Presentation given at 49th Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, in the session "Medieval Texts and Digital Editions: Obstacles and Opportunities", organized by SEENET/Piers Plowman Electronic Archive
Generative AI for Technical Writer or Information Developers
New Theory, New Editors and Readers, New Editions
1. New Theory, New Editors and
Readers, New Editions
Peter Robinson
University of Saskatchewan
2. — Edition?
— Social Edition?
— Documentary Edition?
— Archive?
— Resource?
—Thematic research collection?
New Theory: what’s in a name?
3. — 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?
4. 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
5. — 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
7. 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
9. 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
11. 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 all
Lots of other people doing lots of things with the
data – making interfaces, exploring it different
ways
Many Editions/Many Scholars/Many Digital Humanists
12. Coming soon! The CantApp: Chaucer for
mobile phones
www.textualcommunities.usask.ca
peter.robinson@usask.ca