Beyond Social Editing

Introduction

The symposium from which this book emerges invited a conversation about the “futures of digital scholarly editing,” a phrasing that usefully puts the emphasis on the process of editing, and by extension on the human work and agencies involved, rather than on the monumentalism of editions as products. Although discussions of digital scholarly editing during my professional lifetime have often been driven by a fascination with technological possibility, and also an accompanying fascination with definition and redefinition—“what is a digital scholarly edition?”—the questions that most interest me now about the futures of digital scholarly editing are about how the idea of “editing” models, brokers, and informs human interactions: in effect, the social geometry and social entailments of the edition.

In order to understand fully what such a “social geometry” entails, we need to observe the forms of human agency that are present within the ecology that is created around an edition or an editorial process. These include formal practical roles such as author, editor, and reader, and also what we might call “ideological” roles, such as the “scholar” in “scholarly editing”: not a person, precisely, but a name for a formation of authority. Another thing that needs to be made visible is the forms of agency that inhere in documents and editions themselves. Patrick Sahle gives us a great example of this kind of agency in his opening definitional essay in Matthew J. Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo’s Digital Scholarly Editing:

[Editions] explore the uncharted circumstances of documents, texts and their transmission. They may correct errors introduced by the conditions of production, copying and publishing. They explain what is not evident to the present-day reader. In short, they bridge a distance in time, a historical difference. Texts that are created today do not need to be critically edited. They can speak for themselves. Only historic documents and texts need an editor to make them speak clearly.1

The simplest “social geometry” of the scholarly edition consolidates these agencies: it accords to the editor an intellectual self-sufficiency and mastery to serve as the intellectual anchor and guarantor of an edition that fully explores, explains, and bridges the history and uncharted circumstances of an author’s work to a reader. However artificial this consolidation may feel (we know the situation is never this simple!), as an archetype it is compelling enough that critics over the years have taken seriously the task of problematizing it, aiming in varied ways toward a more “social” or pluralized vision of the editorial enterprise. For example, in the space marked out for the author, critics in the tradition of D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann argue that we should attend to an array of different kinds of contributors whose forms of agency equally deserve attention. The Canterbury Tales Project in the 1990s opened up the possibility that a set of manuscript witnesses might constitute a set of potential editions rather than a single edition, with each edition making a provisional argument based on a set of choices rather than a definitive statement. Paths of proliferation like these were marked out early on and were animated by a variety of motives in several of the constituent competencies that contribute to the product we think of as the “digital scholarly edition.” These include the study of digital publishing and its politics, which has put insistent pressure on concepts like definitiveness and proprietary information; they also include the study of digital archives, which addresses the question of how we amass the documents that might contribute to an edition, and what such gatherings represent in terms of power relations and agency. Strategic choices by the funding agencies that support digital editing have urged the creation of sharable repositories of source material (with the explicit goal of encouraging a divergent proliferation of editions). And technological developments over the decades have steadily improved the availability of tools for collaborative and distributed work: for instance, version control, annotation systems, and collaborative editing platforms.

The idea of a distributed or community-based or “social” edition can thus take many different forms that, though geometrically analogous in a superficial way, are conceptually quite different in the ways they imagine agency and relationships, and also in the way they imagine human virtue.

The “Social Edition”

The term “social edition” in a digital humanities context seems to have been introduced by the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) collaborative team, including Ray Siemens, Cara Leitch, Megan Timney, and others, in a series of articles that discuss a social edition of the Devonshire manuscript, a commonplace book containing the poems of Thomas Wyatt but also writings by many other contributors, both men and women. The qualified term “social edition” explicitly draws attention to a set of differentiations and deliberately experimental practices that set this approach apart. Broadly, the INKE team situates the social edition in two ways. Historically, they position it as a further step in a genealogy of the digital edition that begins with the “dynamic” nature of the electronic text and the “hypertextual” nature of interlinked digital archives, a foundation of abundance and interactive bilateralism. Typologically, the social edition is characterized by the way it “blends traditional scholarly editing practices with . . . digital social media environments,” and by its debt to contemporary editorial theory (building on work by McGann and McKenzie), “which recognizes the inherently social form and formation of texts.”2 In their practical account of how this social edition was developed, the INKE team directs our attention to the components and work processes of the traditional scholarly edition to show us where they could be blown open. As in the “pluralized” geometry above, the social edition imagines multiple, negotiated agencies in places where the traditional edition tends to consolidate authority: for example, in the selection of documents and prioritization of texts (the result of transparent, but unilateral decision-making) and in the communicative circuit created by the edition, in which expertise is disseminated to be shared with other experts. The social edition also deliberately diminishes the effects of prestige in places where the traditional edition seeks to magnify it. These spaces of diminished prestige include the authorship of the text(s), the “work” itself as something worthy of attention—something that stands out from the much larger set of texts in existence as canonical or canonizable—and the scholarly editor as a credentialed and named figure. They also include the editing process, conventionally construed as a heroic “life’s work,” and the resulting monumentalism of the edition itself as a product, as well as the intellectual sponsorship conferred by the press that magnifies the monumental effect.

