What affordances does the digital bring to editing? This keynote talk presents a partial view on the early modern digital landscape, asks what a (digital) edition is, and looks at the claims and potential for dialogue and democratization. The talk was presented at the Editing Tudor Literature workshop, Newcastle University, 11 May 2014. The workshop was organized by Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink, and I'm grateful to them, and to everyone there, for wonderfully generous and thought-provoking discussion.

1. democratization, dialogue, and the digital
Pip Willcox
Curator of Digital Special Collections
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
@pipwillcox
William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, London (1604), fol. K3v.
Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22276X, Copy 1. http://quartos.org.
Editing Tudor Literature, 11 May 2014

3. A partial view on the early modern digital landscape
What is a (digital) edition?
Digital decisions
Dialogue
Democratization
A republic of letters
Today

4. Publisher-led editions
Library-led editions
Academic-led editions
Social editions
A partial view on the early modern digital landscape

5. Publisher-led editions
Library-led editions
Academic-led editions
Social editions
Licensedforre-use
Freelyavailable
Subscription
Private
A partial view on the early modern digital landscape

6. Publisher-led editions
Library-led editions
Academic-led editions
Social editions
Licensedforre-use
Freelyavailable
Subscription
Private
D
iscoverable
CitableReusableSustainable
A partial view on the early modern digital landscape

7. Publisher-led editions
Literature Online (LiOn); Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO); Early
English Books Online (EEBO)
Library-led editions
HathiTrust; Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-
TCP); Early English Print in the HathiTrust (ElEPHãT); JISC Historic Books/
Historic Text
Academic-led editions
Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I; Early Modern Letters Online
(EMLO); Forms Online: Renaissance to Modern (FORM); Verse Miscellanies
Online; Digital Renaissance Editions
Social editions
A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS, BL Add MS 17,492, Transcribe
Bentham, The International Greek New Testament Project, Crowdmap the
Crusades
A partial view on the early modern digital landscape

8. Metadata — Early Modern Letters Online
Image — Early English Books Online
Optical Character Recognition — Google Books
Transcribed — EEBO Text Creation Partnership
Encoded — Shakespeare Quartos Archive
Edited — Digital Renaissance Editions
What is a (digital) edition?

9. Metadata
Discovery
Analysis
Bibliography
Prosopography
Cartography
Networks
Visualization
What is a (digital) edition? — Metadata

10. Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO)
What is a (digital) edition? — Metadata
http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

11. Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO)
What is a (digital) edition? — Metadata
http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

12. Image
Access
Materiality
Reflectance Transformation Imaging
Multispectral imaging
Hyperspectral imaging
Image matching
What is a (digital) edition? — Image

13. Bodleian Ballads
Archimedes Palimpsest
http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/
What is a (digital) edition? — Image

14. Transcribed
Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership
130,305 records; 129,541 image sets; 44,314 full texts
Vendor-transcribed, partially proofed, encoded texts
Subscription (ProQuest, JISC Historic Text)
What is a (digital) edition? — Transcription
http://eebo.chadwyck.com/
http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/

15. EEBO-TCP enables
Distant reading — AdornMorph, DocuScope ElEPHãT
Close reading — Verse Miscellanies Online, F21, FORM
EEBO-TCP: 25,000 texts freely available 1 January 2015
What is a (digital) edition? — Transcription
http://morphadorner.northwestern.edu/
http://www.cmu.edu/hss/english/research/docuscope.html
http://versemiscellaniesonline.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

16. What is a (digital) edition? — The copy specific question
Copy specific or “ideal”?
Shakespeare Quartos Archive’s Hamlet
32 copies
of 5, pre-1642 quarto editions
from 6 libraries
Text Creation Partnership representative texts
No manuscript annotation
Digital rebinding
Illegibility, damage, missing pages
http://quartos.org/
http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/

17. What is a (digital) edition? — Edited
Digital Renaissance Editions
Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I
http://digitalrenaissance.uvic.ca/
http://www.culturesofknowledge.org/?page_id=4593
Ruth&SebastianAhnert

18. What is a (digital) edition? — Social editions
DavidDeRoure
http://www.slideshare.net/davidderoure/future-of-
scholarly-communications

19. What is a (digital) edition? — Social editions
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript
http://egora.uni-muenster.de/intf/
http://lbt.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
http://dhcrowdscribe.com/crowdmap-the-crusades/
http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/
Google Image search for “Latin lolcats”

20. What is a (digital) edition?
Using social media allows us to integrate a new stage
into the editorial process — a stage that fills the gap
between an edition’s initial planning stages and its
concluding blind peer review, which capitalizes on the
engaged knowledge communities inside and outside the
academy.
(Siemens and Arbuckle)
http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/viewFile/118/268

21. What is a (digital) edition?
Audience
Time
Funding
Quality
Compromise

22. What is a (digital) edition?
When the great preliminary obstacle of money had
been so far overcome as to justify the Transcript being
proceeded with: there came an almost overpowering
despondency from the bulk of it. Leisure moments only
were available for its execution: and it did seem for a time
that it could not be accomplished within a reasonable
period.
(Arber, I. 27)

24. What is a (digital) edition?
“Oscillations”
SégolèneTarte
http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/05/13/
llc.fqr015.full

25. Additional skills: technical, project and staff management
Additional time: curating new communities
Additional funding: technical collaborators, storage, web hosting
and delivery
Textual instability
Sustainability: ongoing support for resources, communities, and staff
Academic credibility: digital citation, credit, equivalence
Digital decisions: cons

