The eleventh conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, Textual Trails. Transmissions of Oral and Written Texts (Helsinki, 30 October – 1 November 2014), seeks to explore all kinds of textual trails from various angles of scholarly editing and textual scholarship. Texts tend to travel across space and time, carried by sound waves, written on parchments and codices, sealed in envelopes and travel trunks, and streaming as bits in the internet. They pass from mouth to mouth, from singers’ performances to scholars’ notes, from stone engravings to printed books, or from writing desks to digital editions.

Sometimes it is possible to trace the trail of a text or a fragment via several phases of transmission. These trails can be, for instance, a part of the genesis of one writing or an editorial history of one literary work, or they can run through a historical text tradition of scribal texts.

The present call for papers encourages submissions on related topics, such as:

1. Stemmatology in theory and practice
2. Chains of changes in edition history
3. Textual continuums in genetic editing 4. Digital editing and visualisation of textual trails 5. Metamorphoses of bibliographic codes 6. Evolving ideas and textual growth 7. Variance and invariance in the transmission of oral and written texts 8. Spatio-temporal text mining.

PROPOSALS FOR PAPERS AND PANEL SESSIONS

ESTS conferences are characterised by a combination of plenary and panel sessions. Please submit your proposal before 15 April 2014, by email to the programme committee (ests2014proposals@gmail.com). You will be notified by 18 June 2014 whether your proposal has been accepted or not.

Proposals for panel sessions

Typically, a panel of academic papers should include 3 (maximum 4) speakers and 1 moderator (session chair). Each session will last for 1.5 hours allowing for 30 minutes for questions and discussion. Proposers should submit:

(1) Session title and a session intro (ca 100 words)
(2) Paper titles
(3) Abstracts for each paper (500 words max.)
(4) Short biography for each participant and the panel chair (ca 100 words)
(5) Institutional affiliation and address for each participant
(6) Audio-visual and other technical requirements.

PARTICIPATION AND REGISTRATION

Contributors and panel moderators must pay the conference fee and must be members in good standing of the European Society for Textual Scholarship for 2014 (except invited speakers).

For more information about the ESTS, please see www.textualscholarship.eu. Your current membership status is indicated at ests.huygensinstituut.nl.

More information about registration and possibilities of accommodation will be published later on a conference website.