But the INKE accounts also draw attention to specific choices about project design and working environments that diverge from what we might call the “traditional digital scholarly edition.” The first of these is the choice to edit a compilation rather than a single-author work:

A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript seeks to publish the contents of the original manuscript in their entirety, move beyond the limitations of an author-centred focus on Wyatt’s contributions and concentrate on the social, literary and historical contexts in which the volume is situated as a unified whole. . . . A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript aims to preserve the socially mediated textual and extra-textual elements of the manuscript that have been elided or ignored in previous work. These ostensible “paratexts” make significant contributions to the meaning and appreciation of the manuscript miscellany and its constituent parts: annotations, glosses, names, ciphers and various jottings. The telling proximity of one work to another, significant gatherings of materials, illustrations entered into the manuscript alongside the text and so forth all shape the way we understand the manuscript, but are often ignored when preparing scholarly editions.3

Mirroring the multi-author space of the compilation, the editorial team makes use of social media environments and collaborative authoring environments (rather than more local, internal working spaces) to “enable new editing practices,” using Wikibooks, which situates users as “active authors rather than simply readers or consumers.”4 Drawing in a “community of individuals” to create the new edited text, the team uses TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) markup to make transcription and editing decisions visible, debatable, and revisable by the project team and its external audience. These editorial design decisions reinforce the team’s emphasis on working in public and distributing editorial authority beyond the editorial team. The social edition “brings communities together to engage in conversation around a text formed and reformed through an ongoing, iterative, public editorial process. A central aim of the project was to facilitate knowledge transfer and creation between multiple editorial communities with varying values and priorities.”5

These design choices are notable for being motivated by ethical rather than purely intellectual considerations, and they cohere around three distinct types of virtues. The first of these are what I would describe as “epistemological virtues” or virtues of enlightenment: enhancements to knowledge such as accuracy, clarity, transparency, distribution, access: “knowledge transfer”; “public editorial process.” This kind of virtue is also evident in Sahle’s definition of the mission of the scholarly edition: “correct errors”; “explore uncharted circumstances”; “explain what is not evident”; “speak clearly.” This language is echoed in other definitional spaces such as the white paper “Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age” published by the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editing, which identifies “a set of crucial features that we take to be fundamental to scholarly editing: transparency, accuracy, appropriateness of method, clear and responsible documentation, and the exercise of critical judgment in representing a full account of the textual situation at stake.”6

The second set of virtues are what I would describe as “affective virtues” or virtues of empathy, such as enhancements of trust and strengthened social bonds. In the Devonshire manuscript scenario, this is evident in the way that knowledge transfer is being effected “between multiple editorial communities with varying values and priorities, . . . bringing communities together to engage in conversation.” And the final group are virtues we might describe as “social virtues” or “virtues of empowerment”: shared agency, equity, and inclusiveness. The INKE team describes their editing process as creating “active authors,” “enabling new editing practices,” “speaking for themselves.” The work of “knowledge transfer” also operates as a virtue of empowerment, since what that transfer accomplishes is the transfer of agency as well.

