Textual studies is ground zero of everything we do. We read, we write, we think in a textual condition.
— Jerome McGann, "Textual Scholarship, Textual Theory, and the Uses of Electronic Tools: A Brief Report on Current Undertakings" (1998)
Editing an edition, often a textual scholar's primary task, is a varied and complex act. Many methods, critical approaches, principles, and traditions must be considered before an editor can endeavor to present a reliable text. This being said, however, the single constant in the history of textual studies is that new approaches and concepts of representation are always emerging; particularly now as the influence of technology and new media transforms the ways in which we interact with these physical artifacts and witnesses. This shift in representation is both encouraging and thought-provoking as it becomes clear that the younger audiences coming to these works are often first introduced to them in a digital form rather than a physical one. How must this alter their idea of the work and its history?
Textual Studies Glossary of Terms (in alphabetical order)
Accidentals - A collective term invented by W. W. Greg and now widely used to mean the punctuation, spelling, word division, paragraphing, and indications of emphasis in a given text—things "affecting mainly its formal presentation," as he put it ("The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography 3 [1950–51]: 21).
Authority - A property attributed to texts, or variants between texts, in order to indicate that they embody an author’s active intention, at a given point in time, to choose a particular arrangement of words and punctuation.
Base Text - The text chosen by an editor to compare with other texts of the same work in order to record textual variation among them. Its selection can be to some extent arbitrary, or it can be selected because it is (among the available texts) simply the most complete.
Collation - Comparison. A collation is either the record of the substantive and accidental differences between two or more texts or the act of comparing two or more texts for the purpose of documenting their differences.
Copy-Text - The specific arrangement of words and punctuation that an editor designates as the basis for the edited text and from which the editor departs only where deeming emendation necessary.
Emendations - Editorial changes in the copy-text or base text. These changes may be made to correct errors, to resolve ambiguous readings, or to incorporate an author's later revisions as found in printed editions or other sources, such as lists of errata, assuming for the moment that the editorial goal is to recover the author's textual intentions.
Explanatory Notes - Notes devoted to explaining what something means or why it is present, rather than textual notes, which are devoted to explaining why the text at a certain point reads in the way it does and not in some other way.
Substantives - W. W. Greg's collective term for the words of a given text—"the significant . . . readings of the text, those namely that affect the author's meaning or the essence of his expression," as distinct from its accidentals ("The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography 3 [1950–51]: 21).
Textual Notes - Notes devoted specifically to discussing cruxes or particular difficulties in establishing how the text should read at any given point. Compare "explanatory notes."
Variants - Textual differences between two or more texts. These would include differences in wording, spelling, word division, paragraphing, emphasis, and other minor but still meaning-bearing elements, such as some kinds of indention and spacing.
(All definitions were adapted from the MLA Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions)
Critically Acclaimed Scholarly Editions
The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Call Number: PR5402 2000ISBN: 9780801861192Publication Date: 1999-12-14
- The Emily Dickinson Archive Emily Dickinson Archive makes high-resolution images of Dickinson’s surviving manuscripts available in open access, and provides readers with a website through which they can view images of manuscripts held in multiple libraries and archives. This first phase of the EDA includes images for the corpus of poems identified in The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998).
- The Rosetti Archive THE Rossetti Archive facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter, designer, writer, and translator who was, according to both John Ruskin and Walter Pater, the most important and original artistic force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain. In Whistler's famous comment, “He was a king”. Completed in 2008 to the plan laid out in 1993, the Archive provides students and scholars with access to all of DGR's pictorial and textual works and to a large contextual corpus of materials, most drawn from the period when DGR's work first appeared and established its reputation (approximately 1848-1920), but some stretching back to the 14th-century sources of his Italian translations. All documents are encoded for structured search and analysis. The Rossetti Archive aims to include high-quality digital images of every surviving documentary state of DGR's works: all the manuscripts, proofs, and original editions, as well as the drawings, paintings, and designs of various kinds, including his collaborative photographic and craft works. These primary materials are transacted with a substantial body of editorial commentary, notes, and glosses.
- The William Blake Archive Over the course of two centuries, respect for the prints, paintings, and poems of William Blake (1757-1827) has increased to a degree that would have astonished his contemporaries. Today both his poetry and visual art in several media are admired by a global audience. In the broadest terms, the William Blake Archive is a contemporary response to the needs of this dispersed and various audience of readers and viewers and to the corresponding needs of the collections where Blake's original works are currently held. A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility. A growing number of contributors have given the Archive permission to include thousands of Blake's images and texts without fees.
