The last two years have seen great advancement of digital publishing technologies including the way in which research content is displayed. A prominent example is eLife’s eLENS. But an increasingly sophisticated connection of text, data, and references is not only propelled forward in the STEM-fields. The question of how to effectively and innovatively display research output is becoming more pressing in the humanities and social sciences, too. While print-on-demand— and thus pdf-layouts—still satisfy the need for traditional formats, new options of presenting Humanities and Social Sciences content are rapidly emerging. With increasingly complex projects in the digital humanities, for example, interweaving various strains of research information is a logical next step.

This presentation will begin by quickly sketching out the genres most commonly found in the Humanities and Social Sciences and look at what reading and viewing experiences are generally available, both in terms of viewers and devices. We will then introduce a digital humanities project that requires a more complex integration of flow-text and source material. This will show the missing options in digital publishing in the HSS fields: interactivity and multidimensional reading. We will look at two fundamental source languages with which to close this gap: xml and html5 and close by introducing the solution that Heidelberg University is currently pursuing for the pilot project of its newly founded publishing venture Heidelberg University Publishing: An XML-based single source manuscript production.