OP-LLCJ160063 911..919 Afterword ............................................................................................................................................................ Gabriel Egan School of Humanities, De Montfort University, Leicester, England ....................................................................................................................................... At certain points in history, certain words take on a positive aura that makes it difficult to openly ex- press dissenting or sceptical views about the objects, processes, or qualities they denote. Right now, social has this aura. This word’s role as a modifier to make the noun after it refer to society and other kinds of human association—as in social law and social life—emerged at the end of the sixteenth century (OED ‘social’ adj. 5a, 5b). Most recently, the word has attached itself to a relatively new word, media— first used to denote mass communication in 1927 (OED ‘media’ n.2)—to denote a new kind of tech- nology of communication. Whereas the ordinary media provided only one-way, one-to-many, com- munication, the social media allow ‘users to create and share content or to participate in social net- working’ (OED ‘social’ Special Uses S2 ‘social media’ n.). In the field of textual editing, being social is not so new. The French theorists of the 1960s Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault considered authorship itself to be an inherently social phenomenon. For Barthes, texts were not spun like webs out of the solitary minds of lone individuals but rather woven together from existing ideas and sayings: ‘The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (Barthes, 1977, p. 146). According to Foucault, we are thinking about cre- ativity itself in the wrong way if we concern our- selves too much with authors as persons, for in truth we as readers collectively construct the author to suit what we want to do with the text. In this view, we have to speak not of the author but of the author function that we use to constrain the range of interpretations that a text may be subject to. These reader-constructed authors become ‘the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning’ (Foucault, 1994, p. 352), saving us from outlandish misinterpretations. In their original French-lan- guage publications—much translated and anthol- ogized—Foucault’s essay was a direct response to Barthes’s, and their shared aim was a thorough transvaluation of the notion of authorship by socia- lizing it (Barthes, 1968; Foucault, 1969). In literary studies of authorship, this French post-structuralist and post-modern view still holds considerable sway, although research in computa- tional stylistics is showing that in fact authorship is a good deal more personal and less socialized than Barthes and Foucault had us believe (Craig, 2009-10). The claim that authorship is a fundamen- tally social phenomenon became popular in the fields of book history and textual scholarship with the publication of Jerome J. McGann’s A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (McGann, 1983). McGann argued that we see the idea of socialized creativity in practice most clearly when we think about how lit- erary works reach their readers: ‘the production of books, in the later modern periods especially, some- times involves a close working relationship between the author and the various editorial and publishing professionals’ (McGann, 1983, p. 34). These various others, apart from the author, whose labour goes into making a book—including its printers— should not be seen as contaminating the work (as a previous generation of textual scholars believed) but rather as completing the authorial intention. D. F. McKenzie offered a practical illustration of this claim in Jacob Tonson’s 1710 edition of the works of William Congreve, designed by master printer John Watts, who made extensive use of typographic distinctions to embellish scene Correspondence: Gabriel Egan, School of Humanities, De Montfort University, Leicester, England. E-mail: gegan@dmu.ac.uk Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2016. � The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 911 doi:10.1093/llc/fqw060 by guest on D ecem ber 28, 2016 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from Deleted Text: word's Deleted Text: s Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: )-- Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: Foucault's Deleted Text: Barthes's Deleted Text: 10 Deleted Text: McGann's Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: Tonson's Deleted Text: ich http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ divisions. According to McKenzie, this landmark edition must be seen as an active collaboration be- tween the author, the publisher, and the book de- signer, and hence only a notion of the book as a social object can fully account for its meanings. To respond to this reality, McKenzie called for a ‘new and comprehensive sociology of the text’ (McKenzie, 1981, p. 118). Like the French theory from which it derives, these Anglo-American no- tions of the socialized text are susceptible to consid- erable critique in practice and they often overstate their claims (Egan, 2010, pp. 129–66; Egan, 2014). The essays in this special issue invite us to con- sider the notion of social editing, and just as one would hope from