Introduction: Historical Perspectives on Digital Editing

These essays originated as papers for a panel entitled "Historical Perspectives on Digital Editing" for the 2012 Society for Textual Scholarship Conference at the University of Texas. Amy Earhart, Brett Barney, and I all came to textual studies through digital work. We believe that many early career scholars working in textual studies and editing today, like us, were introduced to these fields through assistantships on digital projects or seminars on digital topics. While digital editorial work has reinvigorated the field of editing, students, faculty, and professional editors working on digital projects often lack an understanding of the pre-digital history of editing, and how current digital methodologies were born out of print ones. We hope that our essays, focusing on the Cold War genesis of certain editorial assumptions, the marginalization of editing and reconsideration of its goals in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the origins and evolution of the now monolithic Text Encoding Initiative, will suggest ways for other primarily digital editors to consider their work within a longer intellectual history.

All three of us work on digital literary projects focusing on nineteenth-century American literature: Brett is an associate editor of the Walt Whitman Archive, Amy edits Digital Concord, and I edit The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk: Race and Ethnic Images in American Children's Literature, 1880-1939. Each of us has experience with and admiration for TEI, which in the first decade of this century grew into a robust and exciting international scholarly community devoted to developing the most rigorous and widely applicable methods for encoding texts for the humanities. Running through these three essays is our concern about whether rigorous editorial projects will enjoy such a community in the coming decade, as "big data" comes to define the promise of digital textuality. Many practitioners of digital humanities increasingly see careful "by hand" editing as antiquated and automatable, and view the goal of digital editions as the creation of corpora encoded to the lowest common denominator in order to ease data mining and interoperability. We hope that the historical view that we adopt in the following essays can give us insight into the current crisis in editing: that the methods for editing print literary editions were fairly homogeneous for much of the twentieth century, that editing was born again after a period of tumult and introspection, in which its methods and relationship to the larger humanities were reconsidered, and that we seem to be in a similar historical moment now, as digital editing is coming to be seen as factory work and faces an identity crisis that, we hope, might make it stronger.