Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age: A White Paper of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions

“This white paper is intended as a tool for thinking through a set of pressing questions for the MLA’s Committee on Scholarly Editions (CSE) and as a contextualized expression of our current responses to those questions. These questions at bottom amount to “What is a (digital) scholarly edition?” and “How can the CSE, through its practices and guidelines, encourage excellence in (digital) scholarly editing?” These questions are of course not new, but the committee has not yet addressed them directly and formally in the context of digital editorial practice. This white paper is an attempt to do so. The audience for this document is threefold. First, it is intended for the present and future members of the CSE, for whom it will hopefully serve as a record of current ideas and rationales and  help in anchoring policy or explaining decisions to later committee members. Second, it is intended for scholarly editors who are interested in using the CSE’s guidelines and would like to know more about their intellectual background. And finally, it is intended for a wider audience that includes those who are interested in scholarly editing and editions and are curious about the evolution of the committee’s thinking…”