If we imagine the world of the edition as a social network with a proliferating set of agents and interactions, we can see how these virtues animate and vitalize specific spaces within the geometry of this network, both editorial spaces and intratextual spaces. For instance, what start as epistemological virtues (the ability of the edition to be “clear” and to “explain”) also become virtues of empowerment: those clear explanations serve and empower readers, who are construed as “active authors rather than simply . . . consumers.” And the constitution of the various communities—contributors, editors, and readers—is understood by the social edition to be founded on affective virtues. As part of the editorial process, the editors discuss and negotiate varying values and priorities in collaboration with readers, via public social media, as well as a social media platform hosted by the edition’s publisher.7 The editorial process is described as a widely inclusive “conversation”:

With the firm foundation of documented encoding, all those working with the document can refer to, build on or adapt the project’s foundation. The markup did not simply help the team keep track of the process; it also facilitated an ongoing scholarly conversation about the text. Readers can compare our transcriptions to the facsimiles included on each page of the Wikibooks edition and are free to contest (and even alter) our regularisations or corrections.8

The homologies between the collaborative work of editing the Devonshire Manuscript and the collaborative work of creating the manuscript itself in the first place redouble the emphasis on sociality; quoting Margaret Ezell’s observation that the practice of manuscript compilation served to “cement social bonds” within women’s literary circles, the authors note that, “by shifting our own editorial process into an environment representative of the inherent sociality of texts, A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript hearkens back to the multi-author roots of the text itself.”9

In noting and celebrating this shared emphasis on sociality, it is worth pausing over a few other elements of the resemblance that may nuance the picture. The authorship of the Devonshire manuscript exhibits not only the “inherent sociality” of all texts but also an intensified version of it: a coterie associated with the court of Queen Anne Boleyn, consisting of members of the nobility who were also in many cases closely related through familial as well as social ties. The manuscript enacts a directly interactive and collaborative process of authoring and annotation that goes far beyond the kinds of sociality marked through McGann’s and McKenzie’s attention to the roles of printers, publishers, illustrators, and other essential contributors to the production and circulation of texts. The elite nature of the group and its closed communicative circuit are thus close—we might almost say essential—adjuncts to its sociality. In drawing the analogy to the INKE editorial team, we can identify an analogous alignment of status (enacted through academic rather than class privilege and through professional rather than courtly ties) that similarly secures the boundaries and creates trust relationships on which the practices of social editing are founded. However, as their written accounts note, the team paid deliberate attention to tools and practices that could render those boundaries porous and expand those trust relationships to include a wider circuit of expertise and contribution. In building on this example and imagining the wider potential scope of “social editing,” it would be important to consider what (possibly implicit or mystified) forms of connection and social uniformity may underpin the trust relationships that are assumed.

The Antisocial Edition

As I noted before, the INKE team situate their social edition within a history of digital humanities and a genealogy of the digital edition that begins with the “dynamic” nature of the electronic text and the “hypertextual” nature of interlinked digital archives, qualities marked by computing researchers in humanities computing as early as the 1980s in discussing digital editions and digital systems of publication and circulation.10 If we were to draw a big diagram to illustrate the word “hypertext,” it would certainly look very much like our social edition network: many nodes connected by arrows, all intercommunicating, buzzing with empowerment. But the social edition as the INKE team describe it is not the only way this narrative can play out, and to illustrate this I’d like to turn briefly to another, earlier experiment (perhaps chiefly a thought experiment) with “social” publishing: Theodor Holm Nelson’s Project Xanadu. Begun in the 1960s and continuing even to this day, Xanadu was an attempt to create a platform for peer-to-peer publishing, annotation, and remixing of content. It is not a direct analogue of “scholarly editing,” but a formation that in effect leapfrogs past the “social edition” in ostensibly the same direction: to eliminate what is hieratic and culturally prominent and exclusive, and to focus entirely on structures of communication and information exchange for use with works of literature and cultural knowledge.

In Xanadu, Nelson envisioned a distributed network to manage all writing, and a platform for reading, authoring, and comparison: “a new populist medium, a many-to-many publishing system, not centralized in editorial and publishing companies, but open to anyone.” The result would be an enormously enhanced reading experience: “All different republications could in principle be viewed side-by-side by the user, thus leading to greater understanding of the material and of the points of view of the different documents, their authors and republishers.”11 He also envisioned a universal system of royalties and access fees. In his formal definition of the problem space, Nelson enumerates the functional requirements for such a system, including reliability, security against accident and malice, authentication and preservation of property rights, reuse, and affordable monetized exchange:

It must be possible to create, access and manipulate this literature . . . cheaply, reliably and securely from anywhere in the world. . . . Documents must remain accessible indefinitely, safe from any kind of loss, damage, modification, censorship or removal except by the owner. . . . It must be impossible to falsify ownership or track individual readers of any document. . . . This system of literature . . . must allow people to create virtual copies (“transclusions”) of any existing collection of information in the system regardless of ownership; . . . the system must guarantee that the owner of any information will be paid their chosen royalties on any portions of their documents, no matter how small, whenever and wherever they are used.12

