Digital Scholarly Editing E-Book

Matthew Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo (eds.)

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This volume presents the state of the art in Digital Scholarly Editing. Drawing together the work of established and emerging researchers, it gives pause at a crucial moment in the history of technology in order to offer a sustained reflection on the practices involved in producing, editing and reading digital scholarly editions—and the theories that underpin them.The unrelenting progress of computer technology has changed the nature of textual scholarship at the most fundamental level: the way editors and scholars work, the tools they use to do such work and the research questions they attempt to answer have all been affected. Each of the essays in Digital Scholarly Editing approaches these changes with a different methodological consideration in mind. Together, they make a compelling case for re-evaluating the foundation of the discipline—one that tests its assertions against manuscripts and printed works from across literary history, and the globe.The sheer breadth of Digital Scholarly Editing, along with its successful integration of theory and practice, help redefine a rapidly-changing field, as its firm grounding and future-looking ambit ensure the work will be an indispensable starting point for further scholarship. This collection is essential reading for editors, scholars, students and readers who are invested in the future of textual scholarship and the digital humanities.

Leseprobe

Digital Scholarly Editing

Digital Scholarly Editing

Theories and Practices

Edited byMatthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo

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© 2016 Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo. Copyright of each individual chapter is maintained by the authors.

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Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo (eds.), Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0095

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This is the fourth volume of our Digital Humanities Series:

ISSN (Print): 2054-2410

ISSN (Online): 2054-2429

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-238-7

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-239-4

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-240-0

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-241-7

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-242-4

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0095

Cover photo: (Upper) Edda Rhythmica seu Antiqvior, vulgo Sæmundina dicta, vol. I (Copenhagen, 1787), p. 53 with comments by Gunnar Pálsson (1714–1791). Image © Suzanne Reitz, CC BY 4.0. (Lower) Clive Darra, ‘Keyboard’ (2009). © Clive Darra, CC BY-SA 2.0

Cover design: Heidi Coburn

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Contents

Notes on Contributors

vii

Foreword

Hans Walter Gabler

xiii

1.

Introduction: Old Wine in New Bottles?

Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo

1

SECTION 1: THEORIES

2.

What is a Scholarly Digital Edition?

Patrick Sahle

19

3.

Modelling Digital Scholarly Editing: From Plato to Heraclitus

Elena Pierazzo

41

4.

A Protocol for Scholarly Digital Editions? The Italian Point of View

Marina Buzzoni

59

5.

Barely Beyond the Book?

Joris van Zundert

83

6.

Exogenetic Digital Editing and Enactive Cognition

Dirk Van Hulle

107

7.

Reading or Using a Digital Edition? Reader Roles in Scholarly Editions

Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen

119

SECTION 2: PRACTICES

8.

Building A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript

Ray Siemens, Constance Crompton, Daniel Powell and Alyssa Arbuckle, with Maggie Shirley and the Devonshire Manuscript Editorial Group

137

9.

A Catalogue of Digital Editions

Greta Franzini, Melissa Terras and Simon Mahony

161

10.

Early Modern Correspondence: A New Challenge for Digital Editions

Camille Desenclos

183

11.

Beyond Variants: Some Digital Desiderata for the Critical Apparatus of Ancient Greek and Latin Texts

Cynthia Damon

201

12.

The Battle We Forgot to Fight: Should We Make a Case for Digital Editions?

Roberto Rosselli Del Turco

219

Bibliography

239

Index

263

Notes on Contributors

Alyssa Arbuckle is the Assistant Director, Research Partnerships & Development, in the Electronics Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria, B.C., in Canada, where she works with the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) group and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). Alyssa holds an MA in English from the University of Victoria and a BA Honours in English from the University of British Columbia. Her studies have centred on Digital Humanities, digital editions, new media and contemporary American literature. Her work has appeared in Digital Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly and Scholarly and Research Communication, and she has given presentations, run workshops or coordinated events in Canada, Australia and the US.

Marina Buzzoni is Associate Professor of Germanic Philology and Historical Linguistics at Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy. Her major scientific interests include Germanic diachronic linguistics, translation studies, textual criticism and digital editing—fields in which she has published numerous papers and scholarly contributions, as well as four monographic volumes. She has taken part in various national and international research projects, the latest of which focus on digital scholarly editing.

