I’m sharing this event announcement because it may be of interest to you.
The Literature and Digital Humanities Working Group, and the Americanist Colloquium, would like to invite you to join us at the following talk:
Editions Inside of Archives: Literary Editing and Preservation at the Mark Twain Project
Christopher Ohge
Thursday October 13th, 6.30pm
DLib Collaboratory, 350 Barrows Hall
The Mark Twain Papers & Project not only contains the largest collection of material by and about Mark Twain, it also employs several editors working toward a complete scholarly edition of Mark Twain’s writings and letters. The editors in the Project are sometimes involved in archival management, preservation, and “digital humanities” endeavors. Yet the goals of the archive both overlap with and diverge from those of a scholarly edition, especially in that editions produced by the Mark Twain Project use material from other archives, and considering the limit to which editorial work can faithful to physical manuscripts. Archival projects are sometimes done at the expense of editorial projects, and vice versa; each enterprise has its gains and losses.
Digital scholarly editing can also depart from more traditional print editorial enterprises. When editorial policy modifications occur simultaneously with the evolution of digital interfaces, what is an editor to do? Put another way, when “digitizing” an old book with a different editorial policy, is one obliged to “re-edit” the text or compromise about how to present the product of a different set of expectations for editing and designing scholarly editions? How do notions of readability and reliability change with concurrent technological innovations? I shall examine instances where the physical archive, the digital archive, and editions at the Mark Twain Project have illuminated common as well as new ground on reading, editing, and cultural heritage.