In its proliferation of nodes with multiple interconnections, this vision shares some of its geometries with the social edition: creators, readers, annotators, and publishers are all highly pluralized and distributed. And it echoes the social edition’s insistence on eliminating the institutional consolidation of power and capital in publishers and their control over production and dissemination. Xanadu’s design anticipates modern social media platforms, but with a much more thoroughly distributed (imagined) architecture than WikiBooks or most of today’s social media sites and tools. However, when we look at the edges instead of the nodes, we see some crucial differences. Foremost among these is a kind of “social distancing” instantiated and enforced through systems of formalized distrust: an emphasis on privacy, security, and authentication. In this respect, Xanadu anticipates systems like blockchain, which the foundational white paper on Bitcoin observes is explicitly architected around “cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”13 As we noted above, the functional requirements for Xanadu include a significant threat model that anticipates risks of “loss, damage, modification, censorship or removal,” as well as falsification of ownership and surveillance and tracking of readers. This threat model in turn is predicated on an economic model that pays careful attention to ownership, monetization, and exchange, and on the ability to set a formal value on information. Indeed, it is precisely the networked circulation posited by the massively distributed architecture of Xanadu that supports this formal valuation, by imagining a marketplace of sufficient scale to achieve competition among producers and accessibility by purchasers, very much in the manner of a platform like Etsy. Nelson’s vision of Xanadu intensifies this effect further through its emphasis on interconnection and recombination of documents, through something called “transcopyright”: through a system of micropayments, authors would be able to remix each other’s work transparently while money flowed from place to place as needed to reflect these tiny transfers of value.

Xanadu’s virtues are emphatically epistemological. They make for “greater understanding of the material and of the points of view of the different documents, their authors and republishers”—in other words, a fully transparent knowledge network in which each node’s perspective can be known to all the others.14 Xanadu thus anticipates the open access movement’s goal of universally transparent access, but without many of the nuances we now recognize as essential, issues like restricting access to culturally sensitive materials, establishing community self-determination, and respecting local information-sharing practices.15 In particular, the Xanadu system emphasizes the fungibility of both documents and people as entities to be managed within a system that accords uniform levels of agency under a uniform system of value. And it relies on this fungibility as a substitute for a more complex system of negotiated meaning that would require the agents (readers, authors, remixers, transcluders) to do the things the INKE team highlights as goals of their work: “facilitate knowledge transfer”; “engage in conversation.” Xanadu is based on a leveled free-market economics of “transparency” in which obvious concentrations of capital have been removed, or at least mystified; publishing companies have been eliminated and costs are instead set by individual content creators and transmitters, but economic barriers are still evident. Individual micropublishers, authors, and readers still need access to a presumed universal information network, and technical support for that network is assumed but not explicitly accounted for. The linked flows of information and money underscore the way Xanadu also seeks to establish documents as essentially fungible, their value established in monetary terms by the overall market of readers, rather than in terms of cultural or community value. Its sociality is thus reduced to a flattened, partial, and somewhat naive or disingenuous “everyone”: a social geometry that achieves its flat and egalitarian structure through its omissions. There is knowledge at each node, but all forms of cultural authority have been evacuated, even those that would recognize communities’ differential authority over materials in which they are directly concerned. We might characterize Xanadu as a kind of “post-social” edition: the virtues it most significantly omits are those of affect and sociality.

The Social Edition Revisited

The social edition as described by INKE alerts us to the importance of affective virtues in establishing an editorial scenario in which meaning can be negotiated, but it does not fully illustrate how those virtues could operate or how far we might be able to take its version of sociality. It establishes a space that is still animated by academic scholarship and agency, even while it shares and diversifies that agency, and sets it up on a platform somewhat separate from the academy. The INKE team acknowledges their goal of “blending traditional scholarly editing practices and standards with comparatively recent digital social media environments,” and in that blending (particularly evidenced by the word “standards”), we may understand a reluctance to let go of the primary epistemological virtues of the “edition” as traditionally conceived: the way it establishes a position of authority that grounds its work of “explaining,” even if that authority is now shared. Recent research on graph approaches to digital scholarly editing show a similar understanding of editions as “knowledge sites” where authority is pluralized and distributed within a bounded academic space.16 Technologies like stand-off annotation, application programming interfaces (APIs), and registry services decentralize the edition and create conditions for “editions” to be reconceptualized as a distributed system of edition-knowledge. The design of these technological foundations retains concepts like provenance, permanence, and authority, resituating them at the system level.