Constance Crompton is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and English, and Director of the Humanities Data Lab at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus. She is a researcher with Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) and, with Michelle Schwartz, co-directs Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada. She serves as the associate director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and as a research collaborator with The Yellow Nineties Online. Her work has appeared in several edited collections as well as the Victorian Review, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, the UBC Law Review, Digital Humanities Quarterlyand Digital Studies/Champs Numerique.

Cynthia Damon is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She is the author of The Mask of the Parasite: A Pathology of Roman Patronage (1997), a commentary on Tacitus’ Histories 1 (2003), a translation of Tacitus’ Annals in the Penguin series (2013), and, with Will Batstone, of Caesar’s Civil War (2006). She recently published an Oxford Classical Texts edition of Caesar’s Bellum civile with a companion volume on the text (2015), as well as a new Loeb edition of the Civil War (2016). She is currently preparing a pilot edition of the Bellum Alexandrinum for the Library of Digital Latin Texts.

Camille Desenclos has since September 2015 been Maître de conférences (Associate Professor) at Université de Haute-Alsace. She gained her PhD in 2014 in early modern history with a thesis on ‘The Words of Power: The Political Communication of France in the Holy Roman Empire (1617–1624)’ at the École Nationale des Chartes under the supervision of Prof. Olivier Poncet. Her research interests focus on the history of diplomacy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular the relationship between France and the Holy Roman Empire, with special emphasis on diplomatic writing practices. She has produced two digital editions of correspondence: letters from the embassy of the Duke of Angoulême (1620–1621) and by Antoine du Bourg (1535–1538).

Matthew James Driscoll is Senior Lecturer in Old Norse philology at Nordisk Forskningsinstitut, a research institute within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests include manuscript and textual studies, with special focus on popular manuscript culture in late pre-modern Iceland. He is also keenly interested in the description and transcription of primary sources, and has a long-standing involvement in the work of the Text Encoding Initiative, serving on the TEI’s Technical Council from 2001 until 2010. From 2011 to 2015 he was involved in the research networking programme of NeDiMAH (Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities), funded by the European Science Foundation, and acted as chair of its working group on digital scholarly editions.

Greta Franzini is a PhD student at University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities, where she conducts interdisciplinary research in Latin philology, manuscript studies and digital editing. Her interests lie in the application of digital technologies to the study of Classical texts and in the interdisciplinary research opportunities offered by digital scholarly editions. Greta is also an early career researcher at the University of Göttingen, where she is involved in research pertaining to historical text re­use, natural language processing and text visualisation.

Hans Walter Gabler is Professor of English Literature (retired) at the University of Munich, Germany, and Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, London University. From 1996 to 2002 in Munich, he directed an interdisciplinary graduate programme on ‘Textual Criticism as Foundation and Method of the Historical Disciplines’. He is editor-in-chief of the critical editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1984/1986), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners (both 1993). His present research continues to be directed towards the writing processes in draft manuscripts and their representation in the digital medium. Editorial theory, digital editing and Genetic Criticism have become the main focus of his professional writing.

Simon Mahony is Associate Director for Teaching at University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities and Senior Teaching Fellow at the Department of Information Studies, where he is Programme Director for the MA/MSc in Digital Humanities. He has research interests in the application of new technologies to the study of the ancient world; using web-based mechanisms and digital resources to build and sustain learning communities, collaborative and innovative working; the development of education practice and the use of new tools and technologies to facilitate this. He is also an Associate Fellow at UCL’s Institute of Classical Studies.

Elena Pierazzo is Professor of Italian Studies and Digital Humanities at Université Grenoble-Alpes; previous to that she was Lecturer at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, where she was the coordinator of the MA in Digital Humanities. Her areas of special interest include Italian Renaissance texts, the editing of early-modern and modern draft manuscripts, digital editing and text encoding. She has been the Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative and involved in the TEI user-community, with particular focus on the transcription of modern and medieval manuscripts. She was co-chair of the working group on digital scholarly editions of NeDiMAH and one of the scientists-in-chief of the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network (DiXiT).

Daniel Powell is a Marie Skłowdowska-Curie Fellow in DiXiT. He is based in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and affiliated with the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and Department of English at the University of Victoria, with research interests in Scholarly Communication and Editing, the Digital Humanities and Early Modern Drama. He is Associate Director of the Renaissance Knowledge Network and serves on the Scholarly Advisory Committee for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama. From 2012 to 2015 he served as Assistant Editor for Digital Publication on the journal Early Theatre; since 2015 he has served as Editor for Digital Initiatives at postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. His work has appeared, among other places, in Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Reforme, Scholarly and Research Communicationand Religion and Literature.

Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen took her PhD at the University of Copenhagen in 2015. She has participated in the Velux-funded research project Dansk editionshistorie (History of Editing in Denmark) and has worked as a scholarly editor at The Works of Grundtvig project at the University of Aarhus (2010–2011). Her main research interests are scholarly editing, new media, the history of the book and literary criticism. She is a member of the governing bodies for the Nordisk netværk for boghistorie (Nordic Network for Book History) and the Nordisk netværk for editionsfilologer (Nordic Network for Textual Scholarship).

Roberto Rosselli Del Turco is Assistant Professor at the Università degli studi di Torino, where he teaches Germanic Philology, Old English language and literature and Digital Humanities. He is also Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the Università di Pisa. He has published widely in the Digital Humanities and Anglo-Saxon studies. He has recently edited and translated the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon (2009) and is the editor of the Digital Vercelli Book, an ongoing project that aims at providing a full edition of this important manuscript. He is lead developer of Edition Visualization Technology (EVT), a software tool created at the University of Pisa to navigate and visualise digital editions based on the TEI XML encoding standard. He is also co-director of the Visionary Cross project, an international project whose aim is to produce an advanced multimedia edition of key Anglo-Saxon texts and monuments, in particular the Dream of the Rood and the Ruthwell and Bewcastle preaching crosses.

Patrick Sahle has studied History, Philosophy and Political Science in Cologne and Rome. He holds a PhD in Information Processing in the Humanities, based on his three-volume dissertation Digitale Editionsformen (Digital Scholarly Editions). Currently he is Professor for Digital Humanities at Universität zu Köln, where he also acts as manager of the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH), as Digital Humanities coordinator for the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy for Science (AWK), and as coordinator of the Data Center for the Humanities (DCH). He is also a founding member of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE).

Ray Siemens is Distinguished Professor of English and Computer Science in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, B.C., and past Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing (2004–2015). He is founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal Early Modern Literary Studies, and his publications include, among others, Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities (2004, 2015, with Susan Schreibman and John Unsworth), Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008, with Susan Schreibman), A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS (2012, 2015, with Constance Crompton, Daniel Powell, Alyssa Arbuckle et al.), Literary Studies in the Digital Age (2014, with Kenneth Price) and The Lyrics of the Henry VIII MS (2016). He directs the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, recently serving also as Vice President/Director of the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences for Research Dissemination, Chair of the Modern Languages Association Committee on Scholarly Editions and Chair of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations.

Melissa Terras is Director of University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities, Professor of Digital Humanities at UCL’s Department of Information Studies and Vice Dean of Research for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Her publications include Image to Interpretation: Intelligent Systems to Aid Historians in the Reading of the Vindolanda Texts (2006) and Digital Images for the Information Professional (2008), and she has co-edited various volumes, such as Digital Humanities in Practice (2012) and Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader (2013). She is currently serving on the Board of Curators of the University of Oxford Libraries and the Board of the National Library of Scotland, and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and Fellow of the British Computer Society. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts and humanities that would otherwise be impossible.

Dirk Van Hulle is Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp and director of the Centre for Manuscript Genetics and recently edited the new Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (2015). With Mark Nixon, he is co-director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Beckett Studies. His publications include Textual Awareness (2004), Modern Manuscripts (2014), Samuel Beckett’s Library (2013, with Mark Nixon), James Joyce’s Work in Progress (2016) and several genetic editions in the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, including Krapp’s Last Tape/La Dernière Bande, L’Innommable/The Unnamable (with Shane Weller) and the Beckett Digital Library.

Joris J. van Zundert is a Researcher and Developer in Humanities Computing and Digital Humanities in the Department of Literary Studies at the Huygens Institute for the History of The Netherlands, a research institute of the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). As a researcher and developer his main interest lies with the possibilities of computational algorithms for the analysis of literary and historic texts and the nature and properties of humanities information and data modelling. His current research focuses on computer science and humanities interaction and the tensions between hermeneutics and ‘big data’ approaches.

