Humanities research is focused on cultural artefacts such as texts, images or physical objects. Usually they are kept in libraries, archives and museums and are thus not encountered as original material objects; rather, scholars work with surrogates of them created especially to make them more accessible and to facilitate research. Over the last centuries, the desire to uncover the cultural treasures of the past and to reconstitute important documents, texts and works in the most reliable way possible has led to the development of the concept of the critical edition in the modern sense. This implies the application of wide...

Editing is without doubt one of the oldest scholarly activities within the Humanities. David Greetham traces its origin to the decision of Peisistratus (560–527 BC) to establish an ‘official’ text of Homer. It was this ‘suspicion’ about the authenticity of a text, he stresses, a mistrust of variants, which led to the birth of textual awareness, which in turn has developed over the last millennium and a half into the many theories and practices of what we can now call textual scholarship.¹

Texts come in different versions, and variation in texts is inevitable; or, as John Br yant puts...

This chapter discusses whether it is desirable to establish aprotocolthat would provide, if not a standard, at least some guidance on how to structure the core elements that one should expect to find in a scholarly electronic edition.

A preliminary examination is thus needed to determine which features should be defined as fundamental. Though the debate on the issue is still intense, many scholars in the field of digital philology 1 now agree that there are at least five domains in which scholarly digital editions may offer important advantages over paper editions, namely:²

1. the possibility to present...

This is a story about the methodological interaction between two scientific fields, that of textual scholarship and that of computer science. The names of the fields, however, only imprecisely delineate the permeable boundaries between research domains where methodologies interact—for obviously the world is much more fluid than such nouns suggest.² The interactions of interests are much more complex than the simplified image of a dynamic whereby one field donates a methodology to another. Rather than trying to reflect on the current state and the future potential of the digital scholarly edition from well inside the field of textual scholarship,...

The theoretical framework of this essay is a current paradigm in cognitive sciences, which may be relevant to the development of scholarly digital editing. In cognitive philosophy, the ‘Extended Mind’ hypothesis, first formulated by Clark and Chalmers, suggests that external features in the environment can become partly constitutive of the mind.¹ In other words, the mind is not limited to something inside the skull, but is regarded as being ‘extended’.² Varieties of this post-Cartesian approach, which is being applied to cognitive narratology, are referred to as ‘enactivism’ and ‘radical enactivism’.³ The latter paradigm suggests that the mind is not just...

Hans Walter Gabler has said: ‘We read texts in their native print medium, that is, in books; but we study texts and works in editions—in editions that live in the digital medium’.¹ This account of the difference between reading and studying texts is a fitting point of departure for the present chapter. On Gabler’s account, texts should be read in their original media, but they are better studied in editions; and in today’s publishing scene, scholarly editions live on in the digital medium, where the relationship between texts and works can better unfold and so be studied. This, at...

A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscriptis an unconventional text: it blends traditional scholarly editing practices and standards with comparatively recent digital social media environments. In doing so, the edition aims to reflect both contemporary editorial theory, which recognises the inherently social form and formation of texts, as well as the writerly and readerly practices that shaped the original production of the Devonshire Manuscript (London, British Library, MS Add. 17492). Dating from the 1530s–1540s, the Devonshire Manuscript is a multiauthored verse miscellany compiled by a number of sixteenth-century contributors.¹ As an inherently collaborative document, the manuscript calls for...

Since the earliest days of hypertext, textual scholars have produced, discussed and theorised upon critical digital editions of manuscripts, in order to investigate how digital technologies can provide another means to present and enable the interpretative study of text. This work has generally been done by looking at particular case studies or examples of critical digital editions, and, as a result, there is no overarching understanding of how digital technologies have been employed across the full range of textual interpretations. This chapter will describe the creation of a catalogue of digital editions that could collect information about extant digital editions...

The project of building a platform dedicated to early modern correspondence at the École Nationale des Chartes is the starting point for this contribution. Its reflections are based on the editing of two early modern corpora: the correspondence of Antoine Du Bourg, chancellor during the reign of Francis I (1536– 1538),¹ and the correspondence of the extraordinary embassy led by the duke of Angoulême in the Holy Roman Empire (1620–1621).² The former encompasses approximately 1200 letters concerning every matter with which a chancellor had to deal (justice, royal finances, monitoring printed production, economic policies etc.), while the latter contains...

Texts from the ancient world reach us via a long, complicated process of transmission from copy to copy. As printed today they are at best near approximations of what an ancient author wrote. A critical edition, which presents the text along with the surviving evidence of the transmission process and an editor’s interpretation of it, allows the reader to go beyond a generalised expectation of error and to see whether any given bit of text is secure, or corrupt, or disputed, or weakly supported by the manuscripts that preserve it. No classical text can be read responsibly without one. Yet...

When Peter Robinson wrote ‘Current Issues in Making Digital Editions of Medieval Texts—Or, Do Electronic Scholarly Editions Have a Future?’,¹ he was looking back at what we may call the ‘pioneer era’ of digital editing and publishing: a time span of roughly ten years, from the early 90s to 2004.² It was during this time that important editorial projects such as thePiers Plowman Electronic Archive,³ theElectronic Beowulf,⁴ theCanterbury Tales Project,⁵ theParzival-Projekt⁶ and many more⁷ published the results of their efforts. The preferred publishing medium during this phase was that of an optical support, CD or...