But the graph model does open the door for more radical reimaginings, since the boundaries of the edition (which in the INKE model are still determined by the editorial team) are informational rather than organizational. Although there may still be reluctance to alter the basic epistemological orientation of the edition, at a structural level that change has already been put on the table. The field of critical archival studies has been pushing on precisely this reluctance in arguing that we need to remake the relationships through which cultural meaning is negotiated, along affective rather than purely epistemological lines. Critical archival studies thus offer us something like the limit case of the social edition. It proposes that documents are innumerable, that all documents have value in deeply situational ways, and that value is conferred by the community rather than by adherence to established professional protocols or metrics of prestige.

If applied to editorial practice, these propositions would have significant impact on the social geometry of the edition in several distinct and important ways. The first of these concerns the acknowledgement, sharing, and dispersal of agency. While acknowledging the real current force of institutional power and authority in establishing and authenticating cultural value, critical archival studies urge that this power be demystified and displaced to make space for community decision-making and ownership.17 Importantly, as part of this shift, professional expertise must also be decentered. As Michelle Caswell argues, a principle of “archival pluralism” would entail

acknowledgement of and engagement with . . . multiple coexisting archival realities—that is, fundamentally differing but equally valid ways of being and knowing—most commonly made manifest in the archival realm by (sometimes) irreconcilably divergent—but still credible—ways of defining, transmitting, and interpreting evidence and memory.18

These principles put pressure on the status of the archivist—the professional training, institutional authority, and epistemological positioning (for instance, presumed neutrality) that underpin that role.

In an even more profound reconsideration of agency, a survey of archival-studies literature by Caswell, Jessica Tai, Jimmy Zavala, Joyce Gabiola, and Gracen Brilmyer draws together myriad sources showing how agency and authority can and must be radically pluralized and dispersed, to include not only “members of the communities documented and represented by marginalized identity-based community archives,”19 but also documents, artifacts, and archival records, which are recast as agents through their enormous affective power, through their role as carriers of human memory and intention, and through their liberatory role in a human rights context in which they act as “agents of accountability”:

Building from a conception of records that highlights their power in inciting change in real-world and material ways, we can begin to conceive of the notion of records as agents imbued with an autonomous sense of purpose and will.20

This decentering and pluralization of agency also shifts the importance we attach to systems of information organization, including provenance,21 metadata,22 and information modeling.23 Acknowledging that historical aggregations of documents may often be the result of violence, appropriation, or displacement, critical archival studies provides an understanding that organizational systems must not be implemented as further outgrowths of institutional power and violence (even under cover of terminology such as “professional standards” or “scholarly rigor” or “interoperability”), but must be animated by the many forms of agency that are understood to be ethically connected to the archive. With this acknowledgement, affective and social virtues of trust, mutual responsibility, and the “ethics of care” or “radical empathy” that Caswell and Marika Cifor propose as the foundations for an archival practice rooted in and oriented toward social justice24 are established as the primary virtues of significance.

As a thought experiment, what would a social edition look like that operated with the primary goal of creating social connection and empowerment? Caswell and Cifor offer us a road map for thinking about this in their proposal to rethink four key archival relationships through an orientation toward radical empathy. The first relationship is between the archivist and the record creator: for purposes of our thought experiment, the relationship between the editor and the author and other participants involved in the production of the text. When the archivist or editor enters into a relationship of care with the creator, key decision-making processes are informed and guided by empathy. A simplistic version of this application of empathy would be to consider the author’s intentions or wishes in developing editorial policy. From a perspective of radical empathy, this ethical consideration of the author’s intentions differs from the use of “authorial intention” that has guided some traditions of editorial practice, in that it asks the editor to treat the author’s wishes as a primary constraint on action, rather than as a form of information to be discovered and made visible. This might entail some significant revision to editorial practices currently considered routine, such as deciphering or unveiling deleted material, seeking or reconstructing materials that were destroyed or concealed by the author, presenting works outside of their original context, or choosing a format of publication (such as a printed book) at variance with the author’s creative philosophy. A fuller exploration of this application of empathy to editorial practice would require us to imagine what it would mean to de-objectify the author and their work: to situate the author’s work as something other than an object of study, and to orient the editorial enterprise as a whole toward goals other than scholarship as currently understood.

