Deegan and Sutherland 2009

Deegan, Marilyn and Kathryn Sutherland, eds. Text Editing, Print and the Digital World. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009.

Being Critical: Paper-based Editing and the Digital Environment, by Kathryn Sutherland (13-25)

“Why have we as literary critical, trained in close reading and the niceties of interpretation, traditionally cared so little about the standing of the documents on which we exercise our judgements? Is there any other interpretative discipline where the status and provenance of the interpreted object is so carelessly disregarded or simply taken on trust?” (14)

New Bibliographers became “victims of the logic of their own theorizing” – put faith in “ideal stasis, achieved by means of the ecectic text,” attempting toj challenge/reverse mishaps of historical transmission; but resulted in text that has never been. • following authorial intention forces them to deny their own work as critical interpretation – but it is precisely call for more critical interpretive work that motivates eclectic editing sociologies of text and digital storage give illusion we no longer need eclectic editing, though

“The electronic edition’s claim to a new kind of definitiveness is marked by a rebased authority, in which the emphasis shifts from intervention and interpretation to full information display.” (18) – we aren’t paying attention to differences between media, too enamored with simulation

"We are paying insufficient attention to electronic difference at almost every stage of our engagement with the architecture and functioning of the electronic edition because we are too enamored of electronic simulation. Electronic materiality, the difference that electronic instantiation makes, is currently fare more of a hindrance to textual engagements than any articulated limitation in the robust, versatile and sophisticated medium of print. At the same time, we have not yet thought hard enough about who will use electronic editions or how often or for what real purposes. We know they bring delight and funding to those who compile them, but who, beyond the few compilers, are the obvious users? If we have lived through a century of cheerful disregard for or simple trust in our major paper critical editions by most professional readers (and I do not think this is an exaggeration) what makes us believe that a new medium will provoke a new, engaged response?" (18-19)

“If we have lived through a century of cheerful disregard for or simple trust in our major paper critical editions by most professional readers (and I do not think this is an exaggeration) what makes us believe that a new medium will provoke a new, engaged response?” (19)

new digital editing not confronting real issue: “how texts as non-self-identical material objects can be replicated satisfactorily across material space” (20) – central problem of textual scholarship