Digital texts are all around us - as objects of study in scholarly work, to the news, social media and other texts we interact with everyday online. But how long will these digital texts last?
The problem with digital texts is that they come in a variety of formats that are hard to reuse. Even robust scholarly formats such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is shaped by the textual, semantic and annotation conventions of specific fields or sub-fields of study. Reusing and sustaining digital texts requires format and infrastructure updates beyond the skill and funding limits that few researchers can access.
This project aims to scope and define an Interoperable Text Format as a means for accessing and delivering text that is stored in a variety of extant formats. Importantly, we are aiming for something that is both human- and computer-readable.
This international collaboration between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK and Notre Dame in the USA will also work with project partners to test the issues, constraints and possibilities of an Interoperable Text Format on case studies in scholarly work and library collections.
If you are interested in taking part in our project workshops, please contact neil.jefferies@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.