The idea of treating the author, and by extension their work, as an ethical agent echoes the urging of Caswell, Tai, and their coauthors that archival records and those represented within them be treated as agents,25 and the second relationship Caswell and Cifor ask us to scrutinize is between the archivist and those represented within archival records: “The archivist has an affective responsibility to those about whom records are created, often unwittingly and unwillingly. Such stakeholders include Indigenous and colonial subjects counted, classified, studied, enslaved, traded as property.”26 From a perspective of radical empathy, the archival goal is to “recover and reassert the voices of record subjects in the archival process.”27 To apply this principle to the editorial ecology, we need to think about what the mandate to “recover and reassert . . . voices” entails, as a way of restoring lost agency and presence in materials being edited. A useful example here is the editorial practice of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) in representing the narratives of enslaved people, originally embedded in white-authored documents, as separately authored works with their own metadata and distinct presence within the ECDA collection.28 We also need to think imaginatively about who are the equivalent of the “record subjects,” particularly in the case of literary and fictional works where those represented are in some sense nonexistent. The fictive entities themselves may have no analogous claim on the editor’s affective consideration, but when understood as representations that draw from and have an impact upon actual persons and places they direct our attention towards entities that should have such a claim.

We are already seeing, as advocates of critical archival practice have also seen, some emerging complexities in applying these principles, such as in cases where a responsibility to the author is at odds with a responsibility to those represented. What about cases in which an author is an enslaver, a colonial administrator, an apologist for state-sponsored violence? To resolve these tensions we need to look to the deeper animating principles of social justice and community empowerment, and perhaps deeper still at principles of nonviolence and self-determination from which we can derive frameworks to help resolve these questions.

The last two relationships of importance here are the most challenging: between the archivist and users of the archive, and between the archivist and the community. Caswell and Cifor propose that “practising radical empathy with users means acknowledging the deep emotional ties users have to records. . . . We cannot ethically continue to conceive of our primary users as academic scholars.”29 Furthermore, archivists have “responsibilities towards unseen others,” those who are not direct users of records but for whom the use of records has lasting consequences. “The archivist has an ethical obligation to empathize with all parties impacted by archival use—the communities for whom justice or impunity has lasting consequences, the community of people for whom representation—or silencing—matters.”30 To apply these obligations to the domain of scholarly editing, it may be apt to think about the pedagogical functions of the edition. By this I mean not the use of editions in the classroom, but rather the ways in which scholarly editions teach—or fail to teach—readers how to use the knowledge they offer, in the broadest sense. Scholarly editions (as we observed at the outset) typically imagine an audience of fellow scholars, in ways that strongly shape both what information is presented and how that information is presented. What would it mean to cease “conceiv[ing] of our primary users as academic scholars,” in the sense that Caswell and Cifor propose? Not, that is, to cease serving academic scholars, but rather no longer to construe all users as having a purely scholarly relationship to information, one animated by an expert quest for knowledge? Radical empathy, in this context, might entail taking a much wider view of the kinds of impact that one’s work might have, including the ethical consequences of that work: wider not only with respect to the kinds of people taken into account (students, the general public), but also wider with respect to the kinds of impacts we expect from an “edition.” This may seem to stretch our sense of both the “edition” and the responsibilities one takes on in creating one, and this is worth remarking on, since it seems less surprising to encounter discussions of ethical responsibilities for members of the archival professions. Why does the role of the scholarly editor seem so much less laden with social responsibility? Is it because the academy is accustomed to construing archivists and librarians as service roles, as roles that are anchored in affective virtues, whereas the scholar’s role is imagined as having primarily epistemological virtues?

If scholarly editors doubt that the works they might deal with themselves, as editors, would call for these kinds of ethical considerations—if the materials seem too distant in time, or too fictional, or too culturally inconsequential—I would suggest that this may be partly because we are not yet editing the most pressing documents. And here we may note that major funding programs including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the Mellon Foundation are slowly starting to aim their funding dollars toward broadening assumptions of what cultural heritage means and what materials should be the focus of attention. But I also wonder whether such doubt might ignore the ways in which editing works that are deemed canonical or hegemonic or mainstream might in fact have repercussions, even violent ones. These repercussions arise precisely in the denial (through an exclusive focus on epistemological virtues) of the violence of formations like hegemonic whiteness. If we edit a Renaissance sonnet in which a blazon presents a standard of white beauty without imagining how a Black child might encounter such a text in a high school English class, we have missed the point that Caswell and Cifor are potentially offering us.

