Formalization, Transformation, and the Digital Scholarly Edition

This talk considers how the scholarly edition (whether print or digital) processes information via formalization, and about the implications of this for our understanding and practice of digital scholarly editing. More specifically, I identify a basic concern with the protocols governing best practices in digital text editing — namely, XML markup with a TEI schema. Because of such protocols and their associated transformations, online scholarly editions are vitiated by a gap between the edition as formalized in markup language and the edition as encountered by the end user. Part of my argument is on behalf of fuller transparency for online projects, which need to turn themselves inside out on demand. Scholar-users need to know more about the provenance of the data they encounter in web environments and not remain satisfied with the orchestrated performances that the interface runs.