Revue3.0 at the Humanistica 2025 Conference

2025-04-25

Halima Malek, a master’s student affiliated with the Revue3.0 project and the Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities, will present a paper at the Humanistica 2025 conference (the annual conference of the Francophone Association of Digital Humanities), entitled: “Writing Practices and the Epistemology of the Text: Redefining the Scholarly Text with Stylo.”

Abstract

This presentation introduces Stylo and its epistemology of the text. Initiated in 2017 by the Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities, Stylo is supported by the Huma-Num and Métopes research infrastructures and is part of the Canadian partnership project Revue3.0. As both a semantic text editor and a research project, this presentation will focus on the research dimension of Stylo.

With Stylo, we examine scholarly writing practices, particularly the meaning of writing in a digital context and the influence of digital environments on scholarly production (Vitali-Rosati et al., 2020). To explore these issues, Stylo develops an epistemology of the text based on writing and editorial modes that rely on standards such as Markdown, YAML, and BibTeX.

Since writing practices are constantly evolving, we continuously integrate them into the Stylo ecosystem as features to understand how these new practices intra-act (Barad 2007, 2023) with the document (Briet 1951; Buckland 1997). Stylo is thus a space of experimentation, in which functionalities model and structure information in a document, thereby revealing their epistemological significance in the humanities. During this presentation, we will share the results and analyses of these experiments, which fall under the theme of emerging uses and practices in the humanities.

To do so, we will draw on the restructuring of article metadata, a prerequisite for the development of the corpus feature. This functionality makes it possible to group several Stylo articles under a common label and export them in bulk. Corpora occupy a higher hierarchical level than articles, which are considered the smallest editorial unit in Stylo. Integrating this feature raises several questions: What is a document in Stylo? What constitutes a metadata structure adapted to a document? What elements need to be made explicit, and at which editorial level? Do metadata structures reflect the editorial practices adopted by journals?

Guided by these questions, we developed and implemented the concept of corpus in the Stylo architecture. While articles were initially the primary editorial unit and the sole object considered a document (Pédauque 2006), corpora now emerge as new editorial objects and documents in their own right: books, journal issues, theses, websites, etc. We will show how these new objects redefine the notion of the scholarly text (and document) within Stylo.

Given that research writing practices continue to evolve—particularly with the rise of tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms—Stylo will continue to experiment with new forms of modelling. Thus, the detailed restructuring work on Stylo documents presented here will serve as a foundation for future experiments involving AI algorithms in specific aspects of the document, such as bibliographic references or keywords.