Revue3.0 at the Humanistica 2025 Conference

Friday, April 25, Halima Malek, a master’s student affiliated with the Revue3.0 project and the Canada Research Chair in Digital Writing, will give a talk at the Humanistica 2025 conference (the annual conference of the Francophone Association for Digital Humanities). Her presentation is titled:
“Writing Practices and the Epistemology of the Text: Redefining the Scholarly Text with Stylo.”
The conference will take place at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar.

Abstract

This presentation introduces Stylo and its text epistemology. Launched in 2017 by the Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities, and supported by the research infrastructures Huma-Num and Métopes, Stylo is part of the Canadian partnership project Revue3.0. As both a semantic text editor and a research project, Stylo offers a unique opportunity to explore its research dimension in depth.

With Stylo, we examine scholarly writing practices, particularly the meaning of writing in digital contexts and the impact of its environment on scholarly production (Vitali-Rosati et al., 2020). To address these questions, Stylo develops a text epistemology centered on writing and publishing practices based on standards such as Markdown, YAML, and BibTeX.

As writing practices continue to evolve, we integrate them into Stylo’s ecosystem as features in order to explore how these new practices intra-act (Barad 2007, 2023) with the document (Briet 1951; Buckland 1997). Stylo is thus a space of experimentation, where features model and structure information in a document, allowing us to examine their epistemological significance in the humanities. This presentation will share results and analyses from these experiments, within the theme of “new” practices and uses in the humanities.

To do so, we focus on the restructuring of article metadata—a prerequisite for developing the corpus feature. This feature allows users to group multiple Stylo articles under a single label and export them collectively. Corpora exist at a higher hierarchical level than articles, which are considered the smallest editorial units in Stylo. Integrating this feature raises several questions: What is a document in Stylo? What constitutes a suitable metadata structure for a document? Which elements should be made explicit, and at what editorial scale? Do metadata structures reflect the editorial practices adopted by journals? These questions have guided the development and integration of the corpus concept in Stylo’s architecture. While the article has historically been Stylo’s core editorial unit—the only object considered a document (Pédauque 2006)—corpora emerge as new editorial objects and documents in their own right: books, journal issues, theses, websites, and more. We will demonstrate how these new objects redefine the notion of scholarly text (and document) in Stylo.

As scholarly writing practices continue to evolve—evidenced by the growing use of tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms—Stylo will continue to experiment with new forms of modelling. The meticulous restructuring of elements within a Stylo document presented here will serve as a foundation for experimenting with AI algorithms to address specific aspects of the document, such as bibliographic references or keywords.