How can we ensure that tomorrow’s knowledge is based on a plurality of worldviews, languages and cultures? How can we ensure that this knowledge is not oriented by commercial interests, and that it retains a public and collective dimension? (Fauchié et al. 2020)

Electronic literature explored the possibilities of writing and publishing literature in new forms (Rettberg 2014). It is about producing literature that can seemingly only exist on digital supports like computers, since it uses hyperlinks, interconnected texts, or multimedia, such as texts, images, videos, and interactions in the same document.

As previously mentioned, the emergence of single source publishing has economic origins: if a workflow can be set up around one single source and can produce three or four different formats, it represents a huge savings.

An earlier example of single source publishing is One Document Does it all (or ODD). Its principle is to write the documentation for an XML (or TEI) schema, the encoding rules, and the customization details all in the same file (Viglianti 2019). More fundamentally, it is about writing code and documentation in a single process, and it is the origin of the word processors: the developers started to write their documentation behind the code—with a typewriter—before the creation of the first word processor, Electric Pencil (Kirschenbaum 2016, 100).

In the humanities, where the pressure to publish is significant (“publish or perish” [Auerbach 2006]), the actual process of publication is quite slow and cumbersome

How can we do so without over-complexifying the task of authors, editors, and publishers?