Foreword

Hans Walter Gabler

The NeDiMAH Experts’ Seminar on Digital Scholarly Editions, held at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands in The Hague in November 2012, was one of the most substantial and concentrated gatherings around a given subject I have ever, I think, attended. Nor is this an idealised memory: it is now fully borne out by the essays deriving from that Seminar assembled in the present volume, each of which is a fresh and much deepened take on the topics addressed in The Hague.

To explore the subject ‘Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices’, as this volume is now titled, is to map out the range of demands that digitality makes on textual criticism and editing today. It is also to envisage fresh conceptualisations for the future of these twin disciplines foundational to the humanities. The ‘scholarly edition’ lives in our present time, and will in the future live more uncompromisingly yet, in the digital medium. In consequence, the systemic triplet on which it relies, the hop, step and jump of textual criticism, editing and edition, needs in important respects to be reconceived. It needs to be re-comprehended in terms of the medium. While the scholarly edition will remain, as it has been, the fruit of state-of-the-art investigative and critical text-focused scholarship, its form and mode of presentation will cease to be the book. As a digital scholarly edition, it is, and will increasingly be, established through text-critical methodology and editorial execution rendered digitally operative in a technically fully digital environment. So, too, the digital scholarly edition will be used: it will be studied and explored, mined and enriched wholly in the digital medium. By no means, though, will this end the symbiosis of text and book. Yet in the digital age, great potentials of innovation lie in the separation of the material medium of the transmission of texts, and the digital medium of the use of editions. Texts as texts depend for readability, and indeed enjoyment, on their presence and simple, since culturally ingrained, availability in the materiality of the book. But texts as texts are not the be-all and end-all of scholarly editions.

An edited text is by its nature a dialogue staged and conducted by an editor (or editorial team) with ‘the text’ of a work as it has commonly been transmitted in variant material texts. The edited text that an edition offers is thus the product of concordant labours of criticism, textual criticism and editing. Comprehensively, these constitute the scholarly edition’s concurrent discourses, which are traditionally understood to be oriented towards the texts of the given work and its transmission, on the one hand, and towards the mediation and elucidation of the work on the other. In terms of the text orientation, the edition’s pivotal discourse is commonly the edited text, towards which are correlated (to give them their traditional names): the textual apparatus, formalised and with its specific information abbreviated into symbols, the textual notes, phrased in natural language, and collations from preceding editions of the given work, usually recorded in lists. The argument, or rationale, for the edition is given in the Editorial Introduction. This whole aggregate of discourses is held together by a common reference grid. To facilitate the mediation and elucidation of the work, moreover, the edition’s reference system equally allows the linking-in of all manner of commentary substance into the edition.

A scholarly edition, then, is relationally coordinated throughout. The medium which in our time allows modelling the relational structure of editions is the digital medium. The task ahead is therefore to realise the scholarly edition as a digital scholarly edition. This demands exploring the medium’s potentials to their full extent. At present, editions realised in a digital environment still tend to remain largely imitative of scholarly editions in print. What the medial shift requires however is a thorough re-conception, and in consequence re-modelling. The scholarly edition used to be an end product, going public when all textual and critical scholarship was done. The digital scholarly edition, by contrast, may from the moment it is technically stable be opened up as a shared enterprise. It may so already in its still ongoing process of content enrichment become generally accessible as a dynamically interactive knowledge and research site. A digital scholarly edition conceived as a research site will thus, from within the Digital Humanities, set an example for what computer science presently strives for: HCI—human computer interaction.

This, in all prefatory brevity, is the conceptual background to the essays assembled in this volume. In their range of reflection on theory and practice, they substantially advance the maturing of digital scholarly editing into the innovative cultural technique that, from out of the humanities, it is already well on its way to becoming.

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1. Introduction: Old Wine in New Bottles?

Matthew James Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo

© M. J. Driscoll and E. Pierazzo, CC BY 4.0http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0095.01

In the past few years we have succeeded in raising the profile of digital editing; networks, conferences, events, training, journals and publications—nothing seems able to stop the stream of scholarly contributions within the field of textual scholarship around the world. The present book is part of this development, and highlights some of the work done between 2011 and 2015 under the auspices of NeDiMAH, the Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities, which has been funded by the European Science Foundation with the aim to reflect on and provide guidance in a wide range of fields within the Humanities at the time of their conversion to the digital medium. One of the workgroups within NeDiMAH, chaired by the editors of the present publication, has been devoted to digital scholarly editing. During the lifetime of the workgroup we have organised three dedicated events and a panel within the 2013 annual conference of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), held at the Università La Sapienza in Rome, as well as sponsoring the participation of young scholars in relevant workshops and trainings. This book represents an enriched version of the second of these events, which was held on 21 November 2012 at the Huygens Institute in The Hague.1 We called the one-day event an ‘expert seminar’, as it was attended by some of the most authoritative voices in the field; but an emerging field needs new voices too, and so we also invited a number of early career researchers. The current publication reflects the same richness, authoritativeness and openness to the future, featuring contributions by established and emerging scholars in roughly equal measure.

