From the 19th to the 21st of November 2015, the European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS) holds its Twelfth Annual Conference at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. Sakari Katajamäki and I are happy to announce that our abstract for a joint paper on lexica for textual scholarship was accepted in the CfP’s first round of submissions. My part of the talk will be on the Lexicon of Scholarly Editing of course. You can read the full abstract below. We hope to meet you all in Leicester!
REMINDER: Don’t forget to submit your own abstract: the conference’s second Call for Papers expires on June 30.
Towards a Multilingual Discussion of Textual Criticism. Lexica for Textual Scholarship and Scholarly Editing.
In the last decades, the awareness in the community of textual scholars has grown that there is more to Textual Criticism than the ‘schools’ it was traditionally divided into. As a result, the originally distinct monolingual discussions on the theories and practices of textual scholarship have been transformed into a larger multilingual one that is no longer bound to the limits of German Editionswissenschaft, Anglo-American Scholarly Editing, and French critique génétique. This paper will investigate how three lexicographic resources in the field deal with the richness of this new multicultural community in their own way.
The Finnish Textuaalitieteiden Sanasto answers the needs of a specific culture that was hitherto underrepresented in the field. As a top-down controlled lexicon, its function is more normative than descriptive, translating the most important concepts of Textual Scholarship for an audience of Finnish scholars. In his part of this paper, Sakari Katajamäki will introduce the project’s new phase, in which the lexicon’s entries will be migrated to the Bank of Finnish Terminology in Arts and Sciences. In this new environment terms, concepts and their definitions will enter into dialogue with other fields of research, such as Literary Criticism, Linguistics and Folklore Studies – which will further its dissemination.
The Lexicon of Scholarly Editing is an inherently multilingual lexicon that gathers its definitions from academic journals, monographs, and the like. As a bottom-up distributed project, its function is more descriptive than normative, adding context to its definitions by displaying them as if in a multilingual discussion with each other – which in some cases they quite literally are. In his part of this paper, Wout Dillen will focus on the project’s recent endeavors to develop the lexicon’s multilingual dimension, and especially its recent alliance with the new Italian FonteGaia project.
