The Art of Editing – from Analogue to Digital (call for papers)

We invite you to submit articles to the issue of "Studies in Polish Literature" planned for 2024, which will be entirely devoted to the broadly understood issues of contemporary editing. The scope of the volume is intended to cover both traditional and paper editions as well as digital ones. While awaiting the opinions of practitioners, we would like, first of all, to pose the question about methodological issues, for in the most recent works on contemporary editing a lot has been said about "the theoretical disorder" and the conceptual chaos resulting from it. Therefore the questions arise: How a well-prepared source text is to be understood today? What is the significance of basic research, bibliographic and textological, for contemporary editing (M. Strzyżewski)? What does philological text criticism look like nowadays? These and other questions are accompanied by the demands for developing common working methods of publishers. The reason for the differences in editing is often the fact that editors represent separate research disciplines. The edition prepared by the historian will differ in the editorial notes and critical apparatus from that prepared by a literary scholar or linguist. As a result, the editions of the same work may be radically different from each other. This has led many scholars to call for working out a general model of modern editing. Is there a need, then, to standardise the editorial practice depending on the discipline or purpose of the publisher? We would like to put this question to representatives of various fields, including literary scholars, linguists and historians. The question of common standards also applies to e-editing. It is impossible to study literature today without the use of modern tools. The data made available on the Internet gives the researcher many new analytical possibilities, including simultaneous tracking of various text variants, author's and reader’s interference, building the image of the social functioning of the text in the cultural space and its cognitive aspects related to typography and illustration. We would also be interested in the issue of the relationship between the development of digital technologies and the modification of the understanding of basic concepts in the field of editing, such as "text", "critical editing". This problem becomes apparent in the case of modern literary genres, which arose with the development of hyperliterature, as is clear from its openness to the multitude of possible interpretations. The juxtaposition of one version of the text with other available variants ("the text of a specific creative phase", J. Gruchała) also raises the question of the limits of the publisher's decision and the limits of using the digital medium, as well as the editor's responsibility for the quality of the prepared edition (e.g. intended for Digital Libraries). An interesting issue is also the question of the identity and differences between the tasks of a scientific publisher and the tools used by him in traditional and digital editing. What challenges does the editor face today by the development of new technologies? Should he still be a publisher or (maybe primarily) a programmer? In discussions on digital editing, there have also been made some interesting reflections on the problem of digital text and the structure of "digital signs". How do publishers, for example, of digital projects implemented in various research centres (e.g. The Corpus of Texts and Correspondence of Jan Dantyszek) understand and implement the "digital paradigm in the field of theory, method and application"? Finally, we would like to pose (quite provocatively) the question of the advisability of publishing texts in the form of traditional critical editions given the availability of digitized source materials in their multiple variants. Is it not that the traditionally understood "critical edition" remains today only an editorial image of the text (P. Bem), falsifying the true multidimensional functioning of the text? Or perhaps just the opposite – the digital sharing of texts on the Internet is nothing but "a fatal fetishisation of modern solutions" (M. Strzyżewski)? We invite representatives of many disciplines to collaborate with us. We are waiting for papers concerning both general, methodological problems on editorial art and "case studies" discussing particular issues regarding literature and source texts. The topic proposals along with abstracts up to 500 characters should be sent in the form of an electronic file to the following addresses: malgorzata.mieszek@filologia.uni.lodz.pl or katarzyna.kaczor-scheitler@filologia.uni.lodz.pl by 31 January, 2023. Articles up to 40,000 characters (including spaces) should be sent in the form of an electronic file (information about accepting the topic will be sent by February 28) to the same address by May 30, 2023. The text must be formatted following the journal’s rules of text editing (http://journals.ltn.lodz.pl/index.php/Prace-Polonistyczne/information/authors). The editor of the volume: dr hab. Katarzyna Kaczor-Scheitler (katarzyna.kaczor-scheitler@filologia.uni.lodz.pl) dr hab. prof. UŁ Małgorzata Mieszek (malgorzata.mieszek@filologia.uni.lodz.pl) Institute of Polish Philology and Logopaedics Department of Old Literature, Editing, and Auxiliary Sciences University of Lodz Pomorska Street 171/173 90-236 Łódź Poland