Abstract

Martha Smith, Electronic Scholarly Editing

The author uses her own project "The Dickinson Archives" as an example and takes a critical stance towards TEI-XML and towards Franklin’s previous print edition of the Dickinson family’s letters and poems. She argues that imposing the tidy classification of ‘letter’ and ‘poem’ to the chaotic mass of handwritings, papers, notes by of a person is too restrictive of the nature of text, and that digital editors can avoid doing it. She also argues that the disambiguation required by electronic encoding helps us to think about the nature of text and about the nature of the editorial practice. She argues that digital scholarly editions must create new (and plural) ways of reading texts. She recalls the ideas of McGann and Bryant.

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