thoughtful experts, they are all undazzled by the idea’s fashionable aura and think through carefully what it means for that adjective to qualify that noun. But what exactly is social editing? Scholarship by McGann and McKenzie in the 1980s told us that the text itself is inherently social, so what implications might that have for a socialized approach to editing the text? Might social editing be a portmanteau term invented merely to enable the staid scholarly endeavour of editing to dress itself in Web 2.0’s gladrags? The strongest claim so far made for the endeavour of social editing (Siemens, et al. 2012) invokes social media in its title and describes the dispersal of editorial authority in terms that are strikingly similar to those previously used to de- scribe the dispersal of authorial authority, first by the French theorists in the 1960s and subsequently by McGann (whom it repeatedly cites on the nature of textuality), and McKenzie, and others. What is new are the opportunities offered by the latest tech- nologies of connectivity: it is now practicable to share out the work that was formerly done by one scholar or a small team of them. But here a potential contradiction arises. If the first wave of authority- dispersal theorists were right—if the authority of a text was always already (to use one of this school’s favourite expressions) dispersed before its first read- ers clapped eyes on it—then what authority remains to be dispersed in the editing? In a penetrating survey of the claims made for a social turn in textual studies, Peter Robinson is deeply sceptical that the new technologies fundamentally alter the power re- lations between authors, readers, editors, and critics, and he is excoriatingly blunt in his conclusions that: ‘. . . neither ‘‘social text editions’’ nor ‘‘social edi- tions’’ exist and that the phrase ‘‘social editing’’ is misleading’ (Robinson, 2015-16). Social editing can mean the eliciting of the con- tribution of labour from the general public during the creation of an edition, for example in transcrib- ing primary documents. It can mean the eliciting of scholarly (rather than public) collaborative input during the creation of an edition. It can mean the eliciting of scholarly debate and reuse during the consumption of an edition. And it can mean elicit- ing public debate and reuse during consumption of an edition. New technologies for scholarly publish- ing—the ubiquitous XML markup and dissemin- ation via the WorldWide Web—have not merely enabled scholars to be collaborative in their editorial labours, they have positively demanded it. This is because most textual scholars do not know how to use XML or publish online and need training in these ways of working. According to Robinson, the large accumulations of technical expertise in centres such as the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities in Virginia, the Humanities Text Initiative at Ann Arbor, Michigan, the King’s College London Centre for Computing in the Humanities, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities are not an efficient way for digital scholarly editions to get made (Robinson, 2010). He points out that much schol- arly expertise in textual matters remains embodied in the minds and labours of lone scholars who are unlikely ever to acquire the resources—the grant awards, the sabbaticals—that are needed to take up a residential course in XML and related technol- ogies at such a centre. We need better ways of har- nessing lone scholars’ textual expertise. In his essay in this special issue, on ‘Project- Based Digital Humanities and Social, Digital and Scholarly Editions’, Robinson observes that for most of the history of scholarly editing, we did not need such large centres nor did we organize ourselves into projects. Yet scholars were still being social because the very means of scholarly communication are inherently social. In Robinson’s example, lone scholars working indi- vidually elucidated the opening lines of Dante G. 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This, according to Robinson, is a way of being social that has served us well for many years. The new technologies certainly offer us new possibilities, according to Robinson, but they are best exploited not in big projects organized within big centres but in genuinely dispersed scholarly labour. For this, Wikipedia provides the most well-known model, but the underlying principles are embodied in the Internet and the WorldWide Web themselves as vast collaborative endeavours running on simple open standards and based on the assumption that humans tend towards intellec- tual generosity rather than hoarding. These prin- ciples keep the bar for engagement as low as possible. Writing that is circulated in print has long enabled collaborative, that is social, endeavours be- tween scholars who never meet. We might think of the big institutional centres of digital research as somewhat like the medieval monasteries, with their special textual expertise and means of repro- duction. In this analogy, the lone scholars are like the many potential intellectuals of medieval Europe who could not enjoy the life of the mind because they lived and worked outside of these institutions. In the somewhat disputed history of technology offered by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, the technology of print itself was the catalyst that brought