Critical Editing in a Digital Horizon

The essay describes and reflects on the changes and transformations induced in scholarly editorial practice by the introduction of the new digital technologies. However, since the basic procedures and goals of scholarly editing remain the same, the essay first makes a brief review of the forms and procedures of scholarly editing that are licensed by codex technology and of the current state of text-editing theory and method. The advent of information technology has transformed in many ways the terms in which editorial and textual studies are able to be conceived and conducted. Digital tools permit the scholar to conceive of an editorial environment incorporating multimedia materials of many different kinds that might be physically located anywhere. The accessibility of an enormous amount of unscrutinized digital materials has however somewhat obscured the new opportunities that have been opened to scholarly practice. Thus the essay devotes particular attention to the ways in which the text can be marked and organized for formal analysis in a digital representation and reflects on how the new technologies are forcing us to revisit and rethink some of the most basic problems of textuality and theory of text. Finally, the essay discusses certain practical methodological implications of these reflections. In particular, it indicates how some documentary and autopoietic functions of the text, conceived of as a social phenomenon, can be transformed in into computable code.