Abstract

My reflections on transitions and successions focussing on the 14 years I directed and run the European Summer University in Digital Humanities "Culture & Technology" (ESU DH C&T), founded at Leipzig University in 2009, as well as the four editions which happened since its closure in 2022, lead me to distinguish five phases:

A first phase (2009-2013) during which I tried to get not only the University of Leipzig and the City of Leipzig involved with ESU DH C&T, but also ministries, research infrastructure initiatives and other DH institutes as well as scholarly associations, software developers and the publishing sector.

A second phase (2014-2018) characterised by soft integration and fruitful collaboration between ESU DH and CLARIN-D which I successfully implemented against conceptual divisions or pushes for hard integration and merging.

The third phase (2018-2021), triggered by the approaching of my retirement was not only governed by the search for and negotiations with potential successors at Leipzig University and endeavours to guarantee that Leipzig University continued to be the home of ESU DH, but also by being caught between powers, unexpected rescue, Covid 19 and unsuccessful transitions.

The fourth and very short phase (2022) began with the realisation that there was no way to keep ESU DH alive in Leipzig and ended with a rebellion against its closure at the end of ESU 2022 and its unexpected take over by the ESU community.

With the fifth phase I mean ESU’s new aera starting in 2022 and during which the ESU community has undertaken important steps to turn ESU DH into an independent community driven institution by creating a democratic structure which allows for rule-based successions and transitions.

Having examined quite thoroughly all the years ESU DH C&T has been in place so far I could only come to the conclusion that the best what could have happened was its takeover by the community it had managed to create and in which workshop leaders played a pivotal role.

Brief Bio

Elisabeth Burr (*1952), emeritus professor of Leipzig university, studied Romance, English and German literature and linguistics at the universities of Tübingen, Leeds and Amien from 1971 to 1980. After having spent more than 5 years in Naples (Italy) as a lecturer for the German Academic Exchange Service she took up a post in the Italian Department at Duisburg University where she was awarded a PhD in 1991 for her dissertation on Verb and Variety, a study of Italian newspaper language for which she had created a marked-up corpus. In 1997 she concluded her 'Habilitation' (post-doctoral monograph) on Repeated Discourse and idiomatic competence based on her corpus of French, Italian and Spanish newspapers. Temporary professorships of Romance linguistics brought her to the universities of Cologne, Siegen, Bremen and Marburg. In 2005 she was offered the Chair of French, Francophone and Italian linguistics at Leipzig University, which she held until her (forced) retirement in 2019. Her research, teaching and main publications, embedded over the years more and more in a Digital Humanities perspective, focus on the history of the description and conceptualisation of Romance languages, corpus linguistics & and linguistics of parole (corpus-design, -theory, -markup and -analysis included), the construction of gender in language science, in grammars and language usage, as well as multilinguality in digital, urban, scientific and scholarly spaces.

She participated in the project proposal EUROSYNCH (1992-1993), represented her university in the Thematic Network ACO*HUM (1998-2000), proposed the project "Humanities and Information Technologies (HUM*IT)" in the framework of the European Year of Languages 2001, organised SILFI 2000 and CLiP 2001 and was a prominent member of the Network of Excellence "Computing & Humanities in Multilingual Europe" (CHiME) (2001-2003). In 2001 the Humanities Computing Unit at Oxford University offered her a Distinguished Visiting Scholarship and in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2010 the European Commission appointed her as an independent expert to the evaluation sessions for proposals received in response to the calls FP6-2003-Infrastructures-4, FP6-2004-Infrastructures-5, FP7-2007-Infrastructures-1, FP7-2008-Infrastructures-1, and FP7-2010-Infrastructures-1.

Apart from serving and having served on various national and European scientific consulting and evaluation bodies (DARIAH-DE, CLARIA-DE, CAHIER, MSH Dijon, Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften (ZfdG) etc.) she constructed a fruitful collaboration with CLARIN-D, with PARTHENOS, CLARIN-EU and DARIAH-EU in the framework of the European Summer University in Digital Humanities “Culture & Technology (https://esu.culintec.de/), which she founded and directed from 2009 until 2022 at the University of Leipzig.

Her interest in and active involvement with scholarly associations led her to accept various prominent positions over the years. From 1996 to 2002 she was, in fact, member of the Exec of the Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana (SILFI) and from 1998 to 2000 President of the same association. From 1997 to 1999 she held the position of 2nd vice-president of the Deutscher Romanistenverband (DRV) and from 2000 to 2014 she was member of the Scientific Board of the Gesellschaft für Angewandte Linguistik (GAL), directed its section Computerlinguistik from 2000 to 2002 and its section Soziolinguistik from 2002 to 2014 and hosted its 40th Conference GAL 2010 "SprachRäume" 2010 in Leipzig. Apart from this she was member of the international scientific committee of the seminars Computer - Literature - Philology (CLiP) from 2000 to 2008 and founding member and member of the Exec of the Circolo dei dialettologi di Sappada from 2002-2005.

The strongest impact on her scholarly life had, however, the Association for Literary and Computing (ALLC) which she joined in 1989 because of the “loneliness” she felt as a corpus linguist. She served this association, in fact, first as co-opted member (1998-2001) and then as voting member (2001-2010) and was member of the joint workgroup ADHOC, established by ACH and ALLC in July 2002, which paved the way for the foundation of ADHO in 2005. She was appointed Chair of the then newly founded Standing Committee on Multi-Lingualism & Multi-Culturalism of ADHO in 2005, and directed it until 2014. From 2006 to 2012, she was a voting member on ADHO’s Steering Committee, and in 2015 she was elected to serve as voting member on the Exec of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) and became its representative in EASSH. Her membership of the Exec ended in 2016 when she became President of EADH, a position she held until 2023. During this time she was also President (elect) of the Constituent Organisations Board of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO) from 2019 to 2021 and chaired the scientific programme committee of the EADH2020-2021 conference in Krasnoyarsk.

Last but not least she was not only member of innumerable scientific programme committees of Digital Humanities and Language Resources conferences but has also considerable experience with the running of one of the Associate Organisations of EADH, the DHd (Digital Humanities in German speaking regions). In 2012 she was, in fact, elected member of the Steering Committee of this then newly founded association and held this position until 2022. In 2016 she hosted its 3^rd international congress DHd 2016 “Modellierung - Vernetzung – Visualisierung: Die Digital Humanities als fächerübergreifendes Forschungsparadigma” with its 470 participants in Leipzig and was Chair of its scientific programme committee for the DHd conference in Bern (2017). She is very interested in the work, thinking and way of doing also of the Associate Organisations of EADH in Italy, in the Czech Republic, the Nordic Countries, and Russia, with whom she had the chance to work together in different settings and not least in the EADH AOs Forum.

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• Burr, E., (2026), "The European Summer University in Digital Humanities "Culture & Technology"", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.25547/B2W2-RJ25)

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1. digital humanities
2. digital projects
3. europe
4. european summer university
5. Germany
6. project management
7. project transition
8. succession
9. transitions and succession