us the Renaissance by ending this institutional dominance (Eisenstein, 1979; cf. McNally, 1987). Less conten- tiously, we can at least acknowledge that the circu- lation of the catalogue of the Frankfurt Book Fair created a kind of social network among the thinkers of early sixteenth-century Europe who thereby knew—at least insofar as they could infer it from book titles—just what other members of the group were working on (Wootton, 2011; Wilding, 2014). Making sure that everyone knows what you are working on is the theme of Murray McGillivray’s essay in the present issue called ‘‘‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’’: The Case for Scholarly Editing as a Public Intellectual Activity’. He finds that the old ways of working were ‘anti-social’, and as such is the only contributor to use that antonym of this issue’s key term. Just as bad, according to McGillivray, the old ways of doing scholarly editions do not meet the political and social agendas that dominate university life in the twenty-first century: We are in danger of simply not being allowed to do them any more. To counter this threat, we should stop doing our editions in secret, says McGillivray, and we should display our activities for all to see. This does not mean crowdsourcing the construction of the edition itself, but simply revealing our work- ing processes and publishing parts of the edition as they are completed. McGillivray describes two of his own projects that have proceeded like this, and he is frank about this method’s necessary public disclos- ure of the imperfect documents made, and of the abandoned blind alleys followed, along the way. McGillivray recommends using the scientists’ notion of Minimum Publishable Units as a way of giving to junior individuals—students, fixed-term researchers—the credit they deserve by explicitly self-publishing their contributions to the project. Opening up the creation of an edition to the world’s public in this way gives that public an opportunity to answer back, and McGillivray recounts valuable textual corrections that resulted from his approach. This is not quite the engagement of the public in the creation of an edition proposed by Ray Siemens, but it goes some way towards it (Siemens, et al. 2012). Involving students and fixed-term researchers in the creation of editions is one thing, but surely bringing in the public at large is a recipe for disaster. Peter Shillingsburg, in ‘Reliable Social Scholarly Editing’, worries out loud that crowdsourcing some of the editorial work such as the proofreading of transcriptions might be just giving into laziness and that it necessarily constitutes a threat to the maintenance of high quality. Shillingsburg expresses a widespread scepticism that we can ensure the quality control needed to exploit the free labour of the crowd without admitting egregious errors into our editions. Somebody, somewhere needs to be checking what is being done, and surely it is still true that ‘. . . what is everyone’s job is no one’s job’. The place where Shillingsburg least objects to the public having a role is in ‘the analytical and explanatory commentary and critical engagement Afterword Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2016 913 by guest on D ecem ber 28, 2016 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from Deleted Text: Alighieri's Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: writer's Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: Dante's Deleted Text: 16th Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: McGillivray's Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: 'Why Deleted Text: Don't Deleted Text: ' Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '', Deleted Text: issue's Deleted Text: 21st Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: method's Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: scientists' Deleted Text: al Deleted Text: ing Deleted Text: (MPUs) Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: world's Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '', Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: ``… Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: `` http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ with works’. These are opinions, so in a sense they cannot be wrong. Paul Eggert too sees problems in the model of editorial crowdsourcing proposed by Siemens, and his essay’s title ‘The Reader-Oriented Scholarly Edition’ indicates the kind of thinking that he be- lieves is needed to avoid them. Eggert proposes that we conceive of the scholarly edition as a transaction with the reader rather than as a model of what the text really is. Eggert gives an account of the post-war tension between the German editing tradition in which it was not permitted to mix readings from different witnesses—each witness was presented as a coherent singularity and its differences from the others recorded—and the more eclectic Anglo- American editing tradition. In this narrative, literary critics have largely ignored editorial work on textual variation because either they just wanted a singular reading text to interpret (as did the New Critics) or they entirely distrusted the categories used in that editorial labour, such as author, intention, and even the work, and treated everything—including things never written down—as a kind of text (as did the Literary Theorists). Understood as