26. Technical skills, project and staff management: knowledge
exchange in practice
Curating new communities: ease and speed of communication,
dissemination, public engagement
Digital delivery: no economy of the print run
Digital affordances: images, performance (audio and video),
distant reading, comparison, visualization
Collaborative texts: ease of coproduction, updatable, “perfectable”,
plural, mutable
Digital decisions: pros

27. Democratization: first, define your democracy
Physical Access
An end to the “golden triangle”
Internet access
Subscription
Sustainable intellectual access
Standards-based editing
Inform, engage, and support audiences
Update resources

28. The canon
Beyond a narrow canon
Discovery
Preponderance of Shakespeare
The text
Contribute to the editing
Select your own versions of texts
Authority, commonality
Democratization: first, define your democracy

29. “Chains of expertise” crossing traditional boundaries
Academics
Editors
Developers
Publics
Computers
Designers
Dialogue: text shall speak peace unto text

30. Nobody has ever answered “yes” to
“Let me show you my XML”
...except a computer
HeatherFroehlich
DavidDeRoure
http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Dialogue: text shall speak peace unto text

31. Dialogue: text shall speak peace unto text
Early English Print in the HathiTrust (ElEPHãT)
KevinPage
&PipWillcox
http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

32. Aeternitas Rei Publicae Literariae: Republic of Letters
Ease of publication, access, community building,
democratization, flexibility of presentation
Test: discoverable, reusable, augmentable, sustainable
Digital affordances: this has never been easier
Collaboration: exchanging knowledge is more than
the sum of its parts

33. Bodleian Library entrance
Aeternitas Rei Publicae Literariae: Republic of Letters
Quod feliciter vortat academici Oxoniens
bibliothecam hanc vobis reipublicaeque
literatorum T.B.P.

34. Thomas Bodley has built this library for
you and for the Republic of the Learned.
May the gift turn out well.
Bodleian Library entrance
Aeternitas Rei Publicae Literariae: Republic of Letters
pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk
@pipwillcox

35. ReferencesEdward Arber, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers 1554-1640 AD, 5 vols. (London & Birmingham: private printing, 1875-1895).
The Archimedes Palimpsest Project (William Noel et al) — http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/.
Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (eds.), William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Giles Bergel et al, ‘Content-Based Image-Recognition on Printed Broadside Ballads: The Bodleian Libraries’ ImageMatch Tool’, IFLA WLIC, 2013— http://library.ifla.org/209/1/202-
bergel-en.pdf.
Bodleian First Folio (Pip Willcox et al) — http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.
Crowdmap the Crusades (Emma Goodwin et al) — http://dhcrowdscribe.com/crowdmap-the-crusades/.
James Cummings and Pip Willcox, ‘Stationers’ Register Online: A case study of a byte-reduced TEI schema for digitization (tei_corset)’, j-TEI, Issue 6, 2012— http://jtei.revues.org/926.
David De Roure, The Future of Scholarly Communication,UKSG 37th Annual Conference and Exhibition (2014) — http://www.slideshare.net/davidderoure/future-of-scholarly-
communications.
Digital Renaissance Editions — http://digitalrenaissance.uvic.ca/.
DocuScope — http://www.cmu.edu/hss/english/research/docuscope.html.
Early English Books Online — http://eebo.chadwyck.com/.
Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership — http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-eebo/.
Form Online: Renaissance to Modern (Elizabeth Scott Baumann, Ben Burton et al) — http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/centres/lsc/people/staff/academic/lizscottb.aspx.
Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2015).
Google Books — http://books.google.co.uk.
Jonathan Hope, and Michael Witmore, ‘The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare’, in Early Modern Literary Studies 9.3 / Special Issue 12 (January, 2004):
6.1-36 — http://purl.oclc.org/emls/09-3/hopewhit.htm.
The International Greek New Testament Project — http://egora.uni-muenster.de/intf/.
JISC Historic Books/Historic Text — http://www.jischistoricbooks.ac.uk/..
Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991).
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
MorphAdorner v.2.0 — http://morphadorner.northwestern.edu/.
Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I (Ruth and Sebastian Ahnert) — http://www.culturesofknowledge.org/?page_id=4593.
Mark Rogerson, ‘Publishing Born-digital Content’, in Cultural Connections DHOxSS 2013 — http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/cultural-connections-exchanging-knowledge-and-widening-
participation-humanities
Shakespeare Quartos Archive — http://quartos.org.
Judith Siefring, and Eric Meyer, ‘Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition: Report on the TIDSR Benchmarking Study‘, SECT project report (2013). — http://papers.ssrn.com/
sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2236202.
Ray Siemens & Alyssa Arbuckle, ‘Understanding the Social Edition Through Iterative Implementation: The Case of the Devonshire MS (BL Add MS 17492)’, Scholarly and Research
Communication, volume 4, issue 3, 2013.
A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS, BL Add MS 17,492 — http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript.
S.M. Tarte. ‘Papyrological Investigations: Transferring Perception and Interpretation into the Digital World’ in Lit Linguist Computing, 26(2):233–47, 2011. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqr010.
TEI: Text Encoding Initiative — http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml.
Thus speaks Arshama: letters of a fifth-century BC Persian Prince — http://arshama.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.
Transcribe Bentham (Tim Causer et al) — http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/.
Whitney Anne Trettien, ‘A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica’, DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 7 Number 1 2013.
Verse Miscellanies Online (Michelle O’Callaghan et al) — http://versemiscellaniesonline.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.
With particular thanks to Giles Bergel, David De Roure, Heather Froehlich,
Anthony Gardner, Brett Hirsch, Kevin Page, Judith Siefring, and Ségolène Tarte.