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.

For my response this week, I watched Secret and Divine Signs: A Cinematic Ode to the Art of Cruising, a Capstone Project by Terrence T. Hunt. Hunt’s short film looks at the changing practice of cruising in New York City. The film is accompanied by an artist’s statement that elaborates on the film’s themes, its creative process, and its stated purpose.

In his artist’s statement, Hunt argues that film is the best medium to convey his thesis subject; cruising has a “close relationship to cinema” both in its many representations in film and the practice itself which shares certain “ways of looking” with film spectatorship (“film spectatorship echoes the desiring gaze”) (4). Hunt also uses film to highlight and celebrate the beauty of queer spaces. Throughout the film, Hunt shows footage of popular cruising spots, many of which are of nature enclaves within NYC (bucolic park scenes, the flowing water of the Hudson River). This footage is overlaid with audio from interview subjects, describing  their experience cruising in different locations. This footage is quite affecting and encourages the audience to think about (and maybe feel) the “erotic potential” of public space (6). 

Hunt also wants to use film to bring his work outside of the academy and reach a broader audience of “queer, gay and bisexual men of different generations” (5). The artist’s statement frames his research questions within a scholarly context of queer history and film and media studies, while the film itself attempts to explore these concepts for this broader audience. 

Although Hunt expresses the desire to show his film at festivals, perhaps an online/social media component to the project could have been an interesting addition (I understand given the still sensitive subject matter, this might not have worked). Further developing this project through a Youtube or public Vimeo channel could also have broadened his audience even more, and allowed Hunt to continue exploring the fascinating questions around class, sex and public spaces, eroticism and technology that he raises in this project. The questions he raises are maybe too numerous for the thesis film but could be creatively approached through film vignettes or interviews on an online platform. 

My analysis is on “From Mass Incarceration to Mass Education Fostering Collaboration Between State Prisons and State Universities” by Miriam Edwin. She gives a critic of the education system and their collaboration with incarcerated people. Stating that state universities should make education more available to individuals in prisons. By doing so, they will be benefited in different ways, avoiding recidivism and post released unemployment. By the end of her thesis paper, she describes what components wouldn’t make a program like this one successful. She claims that state funding is undeniably needed, but just as important is for universities like CUNY and SUNY to partner up to grant degrees to prisoners. It is also considered giving them the opportunities to obtain certifications for the skills they can use after they have been released to work. Edwin provided with some examples of graphics that can be helpful to the reader however most of the paper is just text which is completely understandable because it is a thesis for a Master’s Degree.
This issue is critical and extensive. In the past few years, I have heard a lot of activism hoping to benefit prisoners and also people who have been released. For society to be more informed and aware of the problems and solutions we could think of work being done in ways that are not necessarily considered academic. Different ways of artistic expression like image and video are essential for activism ad social change. I believe that the podcast with Nick Sousanis brought a relevant issue to the table of academia being more accepting of works that are not purely theoretical and textual because then the expression of the issue becomes and stronger as he did with comics.
Miriam’s thesis work can be expanded into the “real world” to create social justice and awareness for this cause. Thinking of Figuring the Word by Johanna Drucker, I was able to understand how visual representation supports the communication between academia and society. Perhaps, Edwin could expand her work outside academia to gain a bigger audience to this influential thesis.

In Jason Manrique’s Art and War: Republican Propaganda of the Spanish Civil War, the reader is presented with a survey of the media weaponized by the Republicans in their anti-fascist effort to defeat General Francisco Franco and his merry band of Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The introduction lays out the material conditions which led to the war and explains how the various political factions involved related with one another in the lead up to the conflict. Interestingly enough, the introduction functions as a successful exercise in anticipation. The reader knows what lays ahead, for the abstract discusses the writer’s mission, and the table of contents lists the various images to be referenced. So, in reading the introduction, the reader, whether a learned scholar on fascist and anti-fascist propaganda circa the 1930s or not, is filled with their own images of what this may look like. However, this anticipation is quelled, or is forcibly placed in the backburner, when the reader reaches the first chapter, a brief analysis of films made during the Spanish Civil War. While the writing does not disappoint, the form which the thesis hinted at, that of a multi-media historical survey, disappoints in that the reader is not offered clips nor screenshots to concretely conceptualize artistic intent in 1930s. Of course, a niche audience of European film historians, the lack of images does not represent a concern. However, Manrique’s work is brief, and I interpret as a work more inviting to the novice as opposed to the expert. Ironically enough, Manrique refers to my previous point in third chapter when discussing the photojournalism of Robert Capa, whose images magnified the impact of LIFE Magazine’s reports from the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War. While structurally-speaking there is nothing wrong with the chapter, as I’m sure multiple readers of this work sought out the films discussed, the potential of an anticipated meaning finds itself disappointed.

It is not until the latter two chapters of Manrique’s work, that his desire to present the reader with a multi-media overview of propaganda in war-time comes to fruition. In Chapter Three, “Republican Posters,” Manrique not only provides a brief history of propaganda posters used in the Soviet Union and United States, but also details how these posters were made, and how different artists and artistic movements, from Goya to Constructivism, influenced the anti-fascist militants. And we get to see some of the posters! Manrique’s words acquire a new level of meaning when paired with the color images of anti-fascist Spanish propaganda. The images, which one would think the reader would pause to analyze, allow for Manrique’s words to soak within the reader’s mind while they stop and look at the propaganda. The excitement of turning the page and seeing a hammer and sickle layered atop a star long with an explanation as to why defeating Franco’s fascist is inherently a step in the revolution towards communism serves as a modern parallel to someone turning a corner in 1930s Valencia and seeing such an image. The image, an interpretable message regardless of what language one speaks, retains a power sole words do not. This amplification carries Manrique’s work towards the end, as the last chapter focuses on the work of several photojournalists during the Spanish Civil War. In between brief biographies and descriptions of the training grounds and battle conditions in Spain, Manrique formats some of the most iconic war photography of the 20^th Century to become the centerpiece of the stage, highlighting the significance of this conflict and the work that arose from it.

Perhaps Manrique meant to keep the viewer in the dark regarding images from 1930s Spanish films to make a comment on the censorship that would follow General Franco’s victory in the Civil War—I don’t know. But, what I do know, is that this work truly reached (what I consider) its ideal form when its message juxtaposed several mediums.