a transaction with the reader, writes Eggert, the scholarly book has to be con- structed with a particular market in mind, and we have to answer questions such as whether the iden- tified readership needs a clean reading text or should be given some sense of the text’s genesis, for example by presenting alterations in situ. As Eggert asks, should we assume the existence of read- ers ‘who can cope with information needing to be decoded rather than just straightforwardly read’? If we do assume this—and as editors we are tempera- mentally inclined to—then the market for our edi- tions gets smaller, and Eggert thinks that in the print medium this reduction in market size may be un- sustainable. Perhaps digital editions can help us by separating the archive, on the evidence of which the textual choices are made, from the reading text itself, which is thereby made freer to engage in broader critical debates. Eggert conceives of a digital edition being just ‘. . . a list of emendations, sup- ported by justifications for them, of one or more of the texts already stored within the digital archive’. Thus the edition is ‘an argument directed at the reader about the archive’, and this model restores the transactional relationship. Reflecting on this suggestion as one of the General Editors of the forthcoming New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works, it occurs to me that we could dir- ectly apply it to our Original Spelling texts but not to our Modernized Spelling texts, since in the latter we depart from the forms in the archive for most of the words. Shakespeare and the dramatists of his time are rather an editorial oddity in this regard. English writ- ings from just before Shakespeare’s time are so unlike modern English that scholars do not consider mod- ernizing them for other scholarly readers. A moder- nized Chaucer, for instance, is only ever created to provide a crib to help students learn Middle English or else to attract lay readers to this field. On the other hand, writings from shortly after Shakespeare’s time are widely considered to be so like modern English as to need no modernization. Shakespeare and his con- temporaries lie in between these periods and are now routinely modernized for lay and scholarly readers. Yet, the great textual theorists of the twentieth-cen- tury New Bibliography generally opposed the mod- ernizing of Shakespeare, and the view that it is unnecessary is still occasionally expressed even today. The linguist David Crystal reckons that with only 5–15% of the words and only 7% of the gram- matical constructions in early modern English being substantially different from those of modern English, today’s readers get a good-enough sense of what Shakespeare meant from an unmodernized text and that to go further specialist study is in any case required (Crystal, 2002). However, since the publica- tion of Stanley Wells’s scholarly argument for mod- ernizing Shakespeare’s spelling, which included his guide on how to do it (Wells and Taylor 1979), the case for original spelling editions is seldom made, and the remaining scholarly arguments revolve around particular words that present special obstacles to modernization (Bevington, 2004). When planning a scholarly edition, the mere fact that it is to be a digital edition should necessarily put the social aspect in a new light. One might try to be social by broadening the contributor base to bring in more scholars than would normally be involved, without letting in anyone else. But accord- ing to Joris Van Zundert, even a few too many G. Egan 914 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2016 by guest on D ecem ber 28, 2016 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: essay's Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: text's Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ''? Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: ``… Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '', Deleted Text: Shakespeare's Deleted Text: Shakespeare's Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: today's Deleted Text: Wells's Deleted Text: Shakespeare's Deleted Text: - http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ scholars can spoil the broth, not least because some of them—especially the non-digital ones—might not be able to see beyond the existing conceptual model of the printed book. In ‘The Case of the ‘‘Bold’’ Button: Social Shaping of Technology and the Digital Scholarly Edition’, Van Zundert com- plains that we are still essentially making digital ver- sions of books rather than editions that could only exist as digital editions. Van Zundert describes the makers of an XML annotation tool at his institution giving in to the scholarly editors’ request to imple- ment a ‘Bold’ button, allowing annotation of a sec- tion of text to show that it appears in boldface type in the documentary witness. This Van Zundert thinks was a mistake, as it constituted a reversion to a metaphor from the older textual form—the printed book—in place of a forward-looking con- sideration of what is possible in the new digital medium. Van Zundert calls the ‘Bold’ button error an ex- ample of the endemic ‘paradigmatic regression’ that plagues all our efforts. The last really big leap for- ward in the ability of new technology to express the true essence of text was, he argues, the Hypertext Reference (HREF) property of