TEXTE (Transfer of Expertise in Technologies of Editing) is a Marie Curie Transfer of Knowledge project funded under the EU 6th Framework Programme. The project is headed by Dr. Sean Ryder, Chair of the Department of English at National University of Ireland, Galway. During the two-year grant period six post-doctoral European researchers have been based at the Moore Institute at NUI Galway, working on scholarly digital editions of a range of historical and literary texts. The aim has been to identify the theoretical and practical challenges posed by different kinds of primary material to those trying to create digital resources that are both valuable to scholars and, because of the material's national importance and/or intrinsic interest, appealing to a wider audience. To this end four of the researchers are creating pilot model editions that embody the questions being asked and possible answers to them.

Tim McLoughlin has been editing the correspondence of the Irish neo-classical painter James Barry. Until now the only publicly available version of his correspondence has been an incomplete collection published in 1809 by his friend Edward Fryer a few years after Barry's death, and itself now a rare book. Fryer's editing consistently reveals a desire to show his late friend in a favorable light, but his book remains important as the only source of some letters that are now lost. The TEXTE edition seeks to acknowledge Fryer's contribution but also repair its shortcomings and integrate newly-found material to provide a comprehensive view of Barry's correspondence.

Malte Rehbein has created a new, genetic form of digital edition with his work on the Kundige Bok, a late medieval manuscript containing the town statutes of Gottingen in Germany. Numerous additions and deletions in the text show the city council constantly reacting to economic, political, and social changes, evolving the laws in adaptation to the changing circumstances. The date of alterations is not always obvious, and in some cases it is impossible to authoritatively assign the order of several related changes. The challenge here is to create an edition that allows flexibility in the definition and reading of (possible) text layers. A tightly-interrelated combination of markup and database information together with an interactive interface enables scholars to dynamically construct alternative versions of the text.

John Moulden has been working on a unique body of material held by the Ulster Museum. The "Cleland collection" is a group of eighteenth and early-nineteenth century popular songbooks and prose books that belonged to a farming family in County Down. As an example of a personal collection reflecting a family's cultural taste in this particular historical and socio-economic context, nothing else like it has been found in Ireland. The task for the web site is not simply to present the material in digital form, it is also to explain its social and historical context, to describe how and why these particular books may have come into the Cleland family's home, and talk about the role they may have played in the everyday life of the family.

Paul Caton is putting online the Dublin Penny Journal, a weekly magazine published in Dublin from June 30th, 1832 until June 25th, 1836. Avowedly non-sectarian and apolitical, the Journal wanted to foster in its readers a sense of (and pride in) Irish-ness through awareness of their own history and culture. The magazine also encouraged self-development, with articles on farming practices, new technologies, and mathematics and science. The extraordinary breadth (and depth) of the Journal's contents promise great rewards if exploited through detailed encoding and promiscuous linking to other resources. The immediate challenge for the online edition, however, is to capture both the physical form of this important cultural artifact and something of the user experience engendered by that form, in a web interface.