The freshly-released Volume 34 of Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing includes Dot Porter’s essay, “Medievalists and the Scholarly Digital Edition.”

Porter, the soon-to-be Curator of Digital Research Services at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, considers medievalists’ use of digital resources, opening with a brief history of digital medieval studies, from the 1970s, when “paper was the interface for electronically created texts,” documenting the shift toward electronic publishing in 1992, with “the first digital-oriented paper presented to the [International Congress on Medieval Studies] that describes an edition definitely intended to be published and delivered on a computer.”

In a survey of medievalists from 2011 that updates graduate research undertaken by Porter in 2002, she finds:

… not surprisingly, a shift from the use of print resources to the use of electronic resources, for the most part. This article focuses on the survey findings with regard to scholarly editions. I also present, in comparison, the findings with regard to journals and facsimiles. Although the survey respondents have a general interest in digital resources, and show a willingness to use them, there are complications surrounding electronic editions that still need to be addressed by the scholarly editing community.

The CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Data Curation for Medieval Studies is an expansion of the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program in Academic Libraries. These five, fully-funded fellowships will provide recent Ph.D.s with professional development, education, and training opportunities in data curation for Medieval Studies. Through this program, CLIR seeks to raise awareness and build capacity for sound data management practice throughout the academy.

Each fellowship is two year appointment, with a $60,000 salary, plus benefits, and a yearly travel and research stipend.