Compared two editing forms, documentary editing and critical editing, the former has a historical perspective on dealing with text as a relic, thereby emphasizing the author’s intention and strengthening his authority. The latter, on the other hand, focuses on the current context in which the article is being read, so the author’s authority is reduced while at the same time the editor gets transferred some of it. In other words, each has its pros and cons. For the former, it opens wide possibilities for the reader to interpret the content because it is aimed at faithfully conveying the original to the reader. However, in the obsessive process of pursuing to seek the author’s intentions, there can be some sanctification of the original. The latter, meanwhile, has the advantage of enabling past and present to be connected and helping readers understand through modernized versions. However, at the same time, the fact that the understanding is the result of reinterpretation by the editor as an actor within society may cancel out the advantage.

In this regard, I don’t mean to be imperative, but editors may need to be wary of the possibility of reflecting their intentions while successfully reflecting the modern context to the original. I am aware of that the emergence of numerous subjective voices resulting from the development of the media is an inevitable phenomenon in modern society. I also know that being in a ‘completely neutral’ position is almost impossible. Therefore, I think it is necessary to reexamine the collective intelligence aspect of the ‘critic’ that the critical editing form has. Editing in modern society is done through collaboration and interaction among many parts. I think this process will make communication and reflection possible and move future knowledge away from being ideological in the renewed way.

It is not just the sense of what is to be edited has transformed from the traditional notion of the literary work to the modern concept of the text (as introduced by Rolland Barthes in his essay “From Work to Text” [1]) as well as to the expanded application of Barthes’s conception of the text to include nonlinguistic codes such as images and music, the field of scholarly editing itself is undergoing a dramatic change. Electronic editions of the texts become a new option for editors. As Kenneth M. Price mentioned in his essay “Electronic Scholarly Editions” [2], these electronic editions (such as the digital archives) get a lot of storage space inside. This means that high-resolution color images become affordable for a digital archive while they are not affordable for the printed edition. In addition, multiple versions of a text can be all displayed in one electronic edition for the users to compare those valuable texts symbol for symbol and to reflect on the meanings of the differences. 

Given this multiple-texts approach to editing, it seems that the possibility of presenting all versions of a text online diminishes the authority of an editorial team partly because this type of editing is not based on finding an authoritative text based on “final intentions” of the author or of an editorial team. Nonetheless, the range of responsibilities for those scholarly editors is in fact broadened. Editors still define objects in space by shaping the materials to be presented in a digital archive. Furthermore, in order to produce a functionable electronic edition of texts, they have to collaborate with others, such as “librarians, archivists, graduate students, undergraduate students, academic administrators, funding agencies, and private donors” (those whom Price briefly mentioned in his essay [2]). 

Technical experts and knowledge of technical issues are also indispensable in the editorial decision-making [2]. For instance, besides the standard tasks of investigating the history of texts, making critical judgements about them by identifying the works and applying bibliographical findings in the editing process [3], scholarly editors who choose to work in digital medium have to get familiar with the role that the database played in editing [2]. In contrast to any form or mode of narrative (which assigns variant values to variant objects), the database collects individual items without discriminating between different cultural values [4]. To effectively deal with the neutral data, editors still have to make the data accessible to the general individuals through a multimedia narrative. As Price quotes from Horton’s Designing and Writing Online Documentation for reflecting on the relationship between an editorial team and the readers in the digital age, “[The users] may not like being controlled or manipulated, but they do expect the writer to blaze trails for them [2].” 

Reference

[1]       R. Barthes, The rustle of language, 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.
[2]       K. M. Price, “Electronic Scholarly Editions,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2013, pp. 434–450.
[3]       W. P. Williams and C. S. Abbott, An introduction to bibliographical and textual studies, 4th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
[4]       L. Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media.” [Online]. Available: http://time.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/manovich.html. [Accessed: 10-Mar-2020].

