The Digital Edition and the Digital Humanities

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.