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.

As described in Abbott & Williams, an editor needs to decide whether he or she makes use of documentary (noncritical) editing or critical editing. With documentary editing, the editor can present a text through a diplomatic reprint, which preserves only the text such as the wording, punctuation, spelling, etc. but also may present notes. If the editor chooses to produce documentary editions, he or she can present the text in facsimile, which maintains the physical detail of the document, or use genetic or synoptic transcription, which refer to editions that offer numerous documentary texts of a work. Additional formats of documentary editions are literal transcription on facing pages, transcription of various states in parallel columns, and presenting various formats of documentary editions electronically in databases and digital archives. Critical editing in contrast gives the editor the choice to incorporate other readings from documentary texts or editorial emendations. In addition, an editor has to determine the authorial intention of a reading and whether or not the author’s intentions might have changed over time, so that editors may have to reconstruct multiple texts. Critical editors can construct a text based on the intentions of more than the author (copyeditors, proofreaders, etc.), and have to decide to what extent their concept of authorship can be broaden, taking into consideration the nonauthorial. 

Increasingly using electronic editing is shaping future knowledge in a field in that it will open up processes of editing to more groups of people. With more digital editions and projects in scholarly publishing, collaborative processes will allow classrooms to participate in the edition process, and enables sharing their knowledge. In one of my American studies classes last semester, we annotated a digital edition of The Negro and the Nation on the Manifold platform. By bringing our voices into the text, we were able to create a community dialogue and bring interdisciplinary perspectives into the field of American studies.

When talking about academic work, editors have to make a lot of choices that will determine how the work will be received by the public, how the text will be read, and how it will shape future knowledge in a field. The editor will gather material to go with the text for example journals, biographies, letters, etc. to complement the work. This will shape how knowledge in the field is received by giving some information and excluding other. By doing this, if the work is used for future academic work or reference, the information that has been excluded will continue to stay neglected and what has been included will gain more importance, which will shape how a field in academia is being talked about. In the past, there has been a lot of valuable information that “disappeared” because editors chose to not include it.

On Electronic Scholarly Editions by Kenneth M. Price, we learned about the benefits and drawbacks of having old academic work transferred into electronic sources to make it more available to the public. One of the drawbacks is that electronic work may be manipulated by people who are not experts on the field, which may have an impact on how that work is being treated and the accuracy of what is being transferred. This is done because the cost of the process is high and in most cases, this new electronic material will be available to the public for free. On the other hand, one of the biggest benefits of making academic work electronic will be that it can be expanded in ways that cannot be expanded by only having it as print. For example, scholars can add images, extra links, videos, etc. into the text. This will greatly impact how future knowledge is shaped in a field because the information that is given to the public will get expanded.

In ‘Electronic Scholarly Editions,’ Ken Price highlights an interesting editorial choice from Wright American Fiction, a digital expansion on Lyle Wright’s 1975 American Fiction 1851–1875: A Contribution Toward a Bibliography. Both Wright himself and the editors of the digital project include Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as part of of their overview of fictional works, but we now know what Wright presumably didn’t: that Jacobs’ work is narrative nonfiction. Price claims that its inclusion here means that Wright American Fiction is “a major contribution to scholarship without being a scholarly edition per se,” as a more “scholarly” choice would be to “take a stand”—presumably by disqualifying the work from the expanded bibliography.

It seems to me, though, that the question is not what qualifies as “scholarly” editing, but what the purpose of the project is, and—drawing on Abbott & Williams—what kind of editing they’re engaging in. The choice to keep Jacobs’ work is a documentary choice: it appears in the original, so it appears in the expanded and digitized version, and also one that plays into a kind of meta-historical-bibliography work. Wright’s inclusion of Jacobs’ work tells us that at the time he was writing it was believed to be fiction, and that it was originally published as such; we could then infer that those reading it when it was new also read it as such. If the goal behind Wright American Fiction is to accurately capture what Wright considered to be the important fictional works published between 1851-1875, then can it be considered less “scholarly” to include an incorrect entry? 

An editing decision based in textual criticism, then, and one allowed by the more flexible boundaries of online publication, would be to include the citation and full text, but annotated to include the expertise that the editors possess: that the text was long believed to be a fictional account written by white abolitionist Lydia Marie Child, but was in fact a nonfictional account of Jacobs’ own life. This would serve a third purpose other than either documentary—including the work without comment—or “correcting” Wright by excising it, highlighting issues of race and recognition, as well as potentially giving citation and credit to the scholar who discovered the real authorship of the work (Jean Fagan Yellin).

First and foremost, an editor will have to decide whether she wants to engage in documentary editing or critical editing. In the former, the editor will have to decide whether she wants to use a diplomatic reprint, which preserves only the text such as the wording, spelling, punctuation, etc. An editor might also want to decide whether she wants to present the text in facsimile, including photo facsimile or make use of genetic or synoptic transcription. Lastly, also available for documentary transcription is literal transcription on facing pages and transcriptions of various states in parallel columns, as well as presenting documentary editions electronically on disks or over the Internet. With critical editing, an editor will have to decide which reading she wants to incorporate and whether to include editorial emendations that establish readings not found in any document. Specifically, an editor will have to determine which readings are authorial and contemporary with the author. Another thing to consider is whether or not the author’s intentions have changed over time. Also, has an author’s revision been made under duress, and thus is it unfaithful to an author’s intent, is a question to be determined.

