” project (Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network), running 2013-2017.​