Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing

We are the home of two major projects built to this formula: the St John's Gospel editions led by David Parker, and the Canterbury Tales Project, led by Barbara Bordalejo and Peter Robinson.

ITSEE staff have developed internationally-accepted encodings for original source description, transcription and textual apparatus (these are now part of the TEI guidelines); have created widely-used software for text transcription and collation (the Collate system); worked with evolutionary biologists on applying their methods to textual traditions; and created many electronic editions, some using XML publishing software developed by ourselves.

We have led, or assisted in, many electronic editing projects, including the publications of the Canterbury Tales Project, the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, Dante's Monarchia, Johnson's Dictionary on CD-ROM, and the digital Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament. We are working on and advising many other editing projects: including medieval Italian, renaissance Latin, Armenian, Sanskrit, modern American and English novels and scientific texts.

We provide a variety of opportunities for study at all levels: we contribute courses on texts and textual editing to the BA course; the MA in Electronic Scholarly Editing provides a degree dedicated to practice and theory in making editions today; there is a large cohort of research students working on PhDs which are either editions of texts or involve textual study (a list is provided on our website); and we welcome scholars who wish to visit us either for a short or a longer time. We are able to provide space and equipment for their research, as well as the opportunity to discuss their work and to present it at seminars.

We believe that digital methods should be applied to any scholarly text, in any language from any tradition. We welcome approaches from other scholarly editors, who would like our help with the editions they are making.