Text Editing, Print and the Digital World

Traditional critical editing, defined by the paper and print limitations of the book, is now considered by many to be inadequate for the expression and interpretation of complex works of literature. At the same time, digital developments are permitting us to extend the range of text objects we can reproduce and investigate critically - not just books, but newspapers, draft manuscripts and inscriptions on stone. Some exponents of the benefits of new information technologies argue that in future all editions should be produced in digital or online form. By contrast, others point to the fact that print, after more than five hundred years of development, continues to set the agenda for how we think about text, even in its non-print forms. This important book brings together leading textual critics, scholarly editors, technical specialists and publishers to discuss whether and how existing paradigms for developing and using critical editions are changing to reflect the increased commitment to and assumed significance of digital tools and methodologies.

Contents: Introduction, Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland; Part I In Theory: Being critical: paper-based editing and the digital environment, Kathryn Sutherland; The compleat edition, Mats Dahlström; Digital editions and text processing, Dino Buzzetti; The book, the e-text and the 'work-site', Paul Eggert; Open source critical editions: a rationale, Gabriel Bodard and Juan Garcés; Every reader his own bibliographer - an absurdity?, Edward Vanhoutte. Part II In Practice: '... they hid their books underground', Espen S. Ore; The Cambridge Edition of the works of Jonathan Swift and the future of the scholarly edition, Linda Bree and James McLaverty; Editions and archives: textual editing and the 19th-century serials edition (ncse), Jim Mussell and Suzanne Paylor; Digitizing inscribed texts, Charlotte Roueché; Digital genetic editions: the encoding of time in manuscript transcription, Elena Pierazzo; Bibliography; Index.

Marilyn Deegan is Director of Research Development, Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London as well as the Co-Director of the AHRB ICT Methods Network. She is editor of the journal Literary and Linguistics Computing and has worked on numerous digitization projects in the arts and humanities. Kathryn Sutherland is Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism at Oxford University. She teaches and researches on bibliography, textual criticism, Romantic period writings, Scottish Enlightenment, textual theory and Jane Austen.