HTML’s (for anchor) element. The hyperlink gave us for the first time a way to embody the interconnectedness of texts. But digital editions have not in general used hyperlinks to point to things outside of themselves and confine their use to internal linking. This is true, but I would say that we must blame the inade- quacies of our current ways of handling external linking: the Domain Name System, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and more recently Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). The last of these, as applied to the problem of scholarly referencing by the CrossRef consortium—a non-profit publishers’ organization initiated at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999—might one day solve the linking problem. However, there is no essentially new technology at work here: the DOI system and CrossRef merely formalize the apportioning of responsibility for the maintenance of the records that keep cross-refer- ences alive. According to Van Zundert, to really think big about this topic, we need to provide users with the application programming interfaces (APIs) to our editions; doing this will be the final and essen- tial break from the book metaphor. But what of the analyses that the API-driven, distant-reading model promotes? Van Zundert characterizes them as ‘lossy’ and ‘reductive’ when compared to close reading. I would object here that in fact all interpretations— distant and close—are equally lossy but in different ways. Criticism is necessarily reductive and that is a good thing, since the only non-reductive account of a text being interpreted is that text itself. Van Zundert thinks that our scholarly editions need to narrow the widening gap between close and distant reading. One way, he suggests (without pushing it as a universal panacea), is to consider texts as what computer scientists sometimes call ‘graphs’: that is, chains of ‘nodes’ (say, words) connected by ‘edges’ that represent their relationships. Roger Osborne, Anna Gerber, and Jane Hunter seem to have avoided the kind of error that Van Zundert discloses in the making of their Australian Electronic Scholarly Editing (AustESE) Workbench software for collaborative editing, as described in ‘Archiving, Editing, and Reading on the AustESE Workbench: Assembling and Theorising an Ontology-based Electronic Scholarly Edition of Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life’. They describe the his- tory of the publication of Furphy’s 1903 novel and the complexities of revision that make a critical edi- tion particularly desirable. The AustESE Workbench software is meant to enable non-technical editors to work digitally, and its main contribution seems to be that it allows us to describe artefacts (such as manu- scripts, typescripts, and editions), events (such as the writing of revisions), and persons (such as publishers and authors) in the life of the literary work being edited, and to indicate how these various entities relate to one another. If I understand it correctly, this identification of phenomena is rather like that in Peter Robinson’s Textual Communities software, the alignment with which suggests that investigators are happily converging on particular ways of thinking that will take us past the intellectual impasses that several contributors here identify in the state of the art of scholarly digital editing. Apparently, the objects in the AustESE Workbench can be as small as single pages in a book, so it is possible to describe in detail how an Afterword Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2016 915 by guest on D ecem ber 28, 2016 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ′Bold′ Deleted Text: '', Deleted Text: editors' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: HTML's Deleted Text: (DNS) Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: publishers' Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '': Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: Furphy's Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: Furphy's Deleted Text: and Deleted Text: Robinson's Deleted Text: which http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ author revised a work by transposing material. I would have thought, however, that much finer granularity than the single page would be needed for most attempts to account for transposition-in- revision. In my field, Shakespeare’s writing, we find alterations to, and transpositions of, individual words and even letters as the reviser hunts for the precise bon mot: ‘too sallied flesh’ (Hamlet, 1604-5) versus ‘too solid flesh’ (Hamlet, 1623) for instance. And what if the change is not even Shakespeare’s own but someone else’s? We have experience in re- cording the changes that multiple hands make to a work, of course, as pointed out by Meg Meiman in ‘Documentation for the Public: Social Editing in The Walt Whitman Archive’. As she observes, we are quite used to figuring out just how to record the multidimensional changes to an XML document when many people work on it, and so in a way we have already achieved a degree of social editing. The very headers of our machine-readable documents contain this sort of information, and—as Meiman implies without stating it so baldly—we perhaps are making a meal of things when we treat the multiple hands and multiple revisions present in our primary texts as if they present an almost