The reader-oriented scholarly edition

Abstract

Recent attempts to computer-model the scholarly edition so as to permit the crowd-sourcing of its production have misunderstood its nature. Scholarly editions are, in their methodology and form, not unchanging, nor are their underlying conceptions simple. This essay is, in response, a reflection on the opportunities that the digital form potentially offers editors about how they may gain traction by taking advantage of the capacities and logic of the new medium. The main proposal stems from leaving the representational question on hold (how the edition represents the work and the methodologies used to achieve that) and instead considering the edition primarily as a transaction with its readers—those print-counterparts of the digital crowd. The history of post-war scholarly editions is reviewed for its evolving understandings of the reader-user. Then a conceptual separation between the archive and the edition is proposed so that a new, more reader-oriented definition of editorial responsibilities can be envisaged for digital scholarly editions—something that the logic of the print medium forbade.