Current issues in making digital editions of medieval texts—or, do electronic scholarly editions have a future?

The digital edition ten years on

§ 1   Scholars working in our area—broadly, texts from medieval western Europe—now have around a decade of experience of making digital editions. In 1994, Hoyt N. Duggan posted the prospectus for the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive to the IATH webserver (Duggan 1994/2003). SEENET, the Society for Early Engish and Norse Electronic Texts of which the archive is a major part, first appeared on the web about the same time and has published four CD-ROMs since (<http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/seenet/home.html>). At the same time, Kevin Kiernan's work with the Beowulf manuscript was bearing its first electronic fruit in Kiernan 1994 and, ultimately, Kiernan 1999/2003. My own Canterbury Tales Project dates to the same time: we published the first volume of our Occasional Papers (effectively a prospectus for the whole project) in 1993, our first CD-ROM in 1996 (Robinson 1996), and five more discs in subsequent years (Solopova 2000; Stubs 2001; Bordalejo 2003; Lloyd Morgan 2003; Robinson 2004a).

§ 2   Ten years and the experience of so many is a reasonable platform for discussions about what has been (and might have been) achieved. I have recently written three articles that include various retrospective and prospective elements. The first, The history, discoveries and aims of the Canterbury Tales project (Robinson 2003), deals specifically with the work of that project over the last decade. The second, The Canterbury Tales and other medieval texts (Robinson Forthcoming), reviews some lessons from that project. The third, Where we are with electronic scholarly editions, and where we want to be? (Robinson 2004b), explores more general issues relating to all electronic editions.

§ 3   These articles deal with specific questions which I do not need, therefore, to rehearse in this article. Robinson Forthcoming, for example, recommends strongly that electronic editing projects should make full electronic transcripts of manuscript sources, that these transcripts should be made according to explicit principles, and that the transcripts should be made available under an open transcription policy. Robinson 2004b addresses a wider issue, describing a model of collaborative scholarship and publication leading toward what I describe as fluid, co-operative and distributed editions. One could say that Robinson Forthcoming focusses on narrower issues of project organization, while Robinson 2004b argues toward a considerable, and very challenging, desideratum: a means by which scholarly work may be dynamically corrected, revised and augmented (a kind of scholarly Wikipedia, if you will).

§ 4   There are two issues which these articles do not face. Firstly, and particularly in the case of Robinson 2004b and Robinson Forthcoming, they assume as a given that the case for electronic editions does not need to be made: that such editions are of such self-evident superiority that one need not argue the point. Secondly, they have very little to say about the tools available to scholars for making electronic editions. Rather, there is an unspoken assumption that the benefits of the electronic medium are so great that one might bear unreasonable inconvenience in order to make editions for it. In light of the first assumption, indeed, one might even argue—wrongly, however—that the issue of tools hardly matters: one uses what one has to use to gain the great advantages of the digital medium, and that is that.

§ 5   In fact, I think these assumptions involve the two most important issues that those of us concerned with making digital editions of medieval texts must face. After more than a decade of experience, we are at a crossroads. Rather few of us have made rather few digital editions. Are we the pioneers, then, who are making a trail that now many more will follow? Or are we brave experimenters who have produced some very interesting results but at a cost so high that our work remains something that few will repeat? To put it another way: in the future, will the great majority of scholarly editions in our area be conceived, executed, and published in digital form, with print being restricted to a few specialized instances? Or will things remain instead much as they are now, with most editions being prepared for print publication, and digital editions restricted to a few specialized instances? As a long-time maker of digital editions, obviously I see myself as a pioneer, not an experimenter. By definition, I think that most of the Digital Medievalist community also will prefer to see the first rather than the second vision of the future come to pass. But we will not achieve this unless we resolve these issues of perception and tools. The whole scholarly community needs to be persuaded that digital editions are indeed superior to print; and it needs to have access to tools so that any scholar who can make a print edition can make a digital edition instead.

