Issues in Electronic Scholarly Editions

Abstract

Electronic texts and the Internet have been variously credited with inducing a revolution as great as that of moveable type in the fifteenth century, a new form of democracy and egalitarianism, and a cognitive liberation from the constraints of linear reading and writing. At the same time they have led users into some unexpected pitfalls: incompatible platforms, limiting and eventually abandoned proprietary systems, and orphaned storage formats. The increasing strength of standardizing movements including meta-markup schemes offers a way forward, although even their deliberately open systems are in recurrent danger of being reinscribed in proprietary formats. A subset of electronic publishing is concerned with the storage, circulation and display of significant existing texts which often have complex publishing histories. The electronic mode offers rich possibilities for the presentation of these texts and in doing so throws light on ways in which texts exist and are used. The complexity of the TEI DTD, for example, shows how much information about a text and its history can be deemed to be important and therefore necessary to record. Perhaps as important as the preservation and display of electronic texts is the facility with which they can be analyzed and manipulated. This manipulability contains its own problems, however, especially that of maintaining the integrity of a text which may have been prepared with great care and exactitude. The JITM system, which my colleagues will describe, safeguards the integrity of the edited text while providing high levels of manipulability and collaborative access.