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 This could be an outdated example for many, but it is a good point on how an editor accesses information in multimedia formats, especially new media formats in the 2020s.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