What we will have in practice with JITM or similar systems is what I propose to call the ‘work-site’. The work-site is text-construction site for the editor and expert reader; and it is the site of study of the work (of its finished textual versions and their annotation) for the first-time reader, as well as any position in between. Because the building of such textual and interpretative work-sites will be piece by piece, collaborative and ongoing, we are starting to look at a future for humanities, work-oriented research that is, if not scientific exactly, then more wissenschaftlich, in the German sense, than what literary critics, historians, and others are used to. JITM sets up a system where dealings with texts (enabled by emerging tools) can accumulate and be organized in relation to one another around carefully edited transcription files; and JITM facilitates subsequent research—but without imperilling the accuracy of textual resources that have been subjected to editorial scrutiny. This approach, if scaled-up, may have the potential to become a building-block in a new mode of scholarly communication and publication. It is a second-stage expression of humanities computing in the literary area.