            These choices shape future knowledge in a field in several ways. One way is that with documentary editing, we may simply make clear something that was unclear for many years. Also, if an author’s intent is determined during the critical editing process, we are stating what the author meant when she wrote the work, which may then have an effect on the way we view works that come afterwards, both from the author and by others in a similar field. This can be illuminating when viewed in the context of the author’s other works, but the risk seems to be that we imply meaning to the work with that was not intended.

When I think about drawing, I think it as a way to make things practical reality, yet drawing itself is also a process of letting reality show you what it is like. Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening [1], a dissertation in comics form, invites the readers to examine the relation between thinking, image, and text. In his commentary, “Behind the Scenes of a Dissertation in Comics Form” [2], (as well as on his website [3]), Sousanis reconnects us to the process of creating these comics pages and the ideas that once generated each image-text entity. That is to say, he invites the readers who have already read the comics to read it again differently – specifically, by seeing how those comics pages respond to the practical issues and scholarly concepts in the field of education. As he recollected in the commentary, that the terms, “education”, “schooling”, “discipline”, and “interdisciplinary”, had never been used by him while creating the comics because he does not want to create a work that “turn the reader away with specialized or politicized language”; rather, he hopes that they can “find their own way of connecting to the material” [2]. In addition to that commentary, he also mentioned this intention to reach people who are not in academia in a podcast on “Revolutionizing Thought in Comics” [4].

To me, Sousanis’s way of challenging traditional scholarship successfully revives a viewpoint that has been frequently overlooked: the picture theory of language. Through his own explanation of the beginning part of the third chapter entitled “The Shape of Our Thoughts”, Sousanis emphasizes that the picture representation itself embodies the content just as the written text does. His use of both verbal and visual metaphors in communicating mental concepts confirms this idea – that is, the two kinds of metaphors are, in his words, “equally integral to making meaning” [2]. For him, comics are more like architecture; it invites the visitors to move through the organized spatial experiences [2].  

Reference

[1]       N. Sousanis, Unflattening. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015.
[2]       N. Sousanis, “Behind the Scenes of a Dissertation in Comics Form,” Digit. Humanit. Q., vol. 009, no. 4, Dec. 2015.
[3]       N. Sousanis, “Spin Weave and Cut.” [Online]. Available: http://spinweaveandcut.com/. [Accessed: 01-Mar-2020].
[4]       “Unflattening: Revolutionizing Thought in Comics.” [Online]. Available: https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/audio/sousanis-unflattening.html. [Accessed: 26-Feb-2020].

The reason why I chose the capstone project Imigration, Small Business and Assimilation: Three Stories of Small-Time Capitalism on the Lower East Side was because it was interesting that the audio link that interviewed the study participants was attached as a result of the study. It was also because I wondered how the choice of such a form contributed to drawing up the finding of the study and how effectively it revealed the theme. However, when I actually looked through the writing, I was rather confused. It was because it was more out of the form of conventional research than I had expected. Basically, the project uses a kind of ethnomethodology that is widely used in anthropology and sociology. Investigate and describe cultural background and show the talks of the study participants as it is without setting up theoretical frame. What really stands out in this project, however, is that the personal narratives of the researcher, which do not seem to be directly related to the theme itself, account for a large portion of the writing (every semester he took at the center is listed on several pages, devoting a chapter of pride in completing the study). I would like to compare this project with the most formal academic form I have learned previously, concentrating on disclosure/hiden of the author, to think about what difference they have, what meaning each of them has, and what its effect would be.

Especially in the field of social science where I majored, the existence of researchers is completely excluded from writing. Because it is science, it is wary of the author’s subjectivity and intent in revealing facts and objectively analyzing them. A clear explanation and rationale (through theoretical background and prior study review) is required in selecting research questions, objectives and targets. However, his personal experience and motivation are actively showed in the project. (Of course it’s very feeble. It’s just that he loves New York so much, and he has personal career and experience as a radio host and city guide.) Meanwhile, ordinary studies in utilizing interview in research regard it as a discourse and analyze it by researchers on the premise that they are methodologically trained. Sadly, however, it is one of the most difficult tasks to analyze, leaving their intentions completely blank. On the other hand, the project has attached a link to the audio file to listen them directly and opened the full text of the conversation with the study participants (even describing the noise and music sounds heard during the interview) as an alive form. Here analysis and judgment are left to the readers.

Then, what does each of these extreme two formats have a meaning and an effect? In the case of formal academic form, researchers tend to set themselves as an observer outside the world. This is a modern way of approaching truth and closed to elitism as a reproducer of knowledge. This project, on the other hand, cannot be said to have revealed the world technically and scientifically. However, even the author is represented as part of the world he describes, and acts as living material. Thus, because the former uses academic language, it creates a distance from the real world and universal readers, but in the latter case, it has the advantage of narrowing the distance. However, for what contents this each form contains, when given the difference that the former is in philosophical methodology and the latter is close to aesthetic form, more research is likely to be needed on what difference they will bring.