intractable intel- lectual problem. Touché! Or as Osric put it, ‘a palp- able hit’. If we are going to undertake crowdsourcing of some of the work in scholarly editing, what does practical experience tell us to plan for? Kenneth Price, in ‘The Walt Whitman Archive and the Prospects for Social Editing’, reckons that crowdsourcing efforts work best when there are no tricky conceptual questions at stake, no training is needed, and when we have mountains of simple, repetitive labour to complete and the vetting pro- cedures can be made simple. The project to crowdsource the transcription of Jeremy Bentham’s works found that there was an extraor- dinarily long tail to the volunteer profile: thousands of people transcribed just one or two documents and a handful of them transcribed many hundreds. Like other essayists in this special issue, Price is sceptical of Siemens’ suggestion that editorial au- thority can also be socialized, and he asks of the Bentham contributors ‘What was the quality of their contributions?’ and were they in fact not ordinary citizens as the project hoped but ‘other scholars, perhaps not affiliated with the project but nonetheless possessing expert training in early modern texts’? Price considers the ideas of other investigators, including Martin Mueller, who hope to bring in masses of students to get undergraduate credit for their performance of ‘lapidarian’ tasks such as ‘proofreading, checking part-of-speech tag- ging, and correcting or creating a cast list’. Offering degree-level credit might, it seems, act as an incen- tive to maintain high quality in the labour. We are, of course, only at the beginning of our exploration of the possibilities of social editing and it occurs to Price that such experiments might have unantici- pated spin-off benefits. For example, if we leave open a public poetry-annotating site for several dec- ades, we would end up with a useful snapshot of changing public perceptions around various topics. Our secondary material might turn into a social historian’s primary material. All the essayists here are agreed that new tech- nologies are changing our ways of thinking about our scholarly editing activities. For Allison Muri, Catherine Nygren, and Benjamin Neudorf (‘The Grub Street Project: A Digital Social Edition of London in the Long Eighteenth Century’), one of the most important changes might be a departure from our traditional fixation with the author. The Grub Street Project aims to be a ‘collaborative social edition of eighteenth-century London’ itself, bring- ing together texts and images about books, art- works, people, places, and trades. There is a relational database holding all the data together and they have 2000 texts as transcribed by the Eighteenth Century Collections Online Text Creation Partnership. But why is it an ‘edition’ not an archive? The authors explore the limitations of our standard nomenclature. Digital archives, they argue, are themselves oddly metaphorical in using that name, since they do not really preserve any- thing in the way that professional archivists would understand in relation to their preservation of phys- ical documents. (Actually, I would contest that as- sertion: keeping old digital files useable is a kind of preservation.) Moreover, many of us are no longer especially author centric even when we work on one writer: we acknowledge that writers exist in social G. Egan 916 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2016 by guest on D ecem ber 28, 2016 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from Deleted Text: Shakespeare's Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: too Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: too Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: Shakespeare's Deleted Text: else's Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '', Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: Bentham's Deleted Text: Siemens's Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ?'' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ''? Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: historian's Deleted Text: (`` Deleted Text: ''), Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: , Deleted Text: (ECCO-TCP) Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: - http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ networks that enable the reading of their words. So, it does not make sense, this essay’s authors argue, to confine the word edition to works by one author. Like the place name Grub Street itself—a real loca- tion in London and an imaginary place of low cul- ture and despicable behaviour—the term edition is freighted with connotations about how people interact with one another that take us far beyond its simple denotation. As the French theorists told us, texts are inextricably embedded in wider social practices. Some of those wider social practices can seem to be ranged in direct opposition to our efforts. This is the topic of Wout Dillen and Vincent Neyt’s ‘Digital Scholarly Editing within the Boundaries of Copyright Restrictions’. They start with Robinson’s exhortation to digital scholarly editing projects that they drop the Non-Commercial and No Derivatives qualifiers that are often put on to a Creative Commons licence. The trouble is, Dillen and Neyt observe, that the editors might well not possess those rights that an Attribution and Share-Alike licence