Digital Scholarly Editions

Transcription

1 1/20 Digital Scholarly Editions Magdalena Turska

2 2/20 At the heart of the edition: the text. What is text? I am not so naïve as to imagine that question could ever be finally settled. Asking such a question is like asking How long is the coast. of England?. (J. McGann).. Text is what you look at. And how you look at it. (P. Sahle)

3 3/20 Text is not the only interest in an edition verbal codes : text, marginalia, reading notes non-verbal codes : pencil marks, dog ears, changes in medium, writing, etc.

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5 5/ Walt Whitman, page of Leaves of Grass,

6 6/20 Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet, Autograph manuscript and corrected galley proofs signed, 1833

7 Maria Skłodowska-Curie, notebook 7/20

8 8/20 In getting my books, Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1844, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this is not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of penciling in suggested thoughts, agreements, and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.

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10 10/20 Different types of editions Type facsimile edition Genetic edition Diplomatic edition Semi-diplomatic edition Critical edition

11 11/20 Witnessess Edition concerned with a single witness diplomatic semi-diplomatic facsimile reading genetic Edition with multiple witnesses Stemmatics (mainly multiple scribal versions) Copy-text (mainly multiple authorial versions) Eclecticism (too many versions) Phylogenetic

12 12/20 Editions given a single witness, when and why 1. the unique witness is the original, i.e. it is an autograph or a copy controlled by the author 2. the unique witness is the only surviving copy of a larger tradition 3. the witness is part of a wider tradition, but has an individual importance 4. the tradition of a text is so messed up that it is impossible to understand the relations among witnesses 5. The editor is interested in the process of authoring 6. the editor thinks that any critical edition is a historical falsification

13 13/20 Stemmatics The Lachmannian method for editing: Recensio Collatio Examinatio Selectio (et emendatio) Editio

14 14/20 Scholarly Editions. Ẹdition ist die erschließende Wiedergabe historischer Dokumente. Ạ scholarly edition is the critical representation of historical documents "historical documents": editing is concerned with documents that already exist. To publish a new document (which doesn't refer to something preexisting) is not scholarly editing. "representation": covers (abstract) representation as well as presentation (reproduction). Publishing descriptive data (e.g. metadata) without reproduction is not critical editing. A catalogue, a database, a calendar is not an edition. "critical / scholarly": reproduction of documents without critical examination is not scholarly editing. A facsimile is not a scholarly edition. P. Sahle

15 15/20 SE is about a research question. Ṛesearch objective determines what is deemed necessary to annotate apparatus criticus commentary genetic editing transcription normalisation metadata (always, but not always the same) linguistic features list goes on forever...

16 16/20 Editorial operations and decisions Scope: the text or the document? Reading the text: how to handle holes, gaps, damages, unreadable passages, word spacing, and abbreviations? History of the manuscript/layer and stratification: are there annotations from different hands? What to do with them? Codicological issues: how was the original manuscript assembled? Is it still assembled in that way? Is it complete? Has it been bound with other material?

17 17/20 Spectrum of editorial intervention Abbreviations Word spacing Line breaks Additions/deletions Spellings Errors Etc.

18 18/20 But what is a Digital Scholarly Edition digital!= digitized A digital edition can not be printed without a loss of information and/or functionality. The digital edition is guided by a different paradigm. If the paradigm of an edition is limited to the two-dimensional space of the "page" and to typographic means of information representation, then it's not a digital edition.. Ḍigital scholarly editions are not just scholarly editions in digital media.

19 19/20 The 'digital' enhancements scope: volume makes the print version impractical or impossible linked data: extensive use of pointers to linked material on-site or elsewhere searches: full-text search with pattern matching, context aware search visualisations: timelines, maps, graphs, word-clouds, topic-extraction... linguistic analysis facsimiles: hi-quality images, zooming, zone-level annotation social aspects: comments allowing for scholarly discussion in context of published material

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