The Assembled Book as a Map of Relations

We are paying insu cient attention to electronic di erence at almost every stage of our engagement with the architecture and functioning of the electronic edition because we are too enamored of electronic simulation.Electronic materiality, the di erence that electronic instantiation makes, is currently far more of a hindrance to textual engagements than any articulated limitation in the robust, versatile, and sophisticated medium of print.At the same time, we have not yet thought hard enough about who will use electronic editions or how often or for what real purposes.We know they bring delight and funding to those who compile them, but who, beyond the few compilers, are the obvious users?If we have lived through a century of cheerful disregard for or simple trust in our major paper critical editions by most professional readers (and I do not think this is an exaggeration), what makes us believe that a new medium will provoke a new, engaged response? 1 Kathryn Sutherland's piercing questions, from her chapter in the 2009 edited collection Text Editing, Print and the Digital World, remain relevant over a decade after they were rst posed.Since the origins of electronic editing in the 1980s, editors have dreamed of building ever more elaborate interfaces, capable of tracking every variant, encouraging multiple forms of reader participation, and documenting all mediations of a text.The rhetoric around web-based technologies foments these fantasies by suggesting that, because all forms of interactivity and functionality are in theory possible, they should in practice be realized.Yet, in the rush to capitalize on the seemingly in nite a ordances of digital editing, textual scholars can lose sight of fundamental questions about audience and intention, relevant to both print and digital editions, namely: how will readers