would give away. A case study for this problem is the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project, for which the primary documents are in libraries in different na- tional jurisdictions and so are subject to differing copyright restrictions. The Beckett Estate requires that the project put the materials behind a paywall, which virtually everyone in academia finds objection- able. Dillen and Neyt detail the other irksome restric- tions that must necessarily be accepted by editors of materials that are encumbered by copyrights unless we are willing to just give up working on these sub- jects altogether. They observe that we can almost always safely give away our own project documenta- tion files, and also if we use the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard we can give away the One Document Does It All file that describes the schema used for the encoding; these actions go a long way towards helping others understand what we have done. Moreover, even copyright materials themselves may be reproduced under the Fair Use doctrine (called Fair Dealing in the UK), and Dillen and Neyt offer a couple of notable examples while cau- tioning that this principle merely provides a possible line of defence for those subject to a legal challenge from rights holders. No academic wants to have to actually fight such a case, and the law, being thus weighted towards rights holders, probably makes us much too timid in the exercising of our Fair Use/ Dealing rights. Encroached upon by rights holders from one side and on the other by political and institutional lea- ders who cannot easily see the value of a new edition of the writings of a dead author, the scholarly editor is in an invidious position. The long-term economic viability of our traditional allies, the commercial publishing houses, is uncertain, and there are un- doubtedly some politicians who would regard their disappearance and ours as no bad thing. This is not because these politicians believe that electronic dis- semination is better than print dissemination, but because they believe that we scholarly editors have nothing of great value to offer society. In the idea of ‘wisdom in the crowds’, some people would see an alternative to the putative wisdom of the scholar. From this perspective, the democratization that comes with crowdsourcing aligns discomfortingly well with what in the UK is called the Impact Agenda, which may not unfairly be characterized as a rather brusque enquiry of ‘what have you done for us lately?’, addressed to academics by those whose taxes pay for our research. The ques- tion is in fact a fair one, so long as we have the confidence to give it a considered response rather than slip into the habitual insecurity of our profession. As Terry Eagleton remarks in his memoir The Gatekeeper, middle-class academics ‘have a problem about patronizing the working class and worry about their posh accents’, whereas ‘working people themselves are usually quite prepared to accept them if they have something useful to offer’. This observation is illustrated by an anecdote about an Oxford academic who was invited to de- liver a lecture at Ruskin, the Oxford trade union college, and who began with the typic- ally donnish, self-deprecating ploy of claiming to know very little of the subject in question. A voice from the back boomed out in a rich Lancashire accent ‘Tha’art paid to knoow!’ (Eagleton 2001, pp. 89–90) Afterword Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2016 917 by guest on D ecem ber 28, 2016 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from Deleted Text: ' Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: ' Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: ' Deleted Text: (NC) Deleted Text: (ND) Deleted Text: (CC) Deleted Text: (BY-SA) Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: (ODD) Deleted Text: nited Kingdom Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '' Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: nited Kingdom Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ?'', Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: '', Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: ''. Deleted Text: `` Deleted Text: !'' Deleted Text: - http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ There is no shame in knowing more about some- thing than other people do, of course, but the point of the anecdote is that academics are in this position because they have an economic role in society, even when (as in Eagleton’s case) they are committed to fundamental social change to transform that economy. None of the contributors to this special issue— certainly not those actively involved in crowdsour- cing aspects of the editorial process—takes the view that the wisdom of the crowd surpasses that of the paid expert. But those like Shillingsburg who worry that such an idea might underlie some people’s con- ception of a social turn in scholarly editing are right to be worried. There has been a general devaluing of scholarly expertise across the Western democracies in recent years, and the Impact Agenda and its ex- pression in such things as the UK’s Research Excellence Framework are symptoms of a political desire to hold academics to a merely economic ac- countability. At their most extreme, the instincts at work here arise from a managerialist, business-like approach to what happens in