We are pleased to present the sixth issue of the Review Journal for Digital Editions and Resources (RIDE), published by the IDE since 2014, which is at the same time the first issue on Digital Text Collections (DTC). We generally define DTCs as digital resources that involve the collecting, structuring and enrichment of textual data and include in this definition DTCs from various humanities disciplines such as Literary Studies, Linguistics and History.

From the beginning, RIDE has been conceived not only as a reviewing journal for digital scholarly editions but also for other kinds of resources with relevance for Digital Humanities, including data sets of different types, software and applications. The idea to edit an issue on DTC came up in late 2016 and was triggered by the following observations: While there is an ever growing number of projects and studies in Digital Humanities creating and using large sets of digital texts,1 the methods and practices have not yet obtained the level of standardization and best practice that has been reached in areas with a longer tradition in corpus-based studies like Linguistics, for example. Often, research on or the creation of new DTCs is based on already existing textual resources scattered among the WWW. Therefore, it is crucial to establish common standards for the documentation and provision of DTCs that support the exchange of textual data while preventing a loss of quality and reliability. Finally, at present, the various self-classifications of DTCs are ranging from “Corpus“ to “Digital archive” to “Digital library” to “Repository” to many more; each of the terms, however, can point to very different types of resources, containing very different contents and applying very different methods. This lack of a common nomenclature and classification impedes a further systematization of types of DTCs and hinders the scholarly discourse about the resources. Such a discourse, however, is desirable if DTCs are to play an ever more important role in Humanities research.

We believe that reviewing DTCs systematically will (1) stimulate a more vivid discourse about reliability and sustainability of textual data and disseminate and canonize approved methods and approaches among disciplines; (2) help to identify and compare various methodological frameworks, and thereby provide an overview of the transfer of methods between single disciplines when building DTCs in Digital Humanities; (3) contribute to sharpen terminologies and concepts of different kinds of DTCs and in the long term lead to a more differentiated understanding of what types of “text collections” exist and in what way they differ from each other. Last but not least, we also want to raise awareness of the scholarly work involved in designing and providing DTCs.