Two notable digital projects, the ECDA and the Colored Conventions Project (CCP), are exploring important applications of these principles of editorial empathy. Both projects use practices like community transcription events and workshops that dramatically extend editorial agency and responsibility, and the ECDA has engaged participants in experiments in “critical fabulation” that ask readers to imagine empathetically the lives of enslaved people whose voices appear fleetingly in the embedded slave narratives recorded in the ECDA collection.31 CCP presents a set of guiding principles for the project’s work that resonate strongly with Caswell and Cifor’s concept of radical empathy in the service of social justice goals; for example:

• Principle 1: “CCP seeks to enact collective organizing principles and values that were modeled by the Colored Conventions Movement.”
• Principle 4: “Mirroring the Colored Conventions’s focus on labor rights and Black economic health, our project seeks structures and support that honor the work members bring to the project through equitable compensation, acknowledgement, and attribution.”
• Principle 5: “We seek to name Black people and communities as an affirmation of the Black humanity inherent in Black data/curation.”32

Further, the CCP asks users of its data corpus to make a similar commitment.33 These principles are challenging to follow, and I believe deliberately so: they require not only effort beyond what is typical, but effort that is specifically oriented toward an exercise of mindfulness, an attentiveness to the existence and humanity of other persons at every point and in every place: in documents, in data, in history, in working relationships, in editorial principles.

My original idea for this essay was a thought experiment: what would a “peer-to-peer” edition look like? I was fascinated by the idea of an edition platform based on something like GitHub: a shared repository of source documents, to which would be added at least one repository of representations of those documents, such as TEI-encoded transcriptions, or plain-text transcriptions with stand-off markup. There could be as many such repositories as were prompted by different approaches to the task of representation. Contributions of information could be made by copying a repository, making changes, offering those changes for incorporation back into the original repository. Debates over transcription or encoding strategies could be discovered through an analysis of differences between versions. I am sure somewhere in my mind was an echo of a presentation by Peter Robinson at the 2006 symposium “Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future” (later included in a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly) in which he proposed a similar vision for a “new paradigm for scholarly editing”:

The lifeblood of this is going to be texts made freely available to everyone. I want to put the transcripts of Canterbury Tales manuscripts up out there on the web, for everyone. If this all works, I am very soon going to see those transcripts turning up all over the place, in all kinds of contexts, with all kinds of annotations, being used for all kinds of things I did not expect. I think this is wonderful.34

But in revisiting that piece, I found even this vision ends up leading back to a familiar geometry:

The important exception is this: high-value, fully-published work which combines both exceptional scholarly effort with purposeful design and publication. An example of this is the Nestle-Aland text and apparatus: there are decades of work behind this, by the scholars in Münster, their partners, and their publisher. This is of such high value that, indeed, people are prepared to pay for this.35

The allure of Xanadu is all too real—and, as the contemporary allure of blockchain technologies reveals, it is evidence of a pervasive and enduring economic imaginary rooted in libertarianism and the disavowal of the social. The GitHub dream vision imagines not only a technology for brokering effortlessly shared information, but also an accompanying diminution or abdication of responsibility for dealing directly and empathetically with other human beings. As I’ve learned in the past two years, efforts like the Colored Conventions Project, whose constant attention to ethical and empathetic conduct is such an important model, take us much further in imagining what a genuinely “social” or community-oriented approach to editing could look like.

Notes

1. 1. Patrick Sahle, “What Is a Digital Scholarly Edition?,” in Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices, ed. Matthew J. Driscoll and Elena Pierazzo (Cambridge: OpenBook, 2016): 25–26 (emphasis mine), doi.org/10.11647/obp.0095.08.

2. 2. Ray Siemens, Constance Crompton, Daniel Powell, Alyssa Arbuckle, Maggie Shirley, and Devonshire Manuscript Editorial Group, “Building a Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript,” in Driscoll and Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing, 137–60, at ¶1, doi.org/10.11647/obp.0095.08.

3. 3. Siemens et al., “Building,” ¶3.

4. 4. Siemens et al., “Building,” ¶12.

5. 5. Siemens et al., ¶28.

6. 6. Modern Language Association, “Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age: A White Paper of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions,” 2015, scholarlyeditions.mla.hcommons.org/cse-white-paper/.

