Inclusive Design and Dissemination of Digital Scholarly Editions: A Survey

This is not an “end of DiXiT” blogpost. For my version of that, see this link.  Rather, this is a request for help. Over the summer, myself and four other DiXiT fellows (Elli Bleeker, Wout Dillen, Aodhan Kelly and Anna Maria Sichani) presented a panel at the DH annual conference in Montreal. During that panel, we discussed some preliminary results of a survey we are conducting on the design and dissemination of digital scholarly editions. What we would like to do now is continue this research and widen our scope of respondents.

The impetus of this survey was the theme of the Montreal conference: Access. Initially, our panel intended to discuss our experience of the myriad ways that access has defined and shaped our DiXiT fellowships. Over time, it became clear to us that we needed to focus not just on our own experiences, but the experiences of those outside the DiXiT network. We had some ideas about what our community means when we discuss “access” as it relates to digital editions, but we wanted more concrete results to share with our community. Thus, the survey idea was born. We conversed, negotiated, and spent a long time over skype sessions to try and come up with a set of questions that we feel address the different aspects of this important issue.

Our goal with this survey- to get a better picture of definitions and conceptions of access and accessibility- seems straightforward enough, but getting there will require input from the passionate and diverse researchers who make up our community. So we would like to extend a request to you, readers, to respond to our survey and help us add to the discourse of access and accessibility in the digital editing and digital humanities communities.

The survey can be found here.

It will be open until 1 November. You will probably see it coming around many of our community listservs. Please do help us out by completing it! As an incentive, we will be offering a raffle of 25 digital Amazon gift cards in denominations of $20/20 Euros/20 GBP/etc as the case may be. We will randomly select 25 recipients who have completed the survey once it has closed. We will also be sending out a reminder email to the listservs on 23 October.

So, dear readers, please do add your voice to this important conversation. Your contribution would be very welcome!