Digital Scholarly Editions

Digital Scholarly Editions

A scholarly edition of a text is one that is considered useful and reliable for scholarly purposes.  According to The Committee on Scholarly Editions of the MLA “the editor's basic task is to establish a reliable text”.  In addition to establishing reliability, scholarly editions may also include a textual essay setting forth the history of the text, describing different versions of the text and explaining editorial decisions.  A scholarly edition may also include explanatory foot notes, records alterations and emendations in the text and reports of substantive readings from all versions of the text that might carry authority. 

Digital scholarly editions inherit all the characteristics of traditional scholarly editions. Digital scholarly editions may also include facsimiles of original texts (scanned images of manuscripts for example).  Digital scholarly editions may be created using a number of technologies and standards.  Many use TEI (text encoding initiative) which is a widely used standard for encoding electronic texts.  An important task for all Digital Scholarly Edition projects is to create a machine readable version of the source text. 

The Digitization Centre has the necessary equipment, software and expertise to help create electronic versions of texts.  In the past the centre has worked with researchers for the Texte project and Thomas Moore Hypermedia Archive.  Staff at the Digitisation Centre are available to provide support in the creation of electronic versions of source texts.   

Further information:

• Modern Languages Association Committee on Scholarly Editions
• TEI: Text Encoding Initiative
• Digital Repository of Ireland