Design as Part of the Plan: Introducing Agile Methodology in Digital Editing Projects

This paper aims to discuss where we currently stand with regard to design planning in digital scholarly editing from a project development perspective. In the last two decades, a huge number of digital scholarly editing projects have been developed by introducing and challenging different concepts, methods, workflows, tools, and techniques to and within the textual scholarship community. Although the majority of digital scholarly editions have been typically bound to a project-based logic, very few are actually developed and operate within a solid project management and product development framework. Such a behaviour, we claim, often has the result of limiting digital editing projects to the sheltered boundaries of the known environment, when it could potentially enhance the value of the final product and help it move towards a dynamic development framework such as the commercial world of web publishing and communication.