The sustainability of the scholarly edition in a digital world

Abstract

Scholarly editions must be used for generations; by nature they require a stable long-term publication format. Some editors have eagerly embraced digital editing and XML, but many more editors remain unconvinced that digital publications can last as long as printed books. Community standards and DTDs for editions have not been widely adopted and editors lack consensus about what a digital edition should be. XML's stability and sustainability is critical to efforts to go beyond “the book,” and to develop new ways of presenting texts and scholarly commentary. To build 21st century editions, we need tools to make XML encoding easier, to encourage collaboration, to exploit social media, and to separate transcriptions of texts from the editorial scholarship applied to them.