The experience of the NeDiMAH workgroup has been extremely positive, and we have now passed the baton to another network, namely the DiXiT, funded by the European Commission via a Marie Curie Action.2 In fact, DiXiT not only sees the participation of many of the people present in this publication, but was built on that very experience; DiXiT provides training for early career researchers and organises events on digital scholarly editing, the impact of which will be assessed in the next few years, but promises to be considerable.3 As for training, in the past few years many initiatives have characterised the textual scholarship scene, particularly in Europe. For instance, since 2009 the graduate training programme Medieval/Modern Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age (MMSDA) has provided foundational training in digital methods to graduate students;4 the MMSDA experience has been repurposed in a condensed version as a tutorial during the preliminary phases of the Digital Humanities conference in Sydney (2015). More recently, the Erasmus Plus network on DEMM (Digital Editing of Medieval Manuscripts)5 has started to provide advanced training for MA and PhD students. On the publication side, one cannot but make a reference to the online journal Scholarly Editing, the content of which is not exclusively on digital topics, but its provision of digital editions as part of its content represents an innovative and exciting approach to some of the issues of support and sustainability discussed in this book.

In addition, large numbers of articles and monographs are appearing, demonstrating on the one hand the dynamicity within the field and on the other the compelling need of the community to discuss the changes and the implications brought by computers. It is evident that something is radically changing in the scholarly editing world: the way we work, the tools we use to do such work and the research questions to which we try to give answers—all of these have changed, in some case beyond recognition, with respect to the older print-based workflow.

These changes have produced a compelling need to reflect on the implications of such changes from a theoretical and practical point of view, assessing if the changes in the way we work (the heuristics of editing) are determining also changes in the understanding of scholarly editing and of the texts we edit (the hermeneutics of editing). We know how there has always been an intimate relationship between what instruments make it possible to observe and measure and what sort of research scientists undertake: ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us’, in the words attributed to Marshall McLuhan.6

What seems even more compelling, however, is to understand what digital scholarly editing actually is: is it a new discipline or a new methodology? Are we simply putting ‘old wine in new bottles’, or are we doing something which has never been done—indeed, never been doable—before?

Several years ago a series of conferences devoted to ‘Supporting Digital Humanities’ were held under the auspices of the two big European Humanities research infrastructure projects DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities) and CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure). The theme for the second of these, held in Copenhagen in 2011, was ‘Answering the unaskable’, the idea being that digital technologies have the potential to transform the types of research questions that we ask in the Humanities, allowing us not only to address traditional questions in new and exciting ways, but ultimately also to formulate research questions we would never have been able to ask without access to large quantities of digital data and sophisticated tools for their analysis.

This assertion has been questioned, but research questions change constantly, and always have, even as our perception of the world changes, in keeping with our ability to perceive it.

In order to respond to this question it is perhaps worth examining what has actually changed for textual scholars owing to the introduction of computers, the first revolution being access.

Locating primary sources

For the textual scholar the availability of online catalogues principally means the ability to locate manuscripts and other primary sources more easily and quickly than has hitherto been the case. This was the dream underlying the MASTER project (1999–2001) and many similar attempts at union catalogues of (European medieval) manuscripts: being able to search in all repositories everywhere at the same time. The CERL (Consortium of European Research Libraries) portal, ENRICH (European Networking Resources and Information Concerning Cultural Heritage), the Schoenberg database, Manuscriptorium in Prague, Digital scriptorium in the US, eCodices in Switzerland, TRAME in Italy—not to mention the online catalogues of major libraries such as the British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Harvard University Library and so on—have all improved access to primary and secondary sources and have therefore had a huge impact on the day-to-day work of scholars and editors. Most of these efforts have been made possible by the conscious use of established standards and protocols, since it is only the quality and interoperability of the metadata which make it possible to query multiple databases simultaneously.

Digital images

Once you have found your primary sources you can, in many cases, now view digital images of them, sometimes high-resolution images which are (some would say) better than the originals. One cannot really overestimate the impact that such digital images have had on editorial work: the ready availability of digital facsimiles represents such a huge leap forward that some scholars have even been tempted to say that ‘we need never see the document itself’.7 An animated debate surrounds and questions the pervasive use of digital images in manuscript studies, however, lamenting their lack of embodiment and the possibility of misunderstanding or overlooking some crucial codicological feature;8 but it is undeniable that digital images have changed greatly the way many manuscript scholars work—even if too many online digital libraries still have far too little in terms of navigational aids to be of any great use to scholars. The uneven quality of the digital images, as well as, in many cases, the lack of a systematic programme of digitisation, give more the impression of a patchwork quilt than of a reliable research tool; there is still room for improvement in this area.

The availability of digital images has also encouraged the development of digital palaeography and quantitative codicology,9 as well as research on automatic handwriting recognition and OCR for manuscripts and early printed books.10 This research has not yet produced reliably working products, but much more is to be expected in the coming years.

Transcribed texts

There is a vast number of electronic versions of cultural heritage texts freely available on the Internet. Many of them, unfortunately, are all but unusable, for a variety of reasons. They may be the result of uncorrected (‘dirty’) OCR taken from old, out of copyright editions, and may therefore bear little resemblance to their originals; or they may be totally missing the critical apparatus, which copyright status and the difficulty of representation on a scrollable page are the main reasons for its rare appearance alongside the main text (see the chapter by Cynthia Damon in the present volume, pp. 201–18). The result is that without the apparatus the reader cannot have any real idea what he or she is actually reading. One could—and people regularly do—argue that the availability of these mutilated texts is better than nothing, but in many ways these texts are actually worse than nothing, since they are misleading and fuel the idea that texts exist outside the dialectic between documents and editors, and that editions can possibly establish texts once and for all, undermining in this way the very survival of textual scholarship itself, as argued by Elena Pierazzo in this volume (pp. 41–58).

Proper digital editions, although certainly on the increase, are unfortunately still few and far between.

Crunching the data

But none of this, arguably, is fundamentally different from what we as textual scholars have always done, the only difference being that we can now process much larger amounts of data more quickly than has previously been possible for one person. What is new in these approaches is that we are now able to process these huge amounts of data in new ways, collating, for example, the socio-economic status of the scribes and/or commissioners of manuscripts with the format and the layout of the page, density of the text and the nature/genre of the work being copied, as it develops over time and geographical area. This is the approach chosen by the SfarData project, which aims to locate, classify and identify all extant dated Hebrew manuscripts from the Middle Ages.11 It is also the approach of Jesse Hurlbut, who has developed a method for analysing the overall layout of manuscript pages, which he calls ‘the manuscript average’.12

But, as with the creation of large catalogues and meta-catalogues of manuscripts, unleashing the potential of this approach depends on the interoperability of data, which means using a common standard.

Automatic collation, stemmatology and cladistic methods

Computers have been used since their inception to try to relieve what Peter Shillingsburg has called the ‘idiot work’ of textual editing.13 Automatic collation and the automatic generation of stemmata are still in their infancy—or at least not as far advanced as one might have wished—but as interest increases and more sophisticated applications are being developed there is hope for significant breakthroughs in the foreseeable future; and here too, much depends on the use of accepted standards. The cladistic (or phylogenetic) method is perhaps the only born-digital method available in textual scholarship, since it is based on heavy computational techniques and has arisen through interdisciplinary collaboration between textual scholars, computer scientists and bio-geneticists.14

