Digital Scholarly Editing Theories and Practices

Abstract

The NeDiMAH Experts’ Seminar on Digital Scholarly Editions, held at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands in The Hague in November 2012, was one of the most substantial and concentrated gatherings around a given subject I have ever, I think, attended. Nor is this an idealised memory: it is now fully borne out by the essays deriving from that Seminar assembled in the present volume, each of which is a fresh and much deepened take on the topics addressed in The Hague. To explore the subject ‘Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices’, as this volume is now titled, is to map out the range of demands that digitality makes on textual criticism and editing today. It is also to envisage fresh conceptualisations for the future of these twin disciplines foundational to the humanities. The ‘scholarly edition’ lives in our present time, and will in the future live more uncompromisingly yet, in the digital medium. In consequence, the systemic triplet on which it relies, the hop, step and jump of textual criticism, editing and edition, needs in important respects to be reconceived. It needs to be re-comprehended in terms of the medium.