Text Editing, Print and the Digital World

Citation

Fourie, I. (2010), "Text Editing, Print and the Digital World", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 324-325. https://doi.org/10.1108/07378831011047721

Under the able editorship of Marilyn Deegan and Kathren Sutherland, a well‐qualified team of experts prepared this work to offer a well‐balanced view of the theory as well as practice of the field. As the editors explain in the introduction: “This collection of essays is intended as an appraisal of the current state of digital editing, considering from a number of perspectives its benefits and drawbacks in the development of complex editions”. They continue:

If digital scholarship in the literary field is significantly challenging the way in which theories of text editing are formulated and editions are researched, compiled and disseminated, the scholarly support models within the academy have yet to be modified to reflect the shift in approach and working practices this enjoins.

Text Editing, Print and the Digital World forms part of the series, Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. The content is therefore aimed at the arts and humanities community to promote digital arts and humanities scholarship.

The book consists of 11 chapters covering theoretical and practical issues. In the theory part there is a chapter on critical reflection of paper‐based editing and the digital environment and a call to consider theoretical issues and the textual criticism that underlies literary criticism. In the next chapter, “The Complete Edition”, the legitimacy of assumptions that the nature of a scholarly edition is determined by the historical, technical, social and rhetorical dimensions with a genre when combined with the idealist notions of documents, text and editions is questioned.

The third chapter concerns digital editions and text processing, aiming to develop a semiotics of digital text rather than a sociology of text. This is followed by a chapter on books, e‐text and worksites where it is queried whether the scholarly rigour applied to printed text will be relaxed for electronic versions (e.g. meeting with a deadline of final publication). A chapter on the rationale for open source critical editions then focuses on three matters: the sense and implications of the open source model, the connotations of the “critical” in context, and the question of the kinds of editions that should be included in projects concerning open source access. In the final chapter in the theoretical section, “Every Reader His Own Bibliographer: An Absurdity”, it is questioned who buys editions and why.

The part of Text Editing, Print and the Digital World dealing with practice includes five chapters. A chapter titled “They hid their books underground” explores the management issues of two ancient book deposits, Scepsis and Alexandria. There is also a chapter on the Cambridge edition of the works of Jonathan Swift and the future of the scholarly edition, as well as a chapter on editions and archives concerning the textual editing and the nineteenth century serials edition, digitising inscribed texts and digital genetic editions with regard to the encoding of time in manuscript transcription.

Text Editing, Print and the Digital World is a well‐bound publication with a good index and substantial references to the relevant subject literature. It is recommended to the scholarly reader and researcher in the field. The second part of the publication has a more practical slant.