Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience

Description

Publishing Scholarly Editions offers new intellectual tools for publishing digital editions that bring readers closer to the experimental practices of literature, editing, and reading. After the Introduction (Section 1), Sections 2 and 3 frame intentionality and data analysis as intersubjective, interrelated, and illustrative of experience-as-experimentation. These ideas are demonstrated in two editorial exhibitions of nineteenth-century works: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, and the anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, edited by Mary Anne Rawson. Section 4 uses pragmatism to rethink editorial principles and data modelling, arguing for a broader conception of the edition rooted in data collections and multimedia experience. The Conclusion (Section 5) draws attention to the challenges of publishing digital editions, and why digital editions have failed to be supported by the publishing industry. If publications are conceived as pragmatic inventions based on reliable, open-access data collections, then editing can embrace the critical, aesthetic, and experimental affordances of editions of experience.

'In Publishing Scholarly Editions, Christopher Ohge cogently argues for approaching editing in pragmatic terms, explicitly invoking the ideas of William James and John Dewey. Such an approach emphasizes the complexities of writerly acts, publishing exigencies, and readerly interpretations and charts the networks of actions and practices that constitute literary experience. Through a lucid contribution to editorial theory and deftly articulated case studies, Ohge shows the opportunities that scholarly editing and especially digital editing provide for displaying these complexities and networks and opening up, rather than closing down, meaning.' Samuel Otter, Professor and Slusser Chair in English at the University of California and author of Melville's Anatomies 'Ohge foregrounds minimal computing as one way to navigate the dilemma pitting editing against publishing. But his objective in this engaging and thought-provoking book - one necessary for our juncture in time - is to raise questions more than to offer answers (certainly not easy ones). Indeed, the last chapter raises a question that is critical to the future of scholarly editing: 'What, then, is the meaning and function of the publisher in the digital age?' (116). In reality, this question is essential to the future of humanistic scholarship generally, and Ohge's probing exploration of it is one of the most important dimensions of his book.' Geoffrey Turnovsky, Textual Cultures