Abstract
It has been more than ten years since the first digital editions began to see the light of day. This article examines the current state of and future possibilities for the digital critical edition. Despite great promise, the article argues, digital editions have not been as successful with the general scholarly community as was expected by early digital theorists. The author attributes this failure to two main problems: a lack of easy-to-use tools and a lack of support from major publishing houses. The result is that it currently remains far easier to make a print than electronic edition. This situation will not improve until the tools and distribution of electronic projects is such that any scholar with the disciplinary skills to make an edition in print can be assured he or she will have access to the tools and distribution necessary to make it in the electronic medium.
Highlights
It has been more than ten years since the first digital editions began to see the light of day
My own Canterbury Tales Project dates to the same time: we published the first volume of our Occasional Papers in 1993, our first CD-ROM in 1996 (Robinson 1996), and five more discs in subsequent years (Solopova 2000; Stubs 2001; Bordalejo 2003; Lloyd Morgan 2003; Robinson 2004a)
The third, "Where we are with electronic scholarly editions, and where we want to be?" (Robinson 2004b), explores more general issues relating to all electronic editions
Summary
In the case of Robinson 2004b and Robinson Forthcoming, they assume as a given that the case for electronic editions does not need to be made: that such editions are of such self-evident superiority that one need not argue the point They have very little to say about the tools available to scholars for making electronic editions. The whole scholarly community needs to be persuaded that digital editions are superior to print; and it needs to have access to tools so that any scholar who can make a print edition can make a digital edition instead
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