In Martha Nell Smith’s essay “Electronic Scholarly Editing” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, she mentions “digital scholarly editing,” which I find very interesting. It is the editor’s work to deal with literal and artistic components of scholarly publication tasks. She gives an example of CD ROM slipped inside the cover of a book. This could be an outdated example for many, but it is a good point on how an editor accesses information in multimedia formats, especially new media formats in the 2020s. In 1997, Chris Marker made his CD movie/book Immemory, which is a hybrid of book, video, audio, and game. Now, both the form and content of multimedia publications have evolved. Relating to Williams and Abbott’s book bibliographical and textual studies, documentary editing, (which is not the editing of the documentary film, but similarity could be found in both procedures), may involve new questions for editors in terms of fidelity and materiality. For critical editing, the editor has to rethink how to collect, evaluate, and present the evidence about the authority of the text(s). How to determine authorial intention when the editor works with other mediums and what measures he should take to present the result to the intended audience. The chapter “editorial procedure” in Williams and Abbott’s book is also connected with the idea of multimedia, especially in its discussion of collation. Digital imaging technologies and “editing” software provide the editor with possibilities to work with images, photocopy of text, or microfilm.

Tian Leng

March 10, 2020

The horrors of editing are hinted at in Williams and Abbott’s An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, when the authors describe what occurred to Willard Motley’s novel Knock on Any Door (bolding of text is mine): “…editors at Macmillan and then at Appleton-Century collaborated with Willard Motley to reduce his 600,000-word typescript…to 250,000 words, to eliminate parts of the novel they judged wooden, to soften the depiction of sexuality and political corruption, and to manufacture a book that they could market at three dollars a copy” (74). It is this sort of recounting, in which an artistic work is beheaded for financial gain, which dissects the nature of asking what “needs” an editor has in shaping a text. If we are to follow the logic that “every act is a political act,” espoused by the likes of artist Daniel Buren and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (amongst countless others), then the work of an editor is no exception. There will be those editors, such as the individuals in charge of Motley’s work, whose banal subservience to authority will produce capital, or those whom will edit a work to serve an individual or state ideology. For instance, I am an adherent of the latter group, for one of my ellipses above omitted Motley’s name so as to obscure the fact that Williams and Abbott made it seem as though Motley worked alongside his editors in trying to peddle his book for three dollars. Without the omission, I do not believe I could have easily introduced a critical argument of the financial workings of publishing houses.

In “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” arguably my favorite essay, writer-critic Cynthia Ozick argues that Frank’s autobiography has been “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, reduced…infantilized, Americanized…falsified, kistchified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” (77). Part of her blame falls upon the shoulders of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, who sought to magnify “Anne’s idealism” without any regard as to why this idealism was smothered and ultimately obliterated at Bergen-Belsen in 1944. Ozick blames Frank’s meddling with the autobiography on his and Anne’s disparate upbringings. Though Otto too was a victim of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for The Holocaust), his upbringing was defined by petit-bourgeois stability (an especially lasting line: “Otto Frank had breathed the air of the affluent bourgeoisie”), whereas most of Anne’s life was spent in persecution, while her final years were defined by hiding, the backdrop of her existence permeated with sounds of bombs and bullets. Fatherhood does not confer surrogacy. It was the elder Frank’s insistence in Anne’s “optimistical view of life” which allowed the following line to be torn from Anne and “define” her legacy: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” (85). Ozick points out that in the same passage, Anne writes: “I see the world being transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions…” (85). This is the Anne whose work is a direct result of her historical context, as opposed to the Anne who makes universal and abstract calls to optimism. And what of the Anne who observes: “There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill”? Ozick argues these lines which do not “give the lie to the pervasive horror of her time.” One might find it difficult to consider Anne an optimist when her autobiography remained unfinished, her life enduring a painful end in the snow at Bergen-Belsen, surrounded by hundreds of others soon-to-be ghosts. Ozick posits Otto Frank as editor, and she responsibly builds a milieu for Otto which provides context for his actions. His upbringing was one of assimilation and avoiding confrontation, which resulted in the “diluting” of Anne’s observations of anti-Semitism, not just in Germany but across Europe, and her pulling the veil on the more monstrous aspects of human nature. The essay is a worthy read, as Ozick also writes about the various cinematic and theatre adaptations of Anne’s work, and how these too have further distorted Anne’s self-portrait. At the end of the essay, Ozick muses, with a pain residing within the margins, whether a more “salvational” act than Miep Gies’ rescuing of Anne’s work would’ve been: “Anne Frank’s diary burned, vanished, lost—saved from a world that made of it all things, some of them true, while floating lightly over the heavier truth of named and inhabited evil” (102).