The continuing dominance of print editions

§ 6   We should begin by being realistic about the degree to which print editions still predominate. Print editions, some of them quite major, are still being conceived and made. Existing major print editions commonly have been slow to convert to electronic form. We have become rather too familiar with what one might call the token electronic edition: the edition where the real meat is on display in the print version, and the electronic version consisting of flat, plain-text files, distributed on the internet or in CD-ROM. This is not because scholars and publishers do not know about digital editions. Consider the example of the Early English Text Society (EETS), perhaps the single most important body of editions for medievalists working with English materials. Over the last decade, it is known that the EETS board has discussed several times whether and how the EETS corpus should go digital. The society has collaborated with several initiatives to put substantial segments of the EETS into electronic form—as part, for example, of the Middle English Compendium (MEC) (<http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/mec/>). There has also been an interesting experiment, led by Bella Millet of Southampton University, in preparing a specimen digital edition of part of the Ancrene Wisse with a view to creating a model of practice that might be used more widely by EETS editors (Millet 2003). However, the EETS board has so far (to my knowledge) refrained from an absolute declaration that all future EETS editions will be prepared and published in digital form. And frankly, it would be irresponsible for the board, or any similar agency, to issue any such edict at present. Before any such declaration could be made by a major editorial group, we would need to satisfactorily address the two issues on which this article focusses: we would would need to establish an overwhelming agreement within the community that digital editions are indeed the way to go; and we would need to have tools available so that any editor who had the skills to make a print edition could make a digital one instead.

§ 7   One can see the EETS experience repeated elsewhere. The Model Editions Partnership (MEP) was initiated some ten years ago with the aim of achieving for American documentary editors much what Millet's EETS-sponsored project had in mind for early English: the creation of a model which could then be generalized to all American documentary editions (such as the large National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded editions of the papers of Franklin, Adams, and Twain). Despite considerable effort from an exceptionally well-qualified project team and some impressive prototype results (see <http://adh.sc.edu/>^[1] ; also Chesnutt 1995), the MEP does not appear to have shifted the paradigm of American documentary editions from print to digital. Crossing the Atlantic to the UK, the situation is if anything, worse. The two major academic publishers, Cambridge University Press (CUP) and Oxford University Press (OUP), both in the last decade actually have stopped publishing scholarly editions in digital form. This is the more remarkable given that, in the first half of the 1990s, both publishers made considerable investments in electronic publication of scholarly editions. OUP was first, with the massive project that eventually published some 20,000 pages of Wittgenstein's Nachlaß in digital facsimile and transcripts. But even before this was published, the press had decided to pull back from digital publication of scholarly editions. In 1993, I was looking for a publisher who might be able to publish my edition of the Wife of Bath's Prologue in electronic form. Informal soundings at OUP led to a polite but firm no: the press was already concerned about the viability of such digital editions and was not willing to commit itself to any more. At around the same time, a group from Birmingham University approached the press with a proposal for a digital edition of Johnson's Dictionary and received the same response. It happened that exactly at this time, CUP became interested in the possibility of scholarly editions in digital form. Discussions between myself and key staff at the press followed and bore fruit in the first two electronic publications of the Canterbury Tales Project (Robinson 1996 and Solopova 2000) and the CD-ROM of the Birmingham project's edition of Johnson's Dictionary (McDermott 1996). At one point, around late 1994, we all became rather excited about the prospects for digital editions (then called electronic editions): proposals were flowing in for electronic editions from so many scholars, that CUP even issued a prospectus for a Cambridge Electronic Editions series. The excitement soon faded, however, as CUP discovered what OUP had already learnt: that electronic editions cost no less than print editions to produce and require staff to be educated in the new possibilities. One can see this new scepticism in an article I wrote with Kevin Taylor of CUP on our experiences in publishing the The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM (Robinson and Taylor 1998). By 1999, CUP too had had enough and informed me that our second planned CD-ROM in the series, Elizabeth Solopova's edition of the The General Prologue, was the last they could commit to publishing. In need of an alternative publication venue, and having discovered that the University of Michigan Press had also deserted the electronic publication field, I set up a new electronic publishing house, Scholarly Digital Editions (SDE). We have been moderately successful in attracting other scholars interested in making digital editions, but hardly so much as to raise visions of a mass changeover from print to digital. Nor is it that editors have stopped editing or publishers publishing their work. While neither OUP nor CUP were willing to publish editions exclusively on CD-ROM, both presses have committed to new, large, and primarily print-based editorial projects such as the new Cambridge Ben Johnson and the new Oxford Jonathan Swift.

Have we gone wrong?

§ 8   In academic life (perhaps unlike in other spheres of human activity) to lead is to follow slightly in advance of where others are already going. Scholars are not now heading in the direction of electronic editions and pronouncements from on high will not force them to go there. We have to conclude that many scholars are not persuaded of the advantages of digital editions—or at least that they are still sufficiently satisfied with print editions as to be happy to continue to make and use them. About a decade ago, there was a small spate of articles hymning the glories of electronic editions as we then imagined them (e.g. McGann 1995/1997 and articles by myself and others in Sutherland 1997, Landow and Delaney 1993, and Finneran 1996). Were we wrong then in our belief that the electronic scholarly editions to come would indeed be massively superior to anything that a print edition could ever be? We now have, as we did not then, several instances of full electronic editions. We no longer need to speak speculatively of what digital editions might be. It is now possible to compare what actually has been done with what we then thought might be possible. Is it that the actuality has fallen so far short of the hope?

