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 critics, 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?" (14)

"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)