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..)