This project showcases the data collection work I'm carrying out as part of my PhD studies at the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities under the supervision of Prof. Melissa Terras and Simon Mahony. This research seeks to examine best practice in the field of digital editing by collating relevant evidence in a detailed catalogue of extant digital (textual) editions. The projects included in the Catalogue come from numerous sources and their selection follows basic criteria: the electronic texts can be ongoing or complete projects, born-digital editions or electronic reproductions of print volumes.

The Catalogue is not the first list of digital editions. Others predate it and include:

• Dr. Patrick Sahle's Catalog of Digital Scholarly Editions - the first list of this kind.
• Associazione per l'Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale Wiki
• Digital Classicist
• Dr. Aurélien Berra
• Dr. Paolo Monella (section 2.2)
• Dr. Cinzia Pusceddu
• Hunter College
• Monastic Manuscript Project
• Projects using the TEI
• UCLA’s Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts

These, however, don't record project features. This Catalogue was set-up to fill this gap: it breaks projects down into their constituent parts for a detailed understanding of their creation and it can be downloaded and converted to other formats for reuse. The Creative Commons License attached to this data allows you to reuse it in your work as long as you credit the source and share your research in the same or a similar fashion.

To help disambiguate digital editions from online databases and archives, this Catalogue relies on the definition of digital scholarly edition of Patrick Sahle, one of the top scholars in the field. In fact, while many projects define themselves as digital editions, some misuse the term to describe something more akin to an electronic collection of texts or a digital library. Using Sahle's definition helps enforce some consistency in the Catalogue, which collects both digital editions and a small number of experimental or hybrid projects that may not have started as digital editions but contain elements typical of digital editions. The earliest digital editions in the Catalogue date back to 1980 and the expected completion data of one German Academy project is 2041.

If you would like to suggest an edition for inclusion, please visit the Data description & contribution page of this wiki for instructions.