Introduction

Hans Walter Gabler is Professor (retired) of English Literature and Editorial Scholarship at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Germany, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, London University, Doctor of Literature, honoris causa, from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and Honorary Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation. He undertook, as editor-in-chief, the Critical and Synoptic Edition of James Joyce's Ulysses (1984), and the critical editions of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (both 1993). In Munich from 1996 to 2002, he directed an interdisciplinary graduate programme on “Textual Criticism as Foundation and Method of the Historical Disciplines.” From 2008 to 2010, he was Chair of the ESF-COST Action A32, "Open Scholarly Communities on the Web," and between 2014 and 2016 served as coordinator of a transatlantic research project “Diachronic Markup and Presentation Practices for Text Edition in Digital Research Environments”. Through his research on writing processes he seeks to advance theory and practice of the digital scholarly edition in a Digital Humanities environment. Editorial theory, genetic digital editing and genetic criticism have become the main focus of his professional writing. His 2018 collection of essays, Text Genetics in Literary Modernism and Other Essays, may be traced and read via https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0120