The current state of affairs

§ 12   Our discussion of the first of the two issues—the superiority of digital editions over print editions—thus leads us to two contradictory positions. Firstly, it is rather clear that well-made digital editions are better than print editions from the perspective of their users. I think the digital editions named above show this comprehensively and I am not aware of any study that attempts to argue the opposite. Indeed, of the many kinds of print objects produced over the last centuries, it is difficult to think of any genre that is so well adapted to the computer as the scholarly edition. The layers of footnotes, the multiplicity of textual views, the opportunities for dramatic visualization interweaving the many with each other and offering different modes of viewing the one within the many—all this proclaims I am a hypertext: invent a dynamic device to show me. The computer is exactly this dynamic device. There may be reasons to doubt the superiority of digital forms of other types of print objects such as books and newspapers.[2] But scholarly editions are something else again: if mass copying of the certain texts in the late days of the manuscript age prefigured the print age to come, then the elaborate print editions of the last decades have prefigured the digital age.

Comparing the digital and print worlds

§ 21   Should you choose this third option, a pleasant surprise awaits you. While tools for making and publishing electronic scholarly editions seem rather too difficult for the average scholar, tools for making an impressive print edition are far easier to find and use. There are several based around Donald Knuth's venerable but beautiful typesetting system TeX, e.g. John Lavagnino and Dominic Wujastyk's EDMAC program with Bernt Karasch's Critical Edition Typesetter (see <http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/edmac/index.html>)^[5] ); Typographica Academica Traiectina (<http://www.typographica.nl>). Others are based on extensions of the Microsoft Word family of software: e.g. Imprimatur (<http://www.geocities.com/imprimaturweb/>) and the Classical Text Editor (CTE) (<http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kvk/cte/index.htm>), which seems the most fully developed and supported, and has been used by more than 16 projects and editions.

§ 22   Other pleasant thoughts console the editor who chooses to work with print. We have had centuries of experience in the making of print editions. We know what they look like, how they might be published and used. Particularly, there is a wealth of practical advice to draw on: how to prepare data about variation between versions; how to prepare the edition, apparatus, introductions and notes for the publisher. Of course too for print we have many possible choices for publication. There are all the traditional academic publishing houses—several of which, including Elsevier, Oxford, and Cambridge, have centuries-long traditions of publishing critical editions, leading at times back to the beginnings of print. Now these are joined by many smaller specialist publishers, including some that use on-demand systems for books with very small print runs.

The way forward

§ 23   Given these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that electronic editions have not made the impact that we expected in the last years. But all the advantages we foresaw for them remain valid, and the few electronic editions that actually have been made have shown that these advantages are real and practical. I believe that it must still be our goal that most scholarly editions should be made and distributed in electronic form (often alongside a print counterpart) with comparatively few editions being made in print form alone. This is precisely the reverse of the situation at the moment. So how do we get there from where we are now?

§ 24   In the last decade, we have tried to promote the making of electronic scholarly editions by giving individuals the knowledge of the encoding schemes and of the software to exploit them. Thus the many courses in TEI encoding, usually with a software component, attached to humanities computing conferences or mounted by specialist centres. While these certainly have served some areas well (notably the digital library domain), they have had little impact on the scholarly editing community. I do not believe that putting on more such courses focussed on scholarly editing, attempting to produce better documentation, or further refining the TEI guidelines, will help.

Conclusions

§ 30   Throughout this article, I have expressed what I think should be our aim: that some time quite soon scholars wishing to make scholarly editions will naturally choose the electronic form. It follows then that all major series of scholarly editions, including those now published by the major academic presses, also will become digital. There will be exceptions: there always will be a place for a printed reader's edition or similar. But we should expect that for most of the purposes for which we now use editions, the editions we use will be electronic. We should do this not just to keep up with the rest of the world, but because indeed electronic editions make possible kinds of reading and research never before available and offer valuable insights into and approaches to the texts they cover.

§ 31   But this will not happen simply because we will it, or because this conclusion is obvious. We need some things we do not yet have: software that does not exist and established online publication systems that have yet to be created. Let us not wait too long for these.