7. 7. Siemens et al., “Building,” ¶22.

8. 8. Siemens et al., ¶18.

9. 9. Siemens et al., ¶12.

10. 10. See, for instance, Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990); Peter Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Digital Age: Theory and Practice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 165.

11. 11. Theodor Holm Nelson, “Transcopyright: Dealing with the Dilemma of Digital Copyright,” Educom Review 32, no. 1 (1997), educause.edu/apps/er/review/reviewArticles/32132.html.

12. 12. Theodor Holm Nelson, “What is Xanadu?,” xanadu.com.au.

13. 13. Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. I’m grateful to the editors of this volume for reminding me of this connection.

14. 14. Nelson, “Transcopyright.”

15. 15. See, for instance, Siobhan Senier, “Digitizing Indigenous History: Trends and Challenges,” Journal of Victorian Culture 19, no. 3 (2014): 396–402, doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2014.947188; Kimberly Christen, “Gone Digital: Aboriginal Remix and the Cultural Commons,” International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005): 315–45, doi.org/10.1017/S0940739105050186.

16. 16. See, for instance, Elena Spadini and Francesca Tomasi, “Introduction,” in Graph Data-Models and Semantic Web Technologies in Scholarly Digital Editing, ed. Elena Spadini, Francesca Tomasi, and Georg Vogeler, Schriften des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik 15 (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2021), kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/55227/1/Vogeler.pdf; Daniel L. Schwartz, Nathan P. Gibson and Katayoun Torabi, “Modeling a Born-Digital Factoid Prosopography using the TEI and Linked Data,” Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Rolling Issue 2022, doi.org/10.4000/jtei.3979.

17. 17. See, for instance, Michelle Caswell, “SAADA and the Community-Based Archives Model: What Is a Community-Based Archives Anyway?,” SAADA (South Asian American Archive), 2012, saada.org/tides/article/20120418-704; Ricardo Punzalan and Michelle Caswell, “Critical Directions for Archival Approaches to Social Justice,” Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 86, no. 1 (2016): 25–42; Jessica Tai, Jimmy Zavala, Joyce Gabiola, Gracen Brilmyer, and Michelle Caswell, “Summoning the Ghosts: Records as Agents in Community Archives,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 6 (2019): article 18, https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol6/iss1/18.

18. 18. Michelle Caswell, “On Archival Pluralism: What religious pluralism (and its critics) can teach us about archives,” Archival Science 13 (2013): 277, doi.org/10.1007/s10502-012-9197-y.

19. 19. Jessica Tai et al., “Summoning,” 1.

20. 20. Tai et al., 6.

21. 21. See Punzalan and Caswell, “Critical Directions.”

22. 22. See Kimberly Christen, “Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Mukutu CMS,” in The Design for Diversity Learning Toolkit, Northeastern University, 2018, des4div.library.northeastern.edu/indigenous-knowledge-systems-and-mukurtu-cms/.

23. 23. See Timothy B. Powell and Larry P. Aitken, “Encoding Culture: Building a Digital Archive Based on Traditional Ojibwe Teachings,” in The American Literary Scholar in the Digital Age, ed. Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011): 250–74, doi.org/10.3998/etlc.9362034.0001.001.

24. 24. Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in the Archives,” Archivaria 81 (2016): 23, escholarship.org/uc/item/0mb9568h.

25. 25. Tai et al., “Summoning.”

26. 26. Caswell and Cifor, “From Human Rights,” 36.

27. 27. Caswell and Cifor, 36.

28. 28. Early Caribbean Digital Archive, “Early Caribbean Slave Narratives,” ecda.northeastern.edu/home/about-exhibits/early-caribbean-slave-narratives-exhibit/. This work is grounded in project co-director Nicole Aljoe’s foundational research in Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709–1838 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

29. 29. Caswell and Cifor, “From Human Rights,” 37–38.

30. 30. Caswell and Cifor, 38–39.

31. 31. This phrase “critical fabulation” is drawn from Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

32. 32. Colored Conventions Project, “Colored Convention Project Principles,” coloredconventions.org/about/principles/.

33. 33. Colored Conventions Project, “Digital Records: Corpus,” omeka.coloredconventions.org/ccp-corpus.

34. 34. Peter Robinson, “The Ends of Editing,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2009): ¶35, digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000051/000051.html

35. 35. Robinson, “The Ends of Editing,” ¶38.