Electronic Textual Editing

The long history of textual editing and scholarship has been intimately involved with the physique of the book, which set limits on the presentation and study of text. Increasingly, since the 1980s, the written word has taken on a digital form, and the shift from codex to computer, from print to electronic media, creates new opportunities―and new difficulties.

This volume offers an emerging consensus about the fundamental issues of electronic textual editing. It provides practical advice and faces theoretical questions. Its twenty-four essays deal with markup coding and procedures, electronic archive administration, use of standards (such as Unicode), rights and permissions, and the changing and challenging environment of the Internet. Some of the specific texts discussed are Greek and Latin inscriptions, the Gospel of John, the Canterbury Tales, William Blake’s poems and art, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Devil’s Walk, Stijn Streuvels’s De teleurgang van den Waterhoek, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, and the papers of Thomas Edison.

The guidelines of the MLA’s Committee on Scholarly Editions, recently revised to address electronic editions, are included in full.