New Theory, New Editors and Readers, New Editions

Peter RobinsonUniversity of Saskatchewan

— Edition?— Social Edition?— Documentary Edition?— Archive?— Resource? —Thematic research collection?

New Theory: what’s in a name?

— Try to include everything!— Try to be all things to all people!— Be social! Let anyone do anything!

Bad theory leads to bad editions

What happens if you don’t resist the materials?

You can include images and transcriptions of documents really easily

— Jane Austen manuscripts— Shakespeare quartos— The edition is not the interface

Failing to resist: the “image-based” edition

— You need a theory of the work (forthcoming Ecdotica collection)

— Edition 101: a hypothesis of relationships among the documents and the work

An edition mediates the work

This is what I call an edition

These things are really tough to make

— Gather all the images— Transcribe all the texts— Compare all the texts— Discover how they are related— Produce an edition

— Textual Communities— www.textualcommunities.usask.ca

It takes a community

1. The text of both the document and of the work should be encoded;

2. All editorial acts should be attributed;3. All materials should, by default, be available

by a Creative Commons share-alike license;4. All materials should be available independent

of any one interface;5. All materials should be held in a sustainable

long-term storage system, such as an institutional repository

Social, Digital, ScholarlyEditing

Saskatoon, 11-13 July 2013

How we may work

NOT: One Edition/One Scholar/One Digital Humanist

INSTEAD:Lots of editions with lots of people creating lots of data, open to allLots of other people doing lots of things with thedata – making interfaces, exploring it differentways

Many Editions/Many Scholars/Many Digital Humanists

Coming soon! The CantApp: Chaucer for mobile phones

www.textualcommunities.usask.ca

peter.robinson@usask.ca