A Different Kind of Digital Edition
Mar 24, 2026·
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1 min read
Clément Godbarge
Detail of a letter from Cavriana’s secret correspondence — ASFi MP 4726a f. 17v–18rMost primary sources never get published. The model we rely on to fix this, grant-funded digital editions, is too expensive, too centralised, and too fragile to work at scale. I have just published a post explaining why I am building the critical edition of Cavriana’s letters differently: digitised primary source documents that grow organically, with minimal infrastructure, automated maintenance, open to collaboration, and so cheap that no grants are even needed. It is an argument for a kind of digital humanities that works regardless of institutional support.
Authors
Lecturer in Digital Humanities
Clément Godbarge is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of St Andrews. His research revolves around science and statecraft in early modern Europe. In his forthcoming book, he examines how doctors embedded at the courts of sixteenth-century France and Italy promoted themselves as political experts of a new genre. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Renaissance Society of America, and Harvard University.