universities. In short, there is a discounting of scholarly knowledge except where it can directly be assigned a value by com- mercial exploitation. As any Marxist would predict, the new technologies are double-edged in that regard, for as well as enabling the monetization of scholarly expertise they enable the scholars them- selves to directly reach the great many ordinary readers around the world who value scholarly ex- pertise for its own sake and not in monetary terms. As described in this special issue, there are oppor- tunities for expert individuals to bypass the usual commercial and institutional channels for scholarly interchange and to involve their readers more dir- ectly in their editorial practices. The new technolo- gies can enable a new compact between editors, as the expert curators and disseminators of extraordin- ary writings, and the worldwide readerships that want to read them. References Barthes, R. (1968). La Mort de L’auteur (The death of the author). Mantéia, 5: 12–17. Barthes, R. (1977). Image-Music-Text. Heath, S. (Trans.). London: Fontana. Bevington, D. (2004). Modern spelling: the hard choices. In Erne, L. and Kidnie, M. J. (eds), Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 143–57. Craig, H. (2009-10). Style, statistics, and new models of authorship. Early Modern Literary Studies, 15(1): 41. Crystal, D. (2002). To modernize or not to modernize: there is no question. Around the Globe, 21: 15–17. Eagleton, T. (2001). The Gatekeeper: A Memoir. London: Penguin. Egan, G. (2010). The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-century Editorial Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Egan, G. (2014). What is not collaborative about early modern drama in performance and print? Shakespeare Survey, 67: 18–28. Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-modern Europe (Volumes 1 and 2). Complete in one volume. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1969). Qu’est-ce Qu-un Auteur? (What is an author?). Bulletin de la Societé francaise de Philosophie, 63(3): 73–104. Foucault, M. (1994). What is an author? In Harari, J. V. (Trans.); Davis, R. C. and Schleifer, R. (ed.), Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, 3rd edn. New York, NY: Longman, pp. 341–53. McGann, J. J. (1983). A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McKenzie, D. F. (1981). Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve. Buch und Buchhandel in Europa im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Fünftes Wolfenbütteler Symposium Vom 1 Bis 3 November 1977 [¼ The Book and the Book Trade in Eighteenth-century Europe: Proceedings of the Fifth Wolfenbütteler Symposium November 1-3 1977]. Edited by Giles Barber and Bernard Fabian, Hamburg, Hauswedell, pp. 81–125. McNally, P. R. (ed.) (1987). The Advent of Printing: Historians of Science Respond to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s ‘‘The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.’’ Montreal: McGill University Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. Robinson, P. (2010). How we have been publishing the wrong way, and how we might publish a better way. In Egan, G. (ed.), Electronic Publishing: Politics and G. Egan 918 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2016 by guest on D ecem ber 28, 2016 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from Deleted Text: ' Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: - Deleted Text: -- Deleted Text: ' Deleted Text: For Deleted Text: nited Kingdom Deleted Text: ' http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ Pragmatics. New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Toronto: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (MRTS) and ITER, pp. 139–55. Robinson, P. (2015-16). Chapter 7. Social Editions, Social Editing, Social Texts. In Nelson, B. and Cunningham, R. (eds), Digital Studies/Le champ numérique. An online journal 6: Subsidium on ’Beyond Accessibility: Textual Studies in the Twenty-First Century . Siemens, R., Timney, M., Leitch, C., Koolen, C. and Garnett, A. (2012). Toward modeling the Social edition: an approach to understanding the electronic scholarly edition in the context of new and emerging social media. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 27: 445–61. Wells, S. and Taylor, G. (1979). Modernizing Shakespeare’s Spelling, with Three Studies in the Text of Henry V. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilding, N. (2014). ‘‘The Strangest Piece of News’’: Review of David Wootton Watcher of the Skies (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2010) and J. L. Heilbron Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). London Review of Books, 33: 31–2. Wootton, D. (2011). ‘‘Traffic of the Mind – Facts, Theories, Theories of Facts: The Scientific Revolution and a ‘Forty Year Struggle Not to be Confined By Yesterday’s Questions’’’: Review of Robert S. Westman The Copernican Question: Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2011) and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer Leviathan and the Air- Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life New Edition (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Times Literary Supplement Number, 5664: 3–5. Afterword Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2016 919 by guest on D ecem ber 28, 2016 http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/