What digital humanists don't know about scholarly editing; what scholarly editors don't know about the digital world

Abstract

This paper presents, somewhat polemically, the view that textual scholars need to immerse themselves in the digital world, and take full responsibility themselves for the digital editions they make. This requires a rethinking of the model of collaboration between textual scholar and digital humanist which has reigned for twenty years: what the paper calls the 'one scholar/one project/one digital humanist' model. The paper should be read with a companion blog, at http://scholarlydigitaleditions.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-digital-humanists-should-get-out-of.html, which elaborates an alternative model for collaboration between textual scholars and digital humanists (basically: many scholars/many projects/many digital humanists), and advocates too the widespread adoption of Creative Commons attribution share-alike licences (without the toxic 'non-commercial' restriction) for edition materials, and for their availability through open APIs, independent of any one interface. Joris van Zundert's blog at http://brandaen.huygensinstituut.nl/?p=497 (note his comment on his own blog) also contains arguments which should be read alongside this paper.