There are numerous choices an editor must make when compiling a collection. First, an editor must decide whether documentary editing or critical editing is best suited for their project. Abbot and Williams explain the distinction between these two forms of scholarly editing, writing that Documentary editing, “aims to reproduce a manuscript or printed text as a historical artifact.” (the text as a historical artifact) and Critical editing, “constructs a text that may incorporate readings from several documentary texts and may include editorial emendations that establish readings not found in any document.” (78) Critical editing is a process of perfecting or reconstructing a text to better align with an author’s intention or the work’s broader circumstances of production. (84)

The editor compiling a critical volume must decide how to present the text itself and any supplementary material including author annotations, translations, or footnotes highlighting historical context. These decisions affect how future knowledge is created. If an editor chooses to “modernize” a text for example (changing “old-spelling”, capitalization or punctuation) the possibilities for future scholars to analyze the text by looking at its older features will be lost. Furthermore, by modernizing a text, the editor is in a sense, ‘authorizing’ the position that these earlier aspects of the text are not of significance to the scholar. (104) Choosing to not-modernize a text, of course, limits the possibilities of non-specialists to read the text or gain anything out of it. Williams and Abbot also note that the decision of how and to what extent to annotate an edition has consequences for readership. Perhaps a fully annotated edition with notes on the editor’s process is more transparent, but may also be a burden for general readers.

An editor may also decide to present a scholarly edition in digital format, which creates further opportunities and challenges for future scholarship. As Ken Price writes, in “‘Electronic Scholarly Editions’ A Companion to Digital Literary Studies,” The open-ended nature of cyberspace, allows an editor to add as many annotations, context, history, supplemental material as they would like, and gives them many different options to present this material (toggleable annotations, etc). Decisions about what to include are financial, technical and critical. Editors will also have to make choices regarding how to market their projects and how open or closed to public engagement they want their archives to become. (Seems like questions around social media and digital archives might be an interesting question to explore..)

Publishers face many options when making decisions about publishing. These choices have far-reaching implications as to how the material is received and consumed by the public. In addition, it also has implication on what kind of historical artifact is created for future generations of researchers. The two main forms of editing are documentary editing and critical editing. Williams and Abbott note that documentary editing aims to reproduce a manuscript or printed text as historical artifact (74). On the other hand, they state that critical editing constructs a text that may incorporate readings from several documentary text and may include editorial emendations (78). This is of importance because the author’s intention may change over time. The choice an editor makes in determining the authors intention is itself influence by present context. Who decides at what particular juncture of the authors process Intention at a particular historical moment. What and who influences these decisions has long lasting implications. Historical – critical editing primarily Germany complete textual history. Something that may seem trivial could have long lasting implications. For example, the choice of spelling. Williams and Abbott note editors have a choice of using old-spelling, regularized or modern spelling (103). The choice of spelling has influence on who reads the book and how it is received by readers. As they note this choice, can impede or advance research.

Williams and Abbott note that new technology in the forms of computers and apparatus such as the Hinman collator or the Lindstrad camparator has transformed how research in text analysis is conducted. This not only facilitated the process of textual analysis but it has also opened this research to a greater audience. This medium has greatly influenced how electronic research of text is conducted. This facilitates ease and cost of research in that scholars do not have to travel various libraries extensively as they did in the past. They raise the critical point that coding is interpretive and as such, it is subjective to the interpretation of the editor (88). As such, an over reliance of digital analysis can lead the continued perspective of programmers and coders who’s decisions will have a wide and long lasting influence in determining what directions researchers take.

Before thinking about the choices an editor needs to make, it might be fruitful to unpack wjoe the editor is. In the literary field the editor is typically the person who plans, coordinates and revises material prior to publication – be it for a book, collection, magazine, or web page. The editor might be responsible for ensuring clarity of language, consistency of tone and style as well as adherence to ‘[editorial] standards’. The role of the editor may also differ depending on the form of the object being edited – the book editor will differ from the editor working with multiple pieces for a collection of work. This is different from a copy editor who is responsible for standards of language, grammar and ‘house style’. In a sense, the editor is a selector, and the role of selection can have vast consequences on future knowledge in any given field. By choosing what to include, and by default what to exclude, the editor is in an authoritative role to determine what is worth reading, and what isn’t. 

