Call for Papers Open for H2D’s 2027 Thematic Volume

What are digital editions good for? Data Production and Exploitation in
Digital Scholarly Editions

Digital philological editions are currently a widely accepted mode of text publication among
scholars. Advances in HTR software (handwritten text recognition), increasingly powerful XML
editors, and the development of dedicated platforms for publishing this type of edition — such
as EVT and similar tools — are making them a highly attractive medium for contemporary
philology. At the same time, one of the main arguments in favour of digital philological editions
is that they generally do not offer a single critical text, but rather digitise and convert all textual
material into data, thus constituting a revised and 'clean' textual corpus. However, most
techniques and applications for handling and analysing such data struggle with structured data, or
simply require plain text that is often easier to obtain through other means than by exporting it
from the edition. This raises the question of whether the argument for the edition as a source of
clean data still holds.
This brings us to the central question that underpins the present volume: can digital philological
editions fulfil their promise as truly reusable data sources?
To address this topic, we are preparing a monographic volume for the journal H2D, which
publishes on a continuous publication model throughout 2027, as articles are accepted. We aim
to bring together contributions that approach this question from different perspectives: works
that demonstrate examples of data use from digital editions, the export of XML data to other
languages or environments, or, conversely, that argue for the unsuitability of such data for
further processing. We are also interested in contributions that showcase solutions developed by
digital editions for improved data export or for generating non-exclusively textual data. Finally,
the use of artificial intelligence for the export or manipulation of data is equally welcome. All this
applied to editions of both modern and historical texts, and to all Western philologies.

Submission Guidelines
Interested authors should send an abstract of 300–500 words, along with a brief CV, by July
25th, 2026 to Gir.Filologia.Digital@uva.es. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be
communicated before September 15th, 2026. Final submissions are due before 28 February
2027 and must be submitted through the journal's submission platform.
Articles should be between 4,000 and 10,000 words, formatted according to the H2D journal
guidelines, and written in one of its accepted languages: Spanish, Portuguese, English, or French.
All submissions will undergo an open peer review process.
For any enquiries, please contact Francisco Javier Muñoz (fjavier.munoz@uva.es) and Víctor
Millet (victor.millet@usc.es).