0.26 Underpinnings of the social edition  (Page 9/32)

Perfectly adaptable to, and properly enabling of, social theories of text and the role of editing, the electronic medium has brought us closer to the textual objects of our contemplation, even though we remain at the same physical distance from them. Like other enabling communicative and representative technologies that came before it, the electronic medium has brought about a “death of distance.” This notion of a “death of distance,” as discussed by Paul Delany, comes from a world made smaller by travel and communication systems, a world in which we have “the ability to do more things without being physically present at the point of impact” (1997: 50). The textual scholar, accumulating an “assemblage” of textual materials, does so for those materials to be, in turn, re-presented to those who are interested in those materials. More and more, though, it is not only primary materials—textual witnesses, for example—that are being accumulated and re-presented. The “death of distance” applies also to objects that have the potential to shape and inform further our contemplation of those direct objects of our contemplation: namely, the primary materials. See also Siemens (2001).

We understand, almost intuitively, the end-product of the traditional scholarly edition in its print codex form: how material is presented, what the scope of that material is, how that material is being related to us and, internally, how the material presented by the edition relates to itself and to materials beyond those directly presented—secondary texts, contextual material, and so forth. Our understanding of these things as they relate to the electronic scholarly edition, however, is only just being formed. We are at a critical juncture for the scholarly edition in electronic form, where the “assemblages” and accumulation of textual archival materials associated with social theories of text and the role of editing meet their natural home in the electronic scholarly edition; and such large collections of primary materials in electronic form meet their equivalent in volume in the world of secondary materials, that ever-growing body of scholarship (Siemens 2001: 426).

To date, two models of the electronic scholarly edition have prevailed. One is the notion of the “dynamic text,” which consists of an electronic text and integrated advanced textual analysis software. In essence, the dynamic text presents a text that indexes and concords itself and allows the reader to interact with it in a dynamic fashion, enacting text analysis procedures upon it as it is read. Lancashire (1989). See also the exemplary illumination of three early “dynamic text” Shakespeare editions in Bolton (1990). The other, often referred to as the “hypertextual edition,” exploits the ability of encoded hypertextual organization to facilitate a reader’s interaction with the apparatus (textual, critical, contextual, and so forth) that traditionally accompanies scholarly editions, as well as with relevant external textual and graphical resources, critical materials, and so forth. The elements of the hypertextual edition were rightly anticipated in Faulhaber (1991).