TextRefs: An open registry for canonical text references

Research Colloquium @ Digital Humanities, University of Bern

Invited Talk at Research Colloquium @ Digital Humanities, University of Bern

Slides introducing TextRefs, an open registry for canonical text references. The presentation starts from a familiar scholarly practice: references such as “Plato, Republic 514a” identify the same passage across many editions, translations, languages, layouts, and publication contexts. While this stability is central to scholarship, it is usually encoded only as human-readable citation text in footnotes, prose, or apparatus entries. As a result, software cannot reliably resolve, index, compare, or link canonical passage references across digital collections.TextRefs addresses this gap by treating canonical text references as persistent, machine-readable, and resolvable entities. The slides present TextRefs as a scholarly data infrastructure layer that can connect citation systems, canonical works, resolver targets, catalogues, editions, full-text repositories, datasets, annotations, and publishing platforms. Instead of replacing existing editorial or bibliographic practices, the registry is framed as an interoperability hub that makes established reference conventions visible to machines while preserving their scholarly meaning for human readers.The presentation illustrates this approach through the example of Plato, Republic 514a, showing how a single canonical reference can be represented in context, cited, given aliases, and connected to resolver targets such as Project Gutenberg and the Perseus Digital Library. It then outlines four use cases: stable cross-edition citation for individual researchers; persistent canonical structures for individual editions; federated networks of discoverable text across diverse collections; and AI or machine-learning workflows that benefit from granular, linked canonical text data.The closing slides emphasize that TextRefs is currently pre-1.0, that specifications and APIs may still change, and that scholarly trust will depend on curation, governance, review workflows, and community participation. The deck therefore serves both as an introduction to the TextRefs concept and as an invitation to help build a standard and roadmap for citable, interoperable text on the web.