Week 6: What is the future of editing in a digital world?

Wilken's: Canon's, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method

Fyfe: Electronic Errata: Digital Publishing, Open Review, and the futures of Correction

Cohen: The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing/ Introducing Digital Humanities Now

Witmore: Text: A Massively Addressable Object/The Ancestral Text

This week I decided to forgo a blog about the websites we were to peruse and instead focus on the readings. While I am not tackling the "digital" side of assignments, instead I will be offering commentary on the articles from Matthew K. Gold's book Debates in the Digital Humanities that cover research and scholarship of the field of DH.

Part IV of the book, "Practicing the Digital Humanities" begins with an article from Matthew Wilkens. In this article, Wilkens expresses the problem with the textual canon and what a digital canon would look like. One of the areas that Wilkens focuses on in this article is that of "text extraction and mapping" (251). One way in which the digital humanities could change the canon formation is by employing these kinds of mapping of text extractions of words that were common to appear in a certain time period of literature and then map those words to see what area were discussed frequently during that time period. One problem with that is that the text extraction might not pull the types of metaphorical phrases that were used in texts that do not explicitly say "this country" or "that name" but that are still mentioning it nonetheless. Take for example a political text during the time of Queen Elizabeth like Anne Dowriche's The French Historie. In that work, Dowriche combines political figures like Catherine De Medici and has didactic conversation between her and Satan, Satan obviously working as a metaphor for another political character. This is the type of thing that might get overlooks when employing "text extraction." Wilkens also calls for a "related reallocation of resources within the DH itself" (256). He makes some pretty bold statements about where the thinks that the DH needs to be headed, and yet it also appears as though he is advocating for a canon itself within DH, which could get troublesome if certain sites and scholarship start to be excluded.

Paul Fyfe tackles the subject of the future of editing and corrections in his article.