Stylo is a free and open source semantic text editor for scholarly publishing in the humanities and social sciences. In this poster we show how Stylo meets the needs of scholarly writing in a digital context, and we present the new features integrated in a 3.0 verion in 2023.
Stylo is a research project led by the Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities since 2017. It is supported, among others, by the Huma-num Research Infrastructure and the Métopes Research Infrastructure. Stylo aims to question writing and publishing practices: what is the meaning of writing in a digital context? What influence does the digital environment have on the constitution of scientific content (Vitali-Rosati et al. 2020)? In response to this question, Stylo proposes to build an epistemology of text around specific modes of writing and editing. As a WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean, not What You See Is What You Get) semantic text editor, Stylo seeks to enhance the academic publishing chain (Kembellec 2019).
Stylo puts you back in control of your own text, through a number of features that are part of digital publishing technologies (Blanc and Haute 2018): text markup for fine-grained semantic structuring; import of structured bibliographic data from Zotero; keywords controlled from several ontologies; preview of graphical rendering, with annotation option via Hypothesis; export in several formats (HTML, PDF, XML or DOCX), including XML schemas respecting scientific publishing standards; advanced search-and-replace functions; collaborative editing; data access via a GraphQL API; etc. In opposition to word processors such as Microsoft Word, Stylo promotes and encourages the use of open standards (Vitali-Rosati 2020). At the heart of Stylo, therefore, are three formats that forming a single source and enable multiple exports (Fauchié and Audin 2023): semantic markup with Markdown, data serialization with YAML, and bibliographic reference structuring with BibTeX. Pandoc, the “Swiss army knife of publishing”, generates output in HTML, XML-TEI, PDF (with the help of LaTeX) and DOCX formats.
In 2023, Stylo is upgraded to version 3.0 with new features, including a collaborative editing mode. Stylo now offers two complementary writing modes: asynchronous and synchronous. The asynchronous mode has existed since the very beginning, enabling several people to edit an article at different times, through functions for sharing, workspace (a gateway for sharing a set of articles with several other users) and versioning. The new synchronous mode is the result of needs expressed by the Stylo community, which is accustomed to using online collaborative environments such as Google Docs, SharePoint, Hedgedoc, Framapad and others. Once activated, synchronous mode enables users to edit a document at the same time. These two modes co-exist in parallel in Stylo, thus preserving the original functionality.
These new functionalities are currently available for the humanities community ( stylo.huma-num.fr). We are now ready for future developments of the tool during 2024-2025: text corpora export, useful for the journals, for example; image storage directly available in Stylo; improved and stabilized collaborative writing by implementing new technical modules; etc.