It is not just the sense of what is to be edited has transformed from the traditional notion of the literary work to the modern concept of the text (as introduced by Rolland Barthes in his essay “From Work to Text” [1]) as well as to the expanded application of Barthes’s conception of the text to include nonlinguistic codes such as images and music, the field of scholarly editing itself is undergoing a dramatic change. Electronic editions of the texts become a new option for editors. As Kenneth M. Price mentioned in his essay “Electronic Scholarly Editions” [2], these electronic editions (such as the digital archives) get a lot of storage space inside. This means that high-resolution color images become affordable for a digital archive while they are not affordable for the printed edition. In addition, multiple versions of a text can be all displayed in one electronic edition for the users to compare those valuable texts symbol for symbol and to reflect on the meanings of the differences. 

Given this multiple-texts approach to editing, it seems that the possibility of presenting all versions of a text online diminishes the authority of an editorial team partly because this type of editing is not based on finding an authoritative text based on “final intentions” of the author or of an editorial team. Nonetheless, the range of responsibilities for those scholarly editors is in fact broadened. Editors still define objects in space by shaping the materials to be presented in a digital archive. Furthermore, in order to produce a functionable electronic edition of texts, they have to collaborate with others, such as “librarians, archivists, graduate students, undergraduate students, academic administrators, funding agencies, and private donors” (those whom Price briefly mentioned in his essay [2]). 

Technical experts and knowledge of technical issues are also indispensable in the editorial decision-making [2]. For instance, besides the standard tasks of investigating the history of texts, making critical judgements about them by identifying the works and applying bibliographical findings in the editing process [3], scholarly editors who choose to work in digital medium have to get familiar with the role that the database played in editing [2]. In contrast to any form or mode of narrative (which assigns variant values to variant objects), the database collects individual items without discriminating between different cultural values [4]. To effectively deal with the neutral data, editors still have to make the data accessible to the general individuals through a multimedia narrative. As Price quotes from Horton’s Designing and Writing Online Documentation for reflecting on the relationship between an editorial team and the readers in the digital age, “[The users] may not like being controlled or manipulated, but they do expect the writer to blaze trails for them [2].” 

Reference

[1]       R. Barthes, The rustle of language, 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.
[2]       K. M. Price, “Electronic Scholarly Editions,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2013, pp. 434–450.
[3]       W. P. Williams and C. S. Abbott, An introduction to bibliographical and textual studies, 4th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009.
[4]       L. Manovich, “Database as a Genre of New Media.” [Online]. Available: http://time.arts.ucla.edu/AI_Society/manovich.html. [Accessed: 10-Mar-2020].