Abstract
Although textual scholars agree that collation is a crucial component of the editing process, it often goes undefined and only briefly explained. This article defines the term, explains different kinds of collation, and explores some of its applications. We emphasize stemmatology and medieval textual traditions. By drawing from editorial examples and the theoretical frameworks of projects centred on works such as the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, Dante’s Commedia and the Greek New Testament, the article seeks to compare manual and computer-assisted approaches to collation methods. We delineate the scope of this activity and argue that computer-assisted collation minimizes the risk of missing out on relevant data. We examine the advantages of full-text collation over sample collation and conclude that no decisions about stemmatically significant variation can be made a priory and that variant distribution is the major factor weighing on significance.
Highlights
Bordalejo and Vázquez: You’re Collating Just Fine and Other Lies You’ve Been Telling Yourself we restate that editions depend on a limited number of variants
Even in the case of digital editions, where every piece of variation can be included, we are forced to reckon with the reality represented by our limited number of texts
Human intellect is limited, when it refers to a large number of items and, for this reason, we rely on other systems to help us process the vast number of variants we detect during a regular collation process
Summary
Like the authors of the Lexicon, we have found references to collation in the context of textual scholarship 2014; Bordalejo 2014; Driscoll and Pierazzo 2016; Bordalejo 2018; Fischer 2019), the vast majority of which live up to Spadini’s description of articles that make a note of collation but never elaborate
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