The digital scholarly editions that textual scholars and digital humanists produced
for over two decades have often been accompanied by claims about
their revolutionary nature. Technological innovations are prone to induce such
claims, as the case of the compact disc audio carrier exemplifies. However,
on closer inspection we are hard pressed to identify the revolution that such innovations
bring about. Arguments that textual scholars have put forward to claim
fundamental differences between print and digital scholarly editions turn out to
be weak. Some, therefore, claim that in fact no essential changes exist between
print and digital text, nor between print or digital textual scholarship. However, none of the arguments takes into account the most striking difference between
print and digital text, which is the performative potential of the latter. Digital
text is endowed with a performative aspect through software code. However,
current digital scholarly editions adhere almost exclusively to a representational
philosophy in which the idea of text as a static materialized object is unaltered
digitally remediated, that is: they are mostly static digital objects mimicking
static print books. Perceived primarily as infrastructure underpinning digital
scholarly editions, executable program code has until now largely been ignored
by textual scholarship as a methodological means. Code, as will be explained,
is the very embodiment of the ontological difference between print and digital
text – it is text performing. This ontological shift and the emergence of a performative
digital textual heritage do justify explorations of the methodological
affordances that code creates for textual scholarship. As an example of such an
exploration the idea of the computational scholarly edition is introduced (as
opposed to the “merely digital” scholarly edition) and a tentative implementation
is presented. Finally it is argued that, rather than to extradite them, it is
more productive to embrace digital and computational exploratory niches in
textual scholarship.
Keywords
Scholarly digital edition; performative digital text; data; text-as-code; ontological
status of text; methodological cahnge/innovation