Guidelines

Introduction

As part of our project, we’re building a TEI-model of a new form of digital edition, which we’ve called a Dynamic Edition. The concepts behind it are the product of collaborative work between the entire project team and other key collaborators. Alice Taylor helped to develop the digital interface made by Geoffroy Noël, Paul Caton, Ginestra Ferraro, and Miguel Vieira from King’s Digital Lab. We’ve tested our Dynamic Edition model on The Declaration of Arbroath (edited by Dauvit Broun), as well as on passages from Regiam maiestatem (edited by John Reuben Davies) to show how the model will work on a much more complex text (like Regiam).

Our dynamic edition aims to move away from a stemmatic approach to editing, which focuses on reconstructing an archetype text, and showing how all later manuscript copies derive from it. Instead, our method gives each manuscript equal status, in order to see how a work changes across its entire manuscript tradition, and the various ways in which it has done so. It takes great inspiration from genetic editing, which tries to represent how drafts, insertions, edits, additions all contribute to a work’s meaning and interpretation. But our dynamic digital editions depart from this method in important ways too. We are seeking to represent textual movement in a work across its manuscript witnesses so that we can more easily observe the ways historical scribes and readers might have known, interacted with and used that work.

The project will only develop the Dynamic Edition model in prototype form, but we hope to take it further in future work.

We're be interested in any feedback, so email cotr2020@gmail.com with any thoughts!