Presentation given at 49th Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, in the session "Medieval Texts and Digital Editions: Obstacles and Opportunities", organized by SEENET/Piers Plowman Electronic Archive

1. New Theory, New Editors and
Readers, New Editions
Peter Robinson
University of Saskatchewan

2. — Edition?
— Social Edition?
— Documentary Edition?
— Archive?
— Resource?
—Thematic research collection?
New Theory: what’s in a name?

3. — Try to include everything!
— Try to be all things to all people!
— Be social! Let anyone do anything!
Bad theory leads to bad editions
What happens if you don’t resist
the materials?

4. You can include images and transcriptions of
documents really easily
— Jane Austen manuscripts
— Shakespeare quartos
— The edition is not the interface
Failing to resist: the “image-
based” edition

5. — You need a theory of the work (forthcoming
Ecdotica collection)
— Edition 101: a hypothesis of relationships
among the documents and the work
An edition mediates the work

6. This is what I call an edition

7. These things are really tough to make
— Gather all the images
— Transcribe all the texts
— Compare all the texts
— Discover how they are related
— Produce an edition

8. — Textual Communities
— www.textualcommunities.usask.ca
It takes a community

9. 1. The text of both the document and of the
work should be encoded;
2. All editorial acts should be attributed;
3. All materials should, by default, be available
by a Creative Commons share-alike license;
4. All materials should be available independent
of any one interface;
5. All materials should be held in a sustainable
long-term storage system, such as an
institutional repository

10. Social, Digital, Scholarly
Editing
Saskatoon, 11-13 July 2013

11. How we may work
NOT:
One Edition/One Scholar/One Digital Humanist
INSTEAD:
Lots of editions with lots of people creating lots
of data, open to all
Lots of other people doing lots of things with the
data – making interfaces, exploring it different
ways
Many Editions/Many Scholars/Many Digital Humanists

12. Coming soon! The CantApp: Chaucer for
mobile phones
www.textualcommunities.usask.ca
peter.robinson@usask.ca