Standards

The necessity of using accepted standards has been mentioned in connection with most of the previous items, and indeed it is hard to overestimate the importance of the establishment of common standards for metadata, transcription of texts and the description of events, people and dates. In fact, the development of tools and software able to ‘crunch’ data that can lighten editorial work and guide scholars into new territories requires the establishment of a shared vocabulary and baseline understanding of the most common features of such editorial work. This is perhaps the area where research has advanced the most: the early establishment of the Text Encoding Initiative—in 1986, before the development of the World Wide Web—has been fundamental to the development of the very idea of digital scholarly editing. But in spite of early and widespread use of the TEI in all stages of editing, much is still to be done. The ‘problem’ with the TEI is that its comprehensiveness and flexibility make it hard for developers to create meaningful tools that can serve more than one project at a time. Nonetheless, the effort toward standardisation has made it possible to develop an international, trans-disciplinary community that is interested in digital editing. Furthermore the existence of the TEI as a standard for many aspects of editorial work is now helping to highlight areas where standardisation is yet to be found—or there are too many competing standards; in other words, the standardisation operated by the TEI has whetted our appetite for more. In fact, in spite of the influential models offered by the TEI and by the various standards promoted by the Library of Congress, comprehensive authority files of titles, authors, persons and places are still to come. Standard mechanisms for dating would also be helpful—when, exactly, was ‘the beginning of the 14th century’?15

Social editing

From the evolution of the digital society and from the ubiquity of social networks derives a new take on the idea of teamwork in editing (social editing). The idea that one can indeed put a text ‘out there’ and invite people (either other editors or the lay public, depending on the project) to transcribe, collate, correct and collaboratively edit it has caused a bit of a stir in the editorial community, raising questions about authoritativeness, the role of editors and what is needed for an edition to be labelled as ‘scholarly’; the chapter by Siemens et al. in this book will certainly contribute to the debate.

This sketch of the innovations introduced to textual scholarship by computer technology, although brief, is perhaps enough to allow us to declare that doing things digitally is not simply doing the same old thing in a new medium. In addition, it seems that not only have the methods changed, but this new medium requires a fair bit of theoretical re-thinking and reflection on the significance of what we are doing and its impact on the discipline and on our notions of textuality. The present publication aims to do precisely this: on the one hand to provide an overview of opinions on what is actually changing in scholarly editing from a theoretical point of view, and on the other hand to provide a sample of case studies where such reflections are tested against manuscripts and works from different areas and times.

The book is thus divided in two main sections: Theories and Practices. This division does not mean that theoretical and broad-reaching considerations will only be found on the first section, however: on the contrary, the division is only to manifest how the second group of contributions tends to focus on specific cases and draw from them more general statements, while the chapters in the first group have more methodological aims, but without neglecting the occasional reference to concrete case studies. And it seems only natural that this should be the case: textual scholarship is a ‘field’ discipline, and theories and methods only emerge in practice.

The first section opens with Patrick Sahle’s attempt to answer a very basic question: what is a scholarly digital edition (pp. 19–40)? The chapter presents in condensed form the most important points from his monumental Digitale Editionsformen, published in 2013.16 In his contribution he determines that it is the following of a digital paradigm which distinguishes digital editions from digitised editions, where the latter are found to follow a page paradigm instead. In other words, it is the capability of digital editions to ‘transmedialise’, to move from medium to medium, that gives them the possibility of transcending boundaries and establishing a new field of enquiry.

The second contribution, by Elena Pierazzo, focuses on the fluidity and changeability of texts in general and of digital texts in particular. Texts change over time and across media, and in spite of the early conviction of editors that the uncovering of the lost original (the Urtext) was an achievable goal, the reality of texts demonstrates how this belief cannot be supported: texts are never perfect (in the philosophical sense), but can always be perfected. Electronic texts have an even larger degree of changeability, and digital editing therefore forces editors finally to embrace textual variation as a defining feature of textuality.

Marina Buzzoni (pp. 59–82) discusses the pros and cons of building a protocol for the creation of digital scholarly editions, claiming how the accountability of editorial work, which has been claimed to be the requirement for defining an edition as scholarly, can be only fulfilled digitally. She then proceeds to analyse the defining characteristics of scholarly editions in the light of the Italian school of textual scholarship, reflecting on how these transpose into the digital medium. Her attention focuses in particular on the most striking feature of a scholarly edition, namely the critical apparatus, and she discusses the way this can be formalised, remediated and made more usable and ultimately scholarly in a digital framework, lamenting the current limitations offered by the Critical Apparatus module of the TEI.

