The Texts We See and the Works We Imagine: The Shift of Focus of Textual Scholarship in the Digital Age

The process of editing a text is, in the first instance, an act of imagination. An editor who has collected materials, gathered evidence, and compared variants eventually has to decide what does it all mean, who will care about it and how to present it; but most importantly how those materials relate to each other. The answers to these questions are not in the documents that preserve versions of the texts, but in the minds of the scholars who have carefully studied the physical documents, their texts and the variant states of the text they represent. In this essay, I present my working definitions of the text of the document, the variant states of the text and the work, show how they relate to each other and how they have been affected by digital technologies or how they have arisen from them. I also conclude that while some concepts might remain unchanged from the days of print, others are fundamental only to born-digital texts. ispartof: Ecdotica vol:10 pages:64-76 status: published