Articles Highlighting Intersections Between DH and Textual Studies
- "The Apparatus Criticus in the Digital Age" by Tom Keeline Vol. 112, No. 3 (February-March 2017), pp. 342-363. In this paper I describe a new model for the apparatus criticus in the digital age, one which eliminates many of the limitations of the traditional print apparatus and allows readers to take an active role in constituting their own texts. In addition to discussing the prospects and possibilities for the apparatus criticus, I make a broader case for a new approach to editing texts and try to explain in an accessible way some of the benefits of digital scholarship. These issues are particularly important to think through as the SCS develops their Digital Latin Library and similar projects are underway elsewhere.
- "The Digital Edition and the Digital Humanities" by Amy E. Earhart Textual Cultures, vol. 7, no. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 18-28. Abstract: The legacy of early digital editions and their related scholarship reveals the textual foundation of digital literary studies, a foundation that emphasized form and materiality, in effect a representational rather than interpretative view of text. Early digital editions were formed out of a “whole text” approach, a cohesive print-to-digital model that features interrelated textual materials, often in print book form, rather than an expansive and fragmented representation of text, as is increasingly the case with data-based practices. This article examines the ways in which the digital edition privileges the structure of the book, which is viewed as a self-contained entity with a naturalized means for displaying knowledge and replicated in most aspects of creating digital editions, from display to data treatment.
- "Digital Scholarly Editing within the Boundaries of Copyright Restrictions" by Wout Dillen and Vincent Neyt Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 31, no. 4, December 2016, pp. 785-796. One of the great advantages the digital medium has to offer the field of scholarly editing is that it makes its products much easier to distribute. No longer bound to a shelf, the Digital Scholarly Edition has the potential to reach a much wider audience than a printed edition could. To a certain extent, however, the nature of the materials textual scholars are working with dictates the perimeters within which this dissemination can take place. When working with modern manuscripts, for instance, copyright restrictions may limit the extent to which a project can distribute its resources. In an academic climate where open access is not only becoming a standard, but in some cases even a requirement for receiving funding, such limitations may be perceived as problematic. In this article, we argue that even within the boundaries of copyright restrictions there can still be room to produce and distribute the results of textual scholarship. Therefore, the article zooms in on the way in which different Digital Scholarly Editions of copyrighted materials deal with this issue, using the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP; www.beckettarchive.org) and Woolf Online (www.woolfonline.com) as case studies. To conclude, we investigate other strategies that may be used to share as much research data as we are allowed to, e.g. by sharing metadata and ancillary data, or by using the fair use doctrine to circumvent the problem. Case studies used for this aspect of the article include ModNets (www.modnets.org), the BDMP Encoding Manual (www.beckettarchive.org/encodingmanual), the Lexicon of Scholarly Editing (http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/lse), and the Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET; www.fweet.org).
- "The Hand of the Present: Presidential Address 2013" by Paul Eggert Vol. 7, No. 2 (Fall 2012), pp. 3-19. The following essay is the presidential address delivered at the conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship at Loyola University, Chicago, on 8 March 2013. It is only slightly altered here, with the addition of some concluding remarks on literary study written for but not delivered on the night and also limited bibliographical notices. It retains its spoken-voice flavour. In particular it briefly revisits my work in Securing the Past (2009) and considers the musical and literary work's 'workhood' and the editor's complex but essential role in the relationship between material document and the meanings raised from it at any one time by readers.
- "The Human Touch Software of the Highest Order: Revisiting Editing as Interpretation" by Martha Nell Smith Textual Cultures, vol. 2, no. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 1-15. A rigid set of orthodoxies, a "right" way of doing editorial business, need not inform our practices in order for them to be principled, rigorous, and reliably according to standard. Instead the rule that should continue to inform all of what we do is the lesbian rule, lesbian not in the sense of Showtime's The L Word series but in a seventeenth-century architectural sense. That lesbian rule was/is the principle invoked for difficult challenges in construction (such as arches, irregular corners, and the like) and thus is a principle that is pliant and accommodating in its faithful adherence to standards. In order for editorial praxes to obtain the rigor and sharp discipline required of principled methodologies, our pliant and accommodating standards need also to be more interdisciplinary and take into account the "messy" facts of authorship, production, and reception: race, class, gender, and sexuality. This essay extends some of my previous observations about technologies and texts to argue that embracing messy humanity in all its diversities, even as we embrace new technologies, is no longer a luxury for our community, it is a necessity.
Textual Studies Journals
- Book History Book History is devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print. It publishes research on the social, economic, and cultural history of author-ship, editing, printing, the book arts, publishing, the book trade, periodicals, newspapers, ephemera, copyright, censorship, literary agents, libraries, literary criticism, canon formation, literacy, literary education, reading habits, and reader response. Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The official publication of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP).
- Digital Humanities Quarterly Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) is an open-access, peer-reviewed, digital journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities.
- Digital Scholarship in the Humanities DSH or Digital Scholarship in the Humanities is an international, peer reviewed journal which publishes original contributions on all aspects of digital scholarship in the Humanities including, but not limited to, the field of what is currently called the Digital Humanities.
