Electronic Archives and Critical Editing

Developments in traditional editorial theory and method that came into prominence 25 years ago have converged with more recent online IT resources to establish important, perhaps even breakthrough, approaches to the ways we pursue the scholarly investigation of cultural materials. Various online projects illustrate the widespread effort to create digital tools and environments for studying cultural materials at remarkable levels of complexity. Scholarly ‘editing’ no longer confines itself to a focus on textual documents alone, but now pursues investigations into the entire social context that comprises the cultural work. Moving from a brief look at the theoretical foundations of these developments, this essay sketches the shape of this scholarly work and supplies a few examples of what it entails. In the 1980s, editorial theory and method made a significant move into what became known as a ‘social theory of text’. For Anglo-American scholarship, two books defined this turn: A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983) and Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986). The move entailed rethinking a crucial distinction we traditionally make: the distinction between a text and its context. For the past 25 years, many scholars have been exploring the fault lines of that distinction. Recent work in antebellum American literature – for instance, studies by J. Gerald Kennedy, Jonathan Elmer, Terence Whalen, Eliza Richards, and Meredith McGill– have been especially interesting for me, as I shall explain in a moment. At the outset of her study of ‘the Poe Circle’, Eliza Richards gives an admirable summary of a social text approach to literary study: ‘the poetics of creation are inseparable from the poetics of reception’ (1). The complete genetic information about any cultural work is coded in the double helix of its DNA, that is, in the co-dependent relation of its production history and its reception history. While much more could and should be said about the structure of that codependent relation, the essential point to realize is that each strand of this double helix is produced by the collaboration of multiple agents. The terms ‘the poet’ and ‘the reader’ are high-level generalized descriptors of a dialectical process of various persons and institutions. In that frame of reference, one can lay out a complete matrix for a socio-historical interpretive method. The method is prescribed by six foundational protocols defining the mechanics of a social text. Briefly these are: