The Texts We See and the Works We Imagine: The Shift of Focus of Textual Scholarship in the Digital Age (Prepublication Version) (original) (raw)

Text Theory, Digital Document, and the Practice of Digital Editions

2013

any digital tools have been and are being developed aimed at transcribing, annotating and publishing editions of literary or historical texts making use of crowd sourcing for collaborative research. This panel discusses the question how well digital scholarly editions produced by such tools reflect the theoretical notions of digital scholarly editions, and how such may be assessed based on both empirical examination of current practices and text theory in the digital era. The practice of preparing and producing digital editions is increasingly supported by purpose made and specialized digital tools, many of them involving crowd sourcing. Although an exhaustive survey and typology of these tools is still missing, by and large we can see that most of these tools are highly similar in functionality, text model, and editorial process. As such they express a fairly straightforward transformation from the physical book to a digital metaphor of the book, roughly along a trajectory of trans...

Beyond the Text: Digital Editions and Performance

Shakespeare Bulletin, 2016

The alluring promises of digital editions blind many would-be editors to the sober realities of the undertaking. The heady days of the 1990sand the premature calls for the death of print at the hands of hypertextare over. Although computational tools may aid editors through full-or semi-automation of fundamental editorial processes, such as transcription, modernization, and textual collation, 1 the digital medium introduces additional tasks to those involved in print, and complicates the tasks of producing and maintaining a critical edition. 2 Digital editions are not for the faint of heart. As Coordinating Editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions (Hirsch) and Associate Coordinating Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions (Jenstad), we are intimately aware of the challenges of digital editions. In addition to traditional textual critical skills, the publisher of a digital edition requires technical expertise in programming and software development, textual encoding, interface design, methods of digitizing analogue materials, and digital content management. By contrast, a print edition can be left to fend for itself after publication-no further action on the publisher's part is required to ensure that a book remains readable, so long as copies survive in libraries and on bookshelves. Digital editions, on the other hand, require constant, hands-on, vigilant attention. Play editors for our series need not just full peer review of their work, 3 but also guarantees of long-term preservation of their scholarly labor; we are both publisher and library. The digital editorial platform must adapt to changing technological specifications, redesign its interface periodically, plan for succession if the

The Third Way: Philology and Critical Edition in the Digital Age

Variants, 2013

In 2006, as I prepared to begin my doctorate, I met with my supervisor-to-be to discuss prospective research topics. It became clear during the meeting that he already had a project in mind: I would produce a critical edition of the Armenianlanguage Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa, and it would be a digital critical edition. Some time later, at the celebration that followed my viva examination, my supervisor cheerfully admitted that he had not had the least idea what a "digital critical edition" might be when he had set me on the path to making one. He simply trusted that I, as a software engineer turned humanist, would figure something out along the way. The fact that I now write this suggests that I did produce something that was accepted by my supervisor and examiners as a digital critical edition. So where is it? What does it look like? And if, as recently as that, a lone doctoral student had to work out for herself what a digital critical edition should be, does it not go some way toward explaining why there are so few of them about?

Digital document and interpretation: re-thinking ‘‘text’’ and scholarship in electronic settings

Stefan Gradmann, 2008

The contribution starts from outlining the evolution of the scholarly production flow from the print based paradigm to the digital age and in this context it explores the opposition of digital versus analog representation modes. It then develops on the triple paradigm shift caused by genuine digital publishing and its specific consequences for the social sciences and humanities (SSH) which in turn results in re-constituting basic scholarly notions such as 'text' and 'document'. The paper concludes with discussing the specific value that could be added in systematically using digital text resources as a basis for scholarly work and also states some of the necessary conditions for such a 'digital turn' to be successful in the SSH.

Where is the editor? Resistance in the creation of an electronic critical edition

Human IT, 1999

Printed scholarly editions of any type suffer, for intrinsic and external reasons, from the lack of being incremental and re-usable, and fail in presenting both the results of the historical-critical research and the archive on which the research has been caried out in such a way that it is of use to literary and textual scholarship. The electronic paradigm has, despite its enourmeous storage capacities and intrinsic re-usability, not changed anything, but has on the contrary established the illusion that both the "objective" archive and the "subjective" edition could at the same time be presented in one product, be it called an electronic archive or an electronic edition. In this article I suggest a model for electronic scholarly editing that unlinks the Archival Function (i.e. the preservation of the literary artifact in its historical form and the historical-critical research) from the Museum Function (the presentation by an editor of the physical appearance and/or the contents of the literary artifact in a documentary, aesthetic, sociological, authorial or bibliographical contextualization). The digital archive should be the place for the first function, showing a relative objectivity, or a documented subjectivity in its internal organization and encoding. The Museum Function should work in an edition-disregarding its external form-displaying the explicit and expressed subjectivity and the formal orientation of the editor. The relationship between these two functions is hierarchical. The implementation of the Archive/Museum model calls for a rethinking and a reorientation of the function of the editor.