Defining the Scholarly Edition: a reconsideration

It might be a good idea to step back (following on the previous post) and make a distinction between the scholarly edition and the critical edition.  We might define the former as any instantiation of a text that is produced according to some scholarly principles for use by scholars. Thus for some scholarly uses, the establishment of a text and analysis of its history and variant states might be of foremost importance, as is the case for many literary texts designed for use by professional scholars. For other scholarly purposes, the contextual information and commentary around the text (the introductions and the annotations, for example) might be the most important work of the edition.  This might be true for texts designed for student scholars, or for use in disciplines other than literary studies.  Even in literary studies, the textual work of an edition is more important for some works and some historical periods than others.

A student edition of Terence, designed to enable the student to make inter-linear translations (1521)
Fisher Rare Book Library B-10 5336

A scholarly edition of Terence with an emphasis on commentary (1544)
Fisher Rare Book Library hutt 00012

In his emphasis on the textual work of the scholarly edition (as opposed to the contextualizing work) Shillingsburg arguable blurs the line between the scholarly edition in general and the critical edition in particular.  A critical edition focuses more fully on the text. D. C. Greetham defines a scholar edition as an edition that attempts to establish a text through the exercise of editorial judgment and/or choice, as opposed to merely reproducing a text already in existence (347).  It should contain “an apparatus that presents the evidence used in the text’s construction and that lists the variants of the authoritative states... ”; and “since critical editions are eclectic [i.e., in the sense of requiring choice among variant alternatives],” their preparers “must have some principle of eclecticism, some basis on which to judge the authority of the variant readings and states of the text and on which to make emendations” (Williams and Abbott, 57).

Works Cited

Greetham, D. C. Textual Scholarship. New York: Garland, 1994.

Terence. Comoediae. Paris, 1521.

--------. Comoediae. Venice, 1544.

Williams, Bill and Craig Abbott. An Introduction to Bibliography and Textual Studies. 2d ed. New York: MLA, 1989.

Defining the Scholarly Edition

The current focus of INKE extending into the coming year is the scholarly edition.  This was an opening gambit from the Textual Studies team as INKE began to think about how we might re-imagine this well developed print genre in the digital medium.

Scholarly editions are moving targets, both diachronically and synchronically, which means that any single definition will be provisional, but also that the scholarly edition is inherently a rich manifestation of a diverse range åçof practices. 

Peter Shillingsburg has recently defined scholarly editing with a strong emphasis on the materiality of the text: “The core goal of all scholarly editing (regardless of medium) is to provide a reliable text of a historical work and allow readers to see or feel or sense the historical materialities and contexts of the work. This contrasts with most Internet-available texts from which the materiality of the source book has been stripped away like a banana peel” (“Impact” 22). His definition and the distinction it relies upon might not be universally accepted, but it is a helpful point of reference as we consider both what might be gain and what might be lost in moving scholars editing from the page to the screen.

Shillingsburg links his definition to a list of specific desiderata for digital scholarly editions (Gutenberg 92-3), all of which might translate into specific affordances that could be modelled and implemented in prototypes. In that spirit, and for INKE’s purposes, we find that scholarly editions tend to have at least some of the following characteristics:

• they account for the text’s transmission over time, including changes made by the creator of the present edition
• they account for alternate versions of the text
• they provide additional information to explain or comment upon the text
• they provide an instance of the text
• they include finding mechanisms for sub-sets (word, section, chapter, etc.) of the text

Works Cited

Peter Shillingsburg. From Gutenberg to Google. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

Peter Shillingsburg. “The Impact of Computers on the Art of Scholarly Editing.” Electronic Publishing: Politics and Pragmatics. Ed. Gabriel Egan. Toronto & Tempe, AZ: Iter/Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010. 17–29.