Scholarly editions: does form matter?

Abstract

Paper delivered during the Humanities Postgraduates Conference, held at De Montfort University the 31/10/2007. Textual Criticism and Computer Science are both disciplines which are at the same time theoretical and practical, where these two aspects have a mutual influence on each other. Their relationship has a long and established tradition, since starting from the sixties computer algorithms were created to help textual scholars in their editorial work. For a long time the computer has always been seen as a mere tool, with no theoretical or methodological implications for the humanist. But what happens when the electronic medium is the carrier of Textual Criticism’s investigations and results? What are the consequences? Currently always more and more projects decide to produce electronic scholarly editions, to go over the print edition limits. But what are the consequences of such a choice, and what is the best way for producing such kind of editions? In the nineteenth century the famous scholar Karl Lachmann, proposed his homonym method to produce a critical edition, which is composed by the recensio, collatio and emendatio steps which for electronic editing should be updated adding edition, how the edition is created, and conservatio, how it is preserved. Electronic scholarly editions are currently in a very dynamic state, with their number constantly growing. But their intellectual features challenge even the most advanced electronic publishing technologies with many implications on the semantic web vision. Moreover more than often they adopt a particular approach with the result of being architectural dysmorphic with each others. What this paper wants to address are the methodological and technological implications of creating a scholarly editions using the electronic medium, using both an empirical than a theoretical point of view, addressing their role as that of an important tile in the the larger mosaic of Digital Humanities and eScience for the Arts and the Humanities.