Literary Studies in the Digital Age

Over the past twenty years there has been an evolving body of scholarship exploring the standards, theories, and methodologies of digital scholarly editing. Scholarship from the early-to-mid-1990s maintained a bifurcated focus. On the one hand, many textual scholars found themselves in the slightly unusual position of writing primers, guidelines, and documentation laying the groundwork for basic digital tasks, such as Peter Robinson’s The Digitization of Primary Textual Sources, published in 1993, and The Transcription of Primary Textual Sources Using SGML, which followed a year later, or the largely uncredited scholarship created by the many hands that went into the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), first officially published in 1994. Editors and staff members from many scholarly editing projects spent a great deal of time in documenting encoding practices. This documentation proved to be an essential resource to ensure consistent encoding and to help those entering the field understand how a standard like the TEI was put into practice.1