Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience

Publishing Scholarly Editions offers new intellectual tools for publishing digital editions that bring readers closer to the experimental practices of literature, editing, and reading. Sections 1 and 2 frame intentionality and data analysis as intersubjective, interrelated, and illustrative of experience-as-experimentation. In them, I explore these ideas in two editorial projects of nineteenth-century works: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor and the anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, edited by Mary Anne Rawson. Section 3 uses philosophical Pragmatism to rethink editorial principles and data modelling, arguing for a broader conception of the edition rooted in data collections and experience. The Conclusion draws attention to the challenges of publishing digital editions, and why they have failed to be supported by the publishing industry. If publications are conceived as pragmatic 'inventions' based on reliable, open-access data collections, then editing will embrace the critical, aesthetic, and experimental affordances of editions of experience.