I bring forward the example of the New Yorker – a magazine of cultural and political commentary. I’ve been a subscriber to the New Yorker for many years and one thing that always strikes me is the consistency in style and content that exists across issues and contributors. Through the inclusion of strict editorial standards the New Yorker has managed to create an artifact that plays a huge role in liberal and politically left schools of thought. This is further corroborated by their adherence to a specific tone – it’s easy to read a piece and know automatically that it was borne from the editorial offices of Conde Nast. By maintaining the invisibility of these practices, whilst simultaneously positioning itself as committed to “truth” “accuracy”, and “quality of prose”, the New Yorker establishes itself as a leader in its field, and by association helps to determine what is worthy of reading, and how people should think about different topics. A lot of that work and impact is determined by the editors – in a way they can be seen as the gatekeepers of what it worth thinking about and what isn’t.

https://www.newyorker.com/about/us?verso=true

To emend the author’s text or not, that is the question, and for an editor the emendation opens a Pandora’s box of choices and decisions, especially when considering variations and versions of an author’s text, whether ancient, medieval, modern, for print, or for online. Regardless of place or time, the choices an effective editor makes depends on the audience or audiences for whom the edited work is intended, the publishing format the publisher or author has decided to use, and such factors as time, budget, legal, political, ethical, social, and other considerations. As an intermediary the editor may inadvertently or purposefully alter meaning which at the very least shapes current and future readers’ understanding of authorial intention. A famous case in point was made by Michel Foucault’s mentor, Pierre Hadot, who through imaginative and meticulous exegesis exposed the distortions by Neoplatonist editors of Plato’s notion of being as presented in the dialogue Parmenides, thus subsequently affecting the entire canon of Western philosophy (5-6).

Academic publishers along with some trade publishers and the scholarly reading community place a host of additional responsibilities on the editor in the service of advancing scholarship. According to Craig Abbott and William Proctor Williams, critical editors make choices based on a number of critical editing methods, including the “eclectic method”, the “best-text editing”, “stemmatic or genealogical” methods, and “historical-critical” editing (loc. 1622, 1626, 1725 of 4607). Abbott and Williams point out that the critical editor may also make editing decisions based on different perspectives regarding text, textuality, and technology, such as Shillingsburg’s “formal orientations” and McGann’s “socialized concept of authorship and textual authority” (loc. 1746, 1861 of 4607). Abbott and Williams nevertheless argue for a basic set of choices all critical editors make as they attempt “(1) to discover the relevant documentary texts of the work, (2) to identify variant readings among the texts and the sources of that variation, (3) to construct a text consisting of readings to be authoritative according to the standard the editor has adopted, and (4) to detect erroneous readings and correct them by conjectural emendation based on the adopted standard” (loc. 1746-1772 of 4607). The end result of making all these choices is a critical edition. For documentary editors, whose role is based on considering the edited work as a historical object, choices revolve around the preservation of all of the variations of a work and may result in a variorum edition.

The power of online publishing has brought with it a plethora of new choices for editors and, as Kenneth Price argues in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, “the range of responsibilities for an editorial team has dramatically increased” (2008). Beyond decisions related to the ability to offer virtually all available textual versions and variations, which turn traditional editions into online archives, digital libraries, and electronic scholarly editions, critical and documentary editors confront choices related to data and metadata management as well as user experience design that incorporates choices related to interactions, visuals, and usability. The editor’s audience expands from well defined publishing markets to amorphous transnational readerships. As an example of one of the most consequential data-driven digital libraries for the field of classical studies, Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library, edited by Gregory Crane, offers fully open sourced concordances and translations of the history, literature, and culture of the Greco-Roman world (2020). For the 21st century editor in the age of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web appears not so much wide as it does wild. The more choices the editor entertains the more the potential develops for greater understanding as well as greater misunderstanding.

Works Cited

Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Price, Kenneth M. 2008. “Electronic Scholarly Editions.” In A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens, Part IV, 24. Oxford: Blackwell. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/

Tufts University. 2020. Perseus Digital Library, edited by Gregory R. Crane. Accessed March 10, 2020. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.

Williams, William Proctor, and Craig S. Abbott. 2011. An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Kindle.