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.