Implementing the Devonshire MS (BL Add Ms 17492) as Social Edition

This paper, co-authored with Constance Crompton (Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, U Victoria) offers an understanding the scholarly edition in the context of new and emerging social media from two pertinent perspectives: the first from the perspective of its theoretical context and particularly as that context intersects with a utility-based consideration of the toolkit that allows us to consider the social edition as an extension of the traditions in which the edition is situated, traditions it has the potential to inform productively; the second, the chief focus of the talk, is from the perspective one such edition’s implementation, carried out via a research team operating in conjunction with an advisory group representing key expertise in the methods and content-area embraced by the edition. A central challenge of the editor in such a context is to meet the various partners, stakeholders, and users at their level of technological expertise; although no technological mediation of the text is wholly transparent, it is key to produce online spaces that foster, rather than hinder, scholarly social interaction. The implementation that will form the basis of the example is an edition of the Devonshire MS (BL Add Ms 17492), the first sustained example of men and women writing together in the English literary tradition; see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript