Text Editing, Print and the Digital World

Citation

Barker, P. (2010), "Text Editing, Print and the Digital World", The Electronic Library, Vol. 28 No. 6, pp. 893-894. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471011093589

This book is Volume 13 in a series from Ashgate Publishing that is devoted to the theme of “Digital research in the arts and humanities”. The intention of the series is to explore the application of advanced information and communication technologies and computing methods to research within the arts and humanities areas. This current title is devoted to exploring the use of digital tools and methodologies in relation to text editing and print. The book's origin lies in a series of seminars on textual editing that was held in King's College, London in 2006. Overall, the remit of the book is to appraise the benefits and drawbacks of digital text editing techniques in relation to the creation of complex scholarly editions of literary work.

Following on from the editors' introduction to the book, the subsequent material is organised into two parts. The six chapters that make up part 1 are devoted to the theme “In theory”. The remaining five chapters (part 2) are then concerned with the topic “In practice”. The narrative contributions to the book are supplemented by an extensive collective bibliography. This book has something of an international flavour in that the contributing authors hail from locations as far afield as Australia, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Sweden and the UK.

Some of the interesting and important contributions in the first part of the book include: a discussion of the need to develop an electronic equivalent of textual theory that will accommodate the differences between printed text and its digital counterpart; the loss of “bookishness” when a book is transcribed to electronic form; and the properties and uses of scholarly editions – and the impact that new media, digital transmission and digital archives are having in relation to their creation. Also included in this part of the book are some valuable discussions on, respectively: open source critical editions; and minimal and maximal editions – leading to the proposition that “the electronic edition is the medium par excellence … ” (p. 110). Within this first section of the book, I particularly enjoyed the two chapters that explored the use of markup and its existing, and potential future roles within literary work and text processing.

I found the material in the second part of the book as interesting and stimulating as that in the first section. Indeed the contributions from the authors involved in part 2 describe and discuss a range of different topics such as: past and present text editing and digitisation projects in Norway; and the potential future importance of “hybrid editions” based upon the use of complementary print and electronic representations of a text corpus. There are also three interesting chapters that describe “unusual” applications which would not have been possible were it not for the affordances offered by the digital arena. These applications deal with: the digitisation of non‐book material (such as long runs of periodicals and newspapers); digitising and publishing inscribed texts; and the use of digital genetic editions and the encoding of temporal data within manuscript transcriptions.

This book was an enjoyable one to read. It offers an interesting collection of essays that discuss many different perspectives of the “interplay” that exists between conventional and digital representations of scholarly works. Each of the essays provides valuable insight into some of the problems, which researchers in this area face – and some of the solutions that are being adopted as a result of the use of digital technologies.