On Automating Editions

Recent developments in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) have ensured that automated editions—presentational editions generated from both digital images of text and their corresponding transcriptions created by artificial intelligence—are now available to adopt, adapt, and critique. This paper responds to an absence within scholarly editing literature regarding HTR. HTR is a machine-learning approach that creates accurate transcriptions of images of handwritten documents. We highlight developments in text recognition technology, demonstrating that automated standardized editions are no longer a future possibility, but a reality necessary for consideration within a scholarly editing framework. We present this argument via a case study of creating a standardized online edition in the HTR platform Transkribus of the manuscripts of Marjorie Fleming (1803–1811), a Scottish child author who became posthumously famous for her precocious diaries. As well as providing a cost-effective way to generate machine-processable transcripts at scale, Transkribus can now generate digital online editions with its “read&search” tool. HTR, and specifically the tools available via the Transkribus platform, provide an efficient mechanism to share and search digitized texts, bypassing previous procedures and disrupting established processes for data formatting, hosting, and delivery of online editions. However, we show that while read&search can be considered a scholarly digital edition, it needs further development to be encountered as a critical digital edition, providing suggestions for ongoing development. Automating the process of creating scholarly digital editions will encourage others to generate them, democratizing the digital edition landscape; however, we address the possible ramifications of that eventuality in this study.