Conference presentation (HTML slide deck) delivered at the 38th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 8 May 2003, in Session 90, “Electronic Editions: The Evolution of the Text?” (The title slide of the deck reads “Text and the Single Scholar”; the talk is cited in the author's record as “Texts and the Single Scholar.”) Structural encoding systems such as the TEI offer editors a powerful tool for storing, processing, and presenting texts. Some of the most successful uses of this tool have been made by the editors of large corpora and texts with complex histories or visually interesting source material (e.g. the Brown Women Writers series, the Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman Projects, the Electronic Beowulf). Most of these projects are of massive scope, involving teams of scholars, full-time technical staff, and relatively large budgets. This paper looks at the costs and opportunities of structural encoding and electronic editing from the opposite end of the scale — from the perspective of a single scholar engaged with minimal support in editing a moderately complex text or small-to-medium-sized corpus. Drawing on the author's experience with the recently completed Electronic Cædmon's Hymn, it argues that the intellectual and economic costs of an electronic approach are more significant than often realised, explores myths about the revolutionary character of electronic editions, and concludes by suggesting a model by which editors of smaller projects might pool resources. This record contains the original HTML slide deck (zipped) and a slide-by-slide PDF rendering. Slide 3 was a live demonstration of the Electronic Cædmon's Hymn edition (a separate work).
Daniel Paul O’Donnell (Thu,) studied this question.