Joris van Zundert (pp. 83–106) claims that the so-called novelty promised by digital editions is actually held back by the pervasiveness of the most powerful model: the book. Starting from a software development point of view, van Zundert examines the drawbacks of most current digital editions, and investigates ways and possibilities for a methodological breakthrough. In examining the shortcomings of some current editions, he singles out the communication gap that exists between textual scholars and software developers and the tension between the model of the book championed by the former group and the new born-digital knowledge models proposed by the latter. In order to analyse the impact of this tension (or trading zone), he employs socio-linguistic terminology to show how a creole language develops between the two groups, providing mechanisms through which collaboration and new kinds of scholarship can be built. He calls this retention of the physical book as a model for digital editions a regression, with respect to the early theoretical framing of hypertexts as the new digital paradigm. He then calls for a renewed interest in a dialog between textual scholarship and computer science and the elaboration of a more effective inter-linguistic creole.

Dirk Van Hulle (pp. 107–18) adopts a cognitive approach for his examination of the personal libraries of modernist authors. He claims that genetic digital editing may be the key to creating a bridge and a bi-directional exchange between literary studies and cognitive science, supporting his claim with examples gathered from the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. The case study shows how Samuel Beckett’s marginalia in his private books bears witness to a creative process that extends over decades, and gives an example of how intertextuality functions as a model of the extended mind. The integration of the digital editions of the manuscripts with the digital editions of the personal library of Beckett, as well as the modelling of the type of marginalia and annotation, are the key ingredients to opening new research perspectives into the editing of modern literary drafts, raising the question of what constitutes the interest of the editor and where we should place our intellectual boundaries now that the digital medium allows us to include entire libraries in digital editions as well as all the surviving witnesses of any given work.

The chapter by Krista Stinne Greve Rasmussen (pp. 119–34) shifts the focus from editorial work to the users of digital editions or, more precisely, readers and types of readers. In fact, she distinguishes between readers who are primarily interested in accessing a reliable text, users who engage with the interpretation of the text and with the editorial work itself, and co-workers, who contribute to the editions themselves with commentaries, annotations and even editorial intervention. More than defining types of people, these categories tend to define attitudes and roles, which can change in time and moments. In her analysis, she examines differences in perceptions of texts, works and documents in print and in digital form. The open-endedness of digital knowledge sites (as defined by Shillingsburg) represents a threat to the reader (as defined by Rasmussen), who is distracted by the urge to click and fails to appreciate the text as a full aesthetic object. The author claims that digital scholarly editions can (and should) also take the shape of information sites, i.e. places where a reliable text can simply be read, top to bottom, with no or only minimal paratextual and editorial paraphernalia. This separation between text and editorial statement may not always be necessary, though: for the establishment of the essential relationship between text and readers, it may be sufficient for readers to have the impression that an edition, a digital one, is actually a finished product, a challenge big enough, given the intrinsic variability of digital products.

The section on Practices opens with the contribution by Ray Siemens (pp. 137–60) and his team on their ground-breaking edition of the Devonshire manuscript. The chapter contains an account of the key decisions behind the creation of a digital edition of this important Tudor period manuscript on an open, social platform such as Wikibooks. This ‘social’ edition is social in two ways: on the one hand, it makes reference to the theory of the so-called social text championed by D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann; on the other hand it uses a social platform like a Wiki, where knowledge is crowdsourced. But it is also the text that is edited that is social to begin with: it is in fact the product of the multiple hands at the court of Henry VIII, who over the space of a few years composed and assembled the collection as we know it now. It is therefore the nature of the text, in a sense, that pushes toward a different editorial solution, open to the contribution of unforeseen editors, as the manuscript itself was open to unforeseen contributions. This editorial solution of course has repercussions well beyond this specific case and opens a series of questions about the future of scholarly editions and the role of the editor: if editors will no longer be the textual gatekeepers, what will they become? But perhaps this is not the right question to ask, the authors of the contribution preferring to look at the meaning of scholarship in the new web 2.0 context, where the (academic) work can be exposed to scrutiny and improvement of the users (the textual stakeholders), and what is changing in the perceptions of their work and their outcomes.

Before asking questions about the scholarship of digital editions and the role of digital editors, however, it is perhaps worth asking what digital editions look like, how are they built and what they offer to their users. This is what the chapter by Franzini, Terras and Mahony (pp. 161–82) attempts, namely by investigating the many different shapes of digital editions in the form of a collaborative, online catalogue of editions. The catalogue’s pragmatic approach to the definition of digital edition is then able to provide scholars with interesting insights into what in practice it means to produce a scholarly edition, accounting for disciplinary (classics vs. modern texts) and methodological (TEI or non-TEI) divides.