The idea is to encourage the creators of tools for textual scholarship to make their functionality available to others, and to promote the interoperability of the tools and methodology used in the field of digital scholarly editing and research.

The main objective of the Action is to produce a ‘roadmap’ or ‘manual’ conceptualizing the development of a technical infrastructure for collaborative digital preparing, editing, publishing, analyzing, and visualizing of literary research materials.

Besides the discussions led within particular working groups of the Action, the activities are concentrated on the development of the Collatex tool. Collatex is a Java library for collating textual sources. It may be used, for example, to produce an apparatus.

The Collatex tool is currently a major development activity connected with the Interedition Action. The core Collatex algorithm performs collation of the textual sources (a base and a set of witnesses). The algorithm is supported by various filters and pluggable operations including words detection algorithms, words distance measures, and input/output converters.

There is a great need for international cooperation in the development of tools for scholarly digital editing and analysis of literary material. Research groups from individual institutes exchange research results through conferences and journals and report on their methodological advances, but these results and advances often cannot be scientifically verified or tested because the used hardware and software is not available to or easy to use by other researchers. A shared technical infrastructure for the preparation, editing, publishing, analysis, and visualization of literary material does not exist. This Action aims to form an international Management Committee of researchers that have thorough experience in electronic editing and digital text analysis for scholarly purposes in a national context. A series of meetings will be called for researchers in the field of literary research and information technology to discuss the topic of a shared supranational networked infrastructure for digital scholarly editing and analysis. The Action will deliver a roadmap for the implementation of such an infrastructure.