Johanna M. E. Green

Editing in the Digital Age: From Script, to Print, to Digital Page

This strand focuses on editorial theory of literary and non-literary works, from manuscript to printed text, to the digital page. Its central aims are to engage students in the basics of scholarly digital editing, textual scholarship and the critical apparatus of edited texts, building on the approaches and terminology founded in the printed editions of texts of the past 200 years. By the end of the strand, students can expect to be able to:

• identify the advantages and disadvantages of a range of editorial approaches
• engage with the writings of traditional and emerging editorial theorists (such as, inter alia, Jerome McGann, David Greetham, Peter Robinson, D. F. McKenzie, Elena Pierazzo and Bonnie Mak)
• gain hands-on experience of using and appraising digital editions from CD-ROM to online resource
• be able to present a text for editing, arguing for a particular editorial approach
• and demonstrate engagement with current debates for Scholarly Digital Editions vs. Digital Scholarly Editions.

This strand will focus on five main areas:

1. Textual Scholarship and the History of Editorial Theory
2. The Rationale of Hypertext
3. Digital Editions of Literary Works
4. Digital Editions of Non-Literary Works
5. Digital Edition vs. Digital Archive vs. Digitisation

At the end of the strand, students will be expected to make an oral group presentation 'Towards an Edition' of a written text of their choice (i.e. literary work, corpus of letters, other writings &c), outlining their editorial approach and their justification of that approach, their intended audience, and their proposed use of hypertext tools (if any) and their intended function. Presentations will be peer-assessed by the entire class.