The un-Limited Edition

Emerging new digital editions at Cambridge are effecting a sea-change in the nature of the scholarly edition, radicalising access to vital source materials and opening up new possibilities for research. What we're really talking about here, is a parallel between the way the mind seeks and forms connections between ideas - some straightforward, some subtle - and the way the internet works by facilitating connections - John Rink Much work in the humanities could not be done without scholarly editions, and producing such editions consumes vast amounts of time and energy. Apocryphal stories abound about academics whose editorial labours have consumed their careers. "Scholarly editing has traditionally been about coming up with a stable, pristine text," explained Dr Jason Scott-Warren, Director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts in the Faculty of English. "The greater the cultural significance of a work, the more important it becomes to identify distortions and to correct those distortions, so as to produce a single, perfected version for modern readers." Where conventional editing seeks to reconcile conflicting versions for the reader, digital editing, unconstrained by the spatial limitations of the printed page, is about "giving readers access to the material in all its multiplicity," he continued. "It offers the prospect of 'un-editing'." New digital projects at Cambridge are making what Scott-Warren refers to as the true "mess of history" available in ways hitherto impossible, and are creating opportunities to explore the past lives of texts in ways previously unimaginable.