The Role of the Editor: With Power Comes Great Responsibility

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.