This document discusses the shift in textual criticism from being text-oriented to being document-oriented, accelerated by digital technologies. It outlines several digital manuscript projects that focus on documenting original documents through high-resolution images and transcription tools. The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project is highlighted as an example of a "documentary digital edition" that records and displays meaningful features of Samuel Beckett's original manuscripts through various views and tools to aid analysis and interpretation.

1. The Text of the Document
Image-Text Linking in the Beckett
Digital Manuscript Project
Wout Dillen
@WoutDLN

2. The Text of the Document
Textual Criticism: Traditionally Text-Oriented
2nd half of 20th C: Document ↑

3. The Text of the Document
The only objective thing is the unique original
manuscript itself; it may not be replaced by an
equivalent, and in the strict sense may not be
reproduced even by color photography. The material
manuscript itself, not the text of the manuscript, is the
record. The manuscript requires interpretation,
however, and the result of the interpretation is the text.
This act of interpreting the manuscript is the
constitution of the text.
(Zeller ‘Record and Interpretation’ 43)

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Documentary Turn in Textual Criticism:
German Editionswissenschaft
→ Record and Interpretation
Anglo-American Scholarly Editing
→ Documentary Editing
→ Social Turn
→ Bibliographical Editing
French Genetic Criticism
→ Writing Process

5. The Text of the Document
Documentary Turn accelerated by Digital
Turn:
There is an attractive simplicity in this narrow focus in
digital editing on documents alone. It plays well with the
advances in digital imaging in the last decades, which have
made it feasible to gather and distribute vast numbers of
digital images at low cost. One might produce an edition of
a document containing high-resolution, full-colour images,
capable of magnification so that the tiniest detail of the
page may be analysed, which would be very useful for the
kinds of document-centred analysis advocated by the
writers mentioned in the last paragraph.
(Robinson ‘Towards a Theory of Scholarly Editions’ 108)

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William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org)

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Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org)

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Jane Austen’s Fictional Manuscripts (www.janeausten.ac.uk)

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‘Frankenstein’ (www.shelleygodwinarchive.org)

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Documentary Digital Editions
[W]e could define this new type of editorial object,
the documentary digital edition, as the recording of
as many features of the original document as are
considered meaningful by the editors, displayed in all
the ways the editors consider useful for the readers,
including all the tools necessary to achieve such a
purpose.
(Pierazzo ‘A Rationale of Digital Documentary Editions’ 475)

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The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org)
‘Topographical View’

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The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org)
‘Topographical Zoom’

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The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org)
‘Zones’

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The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org)
‘Search’

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The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org)
‘Text View’

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The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org)
‘Facing-Leaf’

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The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org)
‘Synoptic Sentence View’

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The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (www.beckettarchive.org)
‘CollateX’