The Compleat Edition

The nature of a scholarly edition, as of any bibliographical tool, is determined by the historical, technical, social and rhetorical dimensions of the genre. This situatedness puts constrains of the force of scholarly editions: what they can and what they can not do. Claims have been made for the potent reproductive force of scholarly editions, as well as for the making of massive digital facsimile and transcription archives that can be used as platforms for producing new critical editions. This article questions the legitimacy of such assumptions when combined with idealist notions of documents, texts and editions. That the nature of editions is rhetorical rather than neutral, social rather than individualistic, and one of complex translation rather than simple transmission, for instance, suggests that the versatility and reproductivity of the edited material itself will be limited by significant factors. Recognizing this makes us better equipped at subjecting digital editions, libraries, and archives along with the claims some of their surrounding discourses make, to critical inquiry. Scholarly editions (SEs) based on textual criticism have historically been developed in intimate relationship with particular scriptand print-based technologies and distribution logistics.1 In consequence, editorial theories and strategies are intertwined in their scope, rhetorics, and strategies with particular media materialities and epistemologies. This relationship was certainly there in the temporarily stabilized universe of print media, but was rarely discussed. It is now becoming so to an increasing degree. We are currently experiencing not one but several parallel introductions of new media and technologies, exhibiting radically different logistics and parameters for document production and distribution than previous media ecologies do. For instance, new media and web distribution promise to vastly enhance the spatial confines of SEs, or even to annihilate them altogether. What changes are we witnessing in the division of labour between the people involved in scholarly editing, the tools they use and between the various media outputs from such endeavours? The making of SEs and archives using new media seems to open up new kinds of communication between academic and professional communities that have formerly been more or less isolated from each other. Programmers and software designers on the one hand and 1 This article was originally published as ”How Reproductive is a Scholarly Edition?” in Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 19 (2004), No. 1, pp. 17-33. Apart from the changed title, a few minor distinctions added and some cosmetic work on the text, the article is virtually the same as in the 2004 version. p-dahlstrom-mats-07-the-compleat-edition.pdf, p. 1 Pre-print version, Mats Dahlström, "The Compleat Edition", 2007 Underlag SEC-seminarium, Uppsala, 9 okt 2007 textual critics and bibliographers on the other have come to work together in several digital editing projects, creating grounds for new kinds of negotiation of competence and power. Editing and editions make use of many different technologies and media. Types of editions also stand in delicate relations to each other due to particular historical ecologies of media. The organisation and architecture of SEs as well as the task division between different media change as the ecology changes. Looking at, for instance, current Scandinavian national editing projects that publish both on the web, on discs, as e-books and in print, such as the Ibsen or Almqvist projects, one sees the forming of a new division of labour between various display and distribution solutions, a changed balance between the variants of edition types. The web edition turns into a large resource archive and editorial laboratory, and even more often into a more or less temporary interface to a changing, dynamic digital archive. This affects the scope and function of the editorial material being printed. The printed version does not have to include the laboratory material of the editors (variants, alternative versions, minor paratexts, illustrations and so forth), but rather confines itself to a single, uniform reader’s text with a minimum of editorial tools and paratexts. The digital cumulative archive on the other hand assumes the role of the primary, with or without a web interface, from which static spin-offs are secondarily launched in print, on CD, as e-books or on the web. The digital archive is thus able to play with various document forms as outputs (Svedjedal, 2000). A printed codex edition embodying one particular editorial theory ideal is therefore no longer the only possible output of the editing endeavour but rather one potential output from among many that at least in theory might satisfy several different and perhaps even rival theoretical ideals. One of the questions we ask ourselves in the light of this development is whether the SE can and should continue to fulfil the same functions. To what extent, if any, might the logic and capabilities of new media affect the essence of scholarly editing? Do we need editions any longer, or should we rather invest our human, economical, and textual resources in massive, long-term digital archives? Any attempt at answering such questions will need to begin by reconsidering the nature of the SE, what forces it has and has not, what limits it has and what kind of factors determine its possibilities and limits. This article attempts a tentative discussion of such forces and limits of the SE, and specifically looks at its supposedly representational and reproductive force. The aim is to identify poles of p-dahlstrom-mats-07-the-compleat-edition.pdf, p. 2 Pre-print version, Mats Dahlström, "The Compleat Edition", 2007 Underlag SEC-seminarium, Uppsala, 9 okt 2007 extreme positions in editorial discourse and thereby to map out the fields of tension and perhaps conflict that lie between them. Coming from the field of bibliography and library and information science, I will also make an argument for the bibliographical dimension of the SE.