0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the

image -->

“We are entering a great age of editing.”

—Jerome McGann, at an October 1997 Conference at MIT

Introduction

This paper offers a response to Roger Bagnall’s contribution on Digital Papyrology, but a proper response to this particular topic requires addressing the broader topic behind this workshop: the reinvention of editing in a digital age. More than a decade ago, at a conference at MIT, Jerome McGann remarked in passing that we were entering a great age of editing. These words were not among his prepared remarks—when this programmatic remark was called to his attention several years later, he had forgotten the words but warmly endorsed the sentiment. The papers in this workshop suggest the impending truth of that prophetic remark. Scanning books and generating transcriptions is the incunabular phase of digital publication. For more on the incunabular nature of much early digital publications, see Crane et al. 2006. We need to rethink the goals of editing in the light of the possibilities and challenges of emergent digital media. Literature Compass ( (External Link) ) and the Digital Humanities Quarterly ( (External Link) ) have both had special issues dedicated to the future of textual editing and creating digital editions. Similarly, the recently founded InterEdition project ( (External Link) ) is holding a series of workshops between researchers in the field of textual editing and information technologists to create a roadmap that they hope will lead to an “interoperable supranational infrastructure for digital editions.” We are not entering—we have already entered and will never leave—a new intellectual space, where the speed and the distance between question and answer is qualitatively different from that for which we were trained.

In a digital world where we can publish video and sound and where we can annotate space, we need to extend our vision of editing beyond linguistic sources. In his paper for this collection, Ken Price talks about “topic-based editing,” of which his own Civil War Washington (External Link) civilwardc.org provides one example. For more detail, see Price 2009. HyperCities (External Link) illustrates the opportunities of annotating coordinates in space and time, allowing us to trace such events as the turmoil in Tehran after the 2009 Iranian elections and a tumultuous succession of public buildings over the past century in Berlin. Alison Muri’s Grub Street Project http://grubstreetproject.net/ sets out to bring an entire moment in history to life. If we are to publish documents—especially documents as enmeshed with their material and cultural context as tweets from Tehran or newspapers from eighteenth century London or nineteenth century Washington, we need to embed them within rich cultural databases and to imagine our textual annotations as links into geographic, visual, quantitative, and textual data.

Within this essay, I restrict myself to the editing of textual sources, but within that field I understand editing in a very broad sense as making our primary textual sources usable for scholarly work. If we take this as an intellectual model, then a wide range of document-centric publications is relevant. These include not only facsimile, diplomatic, and critical editions but also translations, commentaries, and even specialized lexica and indices—documents that are hypertextual in nature, largely composed of individual annotations and expositions upon named portions of a primary source. For a further discussion of this topic, see Crane, Seales and Terras 2009. The boundary between editing in this sense and other categories of publication is, in this case (as in almost any classification task), fuzzy. Essays in expository prose that largely follow the structure of a document to elicit an interpretation should probably be considered as well. At least some such studies would be better served if published as hypertextual guides through a document, directing a reader’s focus to one passage after another and using chunks of argumentation to draw out various features of the primary source and comparanda. “Hypertext editions” that link primary sources (particularly individual works or documents) with a wealth of related materials, present a number of their own challenges and has been discussed among many others by O’Donnell 2010 and Riva and Zavrin 2005. The instinct for such publications is deep, and early forms of such hypertextual publications have appeared in various guises (PerseusPaths, Walden’s Paths, http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/ etc.).