Digital Editing and Pedagogy

In o ering the following pedagogical narratives on digital editing, we (the contributors) hold certain truths to be selfevident: that learning is experiential and that sometimes learning may coincide with teaching.The challenges of experiential learning-that is, learning by making and doing-have been with us since Socrates and Cicero on up to John Dewey and Paolo Freire.For e ective instruction, Michel de Montaigne wrote in his essay "Of the Education of Children" (1580) that the aim is to nd a tutor "who has rather a well-made [tête bien faite] than a well-lled head."Instead of "thundering in their pupil's ears, as if they were pouring [facts] into a funnel," instructors should permit the pupil (a young man, in this case) "to taste things, and of himself to discern and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving him to open it for himself [quelquefois luy ouvrant chemin, quelquefois le luy laissant ouvrir]." 1 Managing such pedagogical "openings" for our students-through Montaignian strategies, more focused Socratic discussions, collaborative workshops, or independent research assignments-and waiting for students to "taste things" on their own requires patience, resilience, adaptability, and above all, the capacity to wait through silences in a classroom, for both instructor and student.The intimacies and anxieties of learning can be daunting.Digital technologies will never lessen those challenges, but as our three featured projects demonstrate, the protocols of digital editing enable students "to discern and choose."Fundamental to the thinking here is that the emergent discipline of digital editing can be as much of an opening for textual scholars as it is for students.Each narrative begins with the understanding that editing is a mode of critical thinking that involves the management-one writer calls it "stewardship"of historical documents.Such thinking is shaped, in these case studies, by certain (and by no means all) editorial activitiestranscription, contextual and textual annotation, tagging, collaboration and open editing, the tracing of networks of writers, readers, and publishers-that individuals within a community of learners can use "to open" for themselves certain "ways" of learning.The aim of this kind of digital pedagogy is for instructor and pupil to enact the spirit of independence found in Montaigne by engaging in the pursuit of happiness in editing and thereby rise together as learners.Let me o er, then, another but not always self-evident truth: that editing is learning and that an engagement in the making of a "well-made," even a "well-lled" edition is itself a learning experience.We are used to thinking of scholarly editions in conventional print formats as being monumental, static, and immutable-something like a well-lled lectureand that generations of readers accept the text of a scholarly edition as a given.And yet we know that the words in any edition's Reading Text, the variants in a Textual Apparatus, and the identi able versions of the edited Work are the results of critical judgments.These editorial features are arguments and therefore discussable and subject to change.Editions do not merely "establish the text": they are occasions for discourse about the making, circulation, and management of texts.They are an opening into the interplay of sources, authorial creativity in a historical context, editorial intervention, adaptive revision, textual analysis, and interpretation.An edition will appear static and immutable, but only until such time as a new generation un-edits and re-edits it, in print or digital formats, following a di ering eclectic, genetic, social text, or uid-text approach.Regardless of approach, the process of editing is a learning experience.In editing the rough draft manuscript of Herman Melville's rst book, Typee, I was fairly con dent that I had accurately transcribed that document's revision texts and had discerned a reliable base version for that moment in Melville's creative process.I had viewed the manuscript leaves, relentlessly, through the ancient intermediary of micro lm.Then one day, while proo ng my transcription against the original leaves, I glimpsed, out of the corner of my eye, a faint penciled dot lurking in the left margin of a line of ink inscription that was associated with heretofore invisible (to me) pencilings around certain words.I went searching for more marginal dots and found a dozen or so in this thirty-page manuscript fragment, and from that pattern of marginal penciled dots, and from my coincidental editing of Melville's sister Augusta's revised high-school compositions, edited by their older brother, Gansevoort Melville, I was able to identify Gansevoort as the source of these dots and pencil inscriptions on Herman's rough draft.Gansevoort had edited both brother and sister, and together the siblings made up a coterie of writers and readers learning to write by reading each other and editing themselves.Rarely do we expect so much to emerge from a single penciled dot, but some openings begin with unanticipated moments of discovery.Much of experiential learning is putting students in the condition of discovery.While editing is undeniably a form of learning, the questions we pose here are: How might we make moments of discovery happen for our students?How can digital tools enable students to discover knowledge on their own terms, in their own good time, through their angles of vision?Digital editions should aspire to be rivers of mutability carving out new banks here, depositing silt there, tracing the growths of texts from source to writer to in nitely adaptive cultures of reading.But editorial projects can run dry when the climates of funding and institutional support change, or stagnate when new and younger editors cannot publish their midsized editions easily, in a timely fashion, or at all.Such editions might fail to penetrate into the classroom because their content seems arcane rather than fundamental to creativity, their processes hidden rather than linked to critical thinking, their navigations limited to display rather than open to interaction.The larger question, then, is how can we design editions (print and digital) that are experiential and heuristic with regard to their own making?So far, I suspect that few will disagree with these aspirations.But when I assert that an edition should be designed as interactive, interoperable, and recon gurable-that it should teach editing as it builds an edition, that it should be a forum for debate about variants, revisions, and versions, that it should teach how to argue about texts and textual evolution-then I think I may be testing the limit of one's tolerance for the idea that editing is learning.The problem is that editions are expected to be de nitive, and though editors recognize that they cannot be, they also know that textual uidity-whether it derives from authorial, editorial, or adaptive revision-is a source of anxiety as well as discourse, and even uid-text editors naturally seek ways to contain uidities, if only to navigate them.One pedagogical goal, then, is that editorial management should not mitigate but rather expose the anxieties of textual uidity.