This document discusses several issues related to creating digital editions of texts and manuscripts. It questions whether existing digital editions simply translate traditional print editions to an online format or if they fully utilize the capabilities of digital technologies. It also discusses how analyzing "born digital" materials using distant reading approaches may influence how we view and edit older textual works. Finally, it provides examples of the massive scale of digital archives, like the 200 million emails of the George W. Bush White House.

1. Electronic Beowulf: ebeowulf.uky.edu

10. www.chopin.ac.uk/ocve/

11. www.janeausten.ac.uk

13. • How far do our digital editions take full advantage of the potential of digital
technologies to reshape our view of texts and manuscripts?
• Do existing digital editions simply restate traditional editions in an online
environment, with search replacing the index and the addition of images?
• Do we have a set of separate digital volumes, in the same way that we had
printed volumes on the shelf?
• The effect of the ‘digitisation overhead’
• As we develop new ways of viewing and engaging with born digital
material, new perspectives on how we may engage with older texts may
emerge - the ‘born digital’ paradigm will become the ‘new conditions of
cultural production’
• For ‘born digital’ material, all reading is distant reading - approaches
similar to distant reading are the only way of reading the material. As we
learn to read in different ways, how does that affect our view of the edition?

14. • The e-mail archive of the George W Bush White
House contains over 200 million e-mail messages.
• The electronic archive for the Bush Presidency
contains over 80 terabytes of information.
• There will never been an edition of the
correspondence of George W Bush

20. Figure 5.1 The emotions of London, 1700-1900
In this image, green is particularly prevalent in squares (the term that was also the most
distinctive of the West End’s lexicon), whereas passages where fear dominates are
most o en located in spaces of coercion and internment.