- The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Published on behalf of the oldest scholarly society in North America dedicated to the study of books and manuscripts as physical objects, the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America contains articles on book and manuscript printing, distribution, and collecting in all disciplines. The journal publishes original articles, book reviews, bibliographical notes and review essays. Among its distinguished editors are George L. McKay, W. B. Todd, and Howard-Hill. It continues to be North America's leading bibliographical journal.
- Studies in Bibliography A forum for the best textual and bibliographical work being done anywhere in the world, the annual journal Studies in Bibliography presents a wide range of articles on bibliographical analysis of manuscript and printed material, the transmission of texts, the theory and practice of scholarly editing, and all aspects of the history of books.
- Textual Cultures Essays by scholars from numerous disciplines & focuses on issues of textual editing, redefinitions of textuality, history of the book, material culture, & fusion of codicology with literary, musicological, & art historical intrepretation & iconography.
- Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship Variants is the annual, peer-reviewed journal of The European Society for Textual Scholarship. It is published in Open Access via the OpenEdition platform at http://journals.openedition.org/variants. Individuals and institutions can subscribe to the journal by taking out membership in the Society which entitles them to a printed copy of the journal and immediate online access to the newest volume. A one-year moratorium applies to volumes in Open Access.
Essential Reading
The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship by Call Number: P47 .C46 2013ISBN: 0521730295Publication Date: 2013-05-09As more and more of our cultural heritage migrates into digital form and as increasing amounts of literature and art are created within digital environments, it becomes more important than ever before for us to understand how the medium affects the text. The expert contributors to this volume provide a clear, engrossing and accessible insight into how the texts we read and study are created, shaped and transmitted to us. They outline the theory behind studying texts in many different forms and offer case studies demonstrating key methodologies underlying the vital processes of editing and presenting texts. Through their multiple perspectives they demonstrate the centrality of textual scholarship to current literary studies of all kinds and express the sheer intellectual excitement of a crucial scholarly discipline entering a new phase of its existence.
A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism by Call Number: P47 .M34 1992ISBN: 0813914183Publication Date: 1992-09-29This small but powerful book initiated a major shift in literary theory and method when it was first published in 1983. Starting from a critical inquiry into certain specialized issues in the practice of editing, McGann gradually unfolds an argument for a general revaluation of the grounds of literary study as a whole.
A New Republic of Letters by ISBN: 0674369246Publication Date: 2014-03-01Jerome McGann's manifesto argues that the history of texts and how they are preserved and accessed for interpretation are the overriding subjects of humanist study in the digital age. Theory and philosophy no longer suffice as an intellectual framework. But philology--out of fashion for decades--models these concerns with surprising fidelity.
Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age by Call Number: PN162 .S45 1996ISBN: 0472066005Publication Date: 1996-08-26Most readers, including professional literary academics, spend little time wondering about the state of the texts they are using. Yet the nature and status of texts, and the method of their editing, have profound effects on the ways they can be read. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age introduces the basic vocabulary of textual criticism, demonstrates how literary criticism suffers from ignorance of textual processes, and offers practical advice on the preparation, presentation, and uses of scholarly editions.
Textual Editing and Criticism by Call Number: P47 .T49 2009ISBN: 0393929426Publication Date: 2008-11-03Textual Editing and Criticism emphasizes practical knowledge of textual editing and criticism that undergraduates and beginning graduate students will be able to apply in their own work. The foreword, by esteemed scholar and editor Donald H. Reiman, discusses the recent renaissance in textual studies and demonstrates why textual editing and criticism skills are so important for students of literature.
Textual Scholarship by Call Number: Z1001 .G7 1994ISBN: 0815317913Publication Date: 1994-05-01Designed for editors, literary and textual critics, and students, this historical and methodological survey is richly illustrated with line drawings and photographs. There is a bibliography of scholarship (including a list of standard editions in various fields), an appendix of illustrated types of scholarly editions with interpretive commentary, and a full index. The text is suitable for courses in research methods, critical editing, philology, paleography, manuscript studies, publishing, publishing history, and the history of the book and is an essential aid to graduate students in language and literature.
Guide Attribution
- Taylor Brown
Email: tbrown18@luc.edu
Taylor Brown is a graduate student in the Textual Studies and Digital Humanities program at Loyola University Chicago. She is a poet, artist, and editor and her research interests include Digital Edition Building, 18th-19th Century British Literature, Modern Poetry, Graphic Design, Mixed Media Art, and Digital Humanities.
This guide was informed and inspired by Paul Eggert's syllabus for Textual Studies (ENGL 413-801) at Loyola University Chicago. This was Dr. Eggert's final semester teaching this course and it was an honor working with him. The syllabus has been attached here for reference and personal use.