Digital scholarly editing and the crisis of knowledge technology
- Helen Abbott(author)
- Michelle Doran(author)
- Jennifer Edmond(author)
- Rebecca Mitchell(author)
- Aengus Ward(author)
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| Title | Digital scholarly editing and the crisis of knowledge technology |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Helen Abbott(author) |
| Michelle Doran(author) | |
| Jennifer Edmond(author) | |
| Rebecca Mitchell(author) | |
| Aengus Ward(author) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.3 |
| Landing page | https://books.sup.ac.uk/sup/catalog/book/sup-9781917341073/chapter/4 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Helen Abbott, Michelle Doran, Jennifer Edmond, Rebecca Mitchell and Aengus Ward |
| Publisher | Scottish Universities Press |
| Published on | 2025-04-29 |
| Long abstract | The affordances of the digital age have precipitated a crisis of authority. Whom do we trust? How do we prove ourselves trustworthy? The heuristics of authority, in particular at the information filtering and presentation layers, can be co-opted by actors able to manipulate them, and us. At the same time, social tolerance for uncertainty and complexity is low, to the extent that removing them has become a key success metric within both backend systems and user interface design. This rapid shifting of knowledge technologies, in particular as regards the manner in which sources convey their authority in the transition from their affordances as analogue to digital media (where unfiltered source availability is high and the visual languages of authority, from web design to ‘deep fakes,’ are easily appropriated), is an incomplete process that has muddied our ability to judge he signals of trustworthiness and credibility. These are problems democratic societies are struggling with on a fundamental level. Unfortunately, however, too often the solutions being proposed emerge from the same culture of software development that created the problems in the first place: as Pasquale describes it, ‘...authority is increasingly expressed algorithmically ... Silicon Valley and Wall Street tend to treat recommendations as purely technical problems. The values and prerogatives that the encoded rules enact are hidden within black boxes’ (Pasquale, 2015). Hiding the ‘encoded rules’ informing knowledge creation within ‘black boxes’ is precisely the kind of process the work of scholarly editors, in particular digital scholarly editors, has evolved over decades to avoid. Instead, this is an expertise that documents the complexities resulting from the work of filtering accounts, establishing authority, managing uncertainty, and documenting provenance. The clear link between the problems of information overload and technological overreach and the affordances of digital scholarly editorial expertise to “situate knowledges” (Haraway, 1988) is yet to be systematically explored, however. This chapter proposes a framework for negotiating trust and authority that exploits the affordances of digital scholarly editing by privileging the iterative rather than the definitive (McGann, 1996; Schreibman, 2013; Sahle, 2016; Broyles, 2020), the process rather than the product (Siemens et al., 2012; Pierazzo, 2014; Sahle, 2016; Doran, 2021), and the active, even radical role, of the editor, transparently acting as an active collaborator in the sensemaking process, rather than an ‘invisible hand’ (Siemens et al., 2012). It will draw together the long tradition of digital scholarly editing with the emerging subfield of critical digital humanities (see Hall, 2011; Liu, 2012; Berry, 2019) and address in particular the two key points of a) how we can explore and expand the current norms within analogue, digital and indeed hybrid scholarly editing processes toward a model that emphasises the constructed and consensual nature of knowledge, embraces the uncertainty, complexity and contextual dependency of cultural materials and makes knowledge claims and decision-making processes transparent; and b) how this model can be documented and expanded to become applicable in other kinds of human, machine and hybrid knowledge-making processes, in particular systems wielding algorithmic authority. References Berry, D. (2019) “Critical Digital Humanities.” Conditio Humana - Technology, Ai and Ethics (blog), January 29, 2019.Broyles, P.A. (2020) “Digital Editions and Version Numbering.” DHQ 14, no. 2, 2020. Doran, M. (2021) “Reflections on Digital Editions: From Humanities Computing to Digital Humanities, the Influence of Web 2.0 and the Impact of the Editorial Process.” Variants., 2021. Haraway, D. (1988) “Situated Knowledges, The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, vol 14.3, pp. 589-599. Hall, G. (2011) “The Digital Humanities Beyond Computing: A Postscript.” Culture Machine, 2011, 11. Liu, A. (2012) “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” in Debates in the Digital Humanities. McGann, J. (1996) “Radiant Textuality.” Victorian Studies 39, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 379-390. Pasquale, F. (2015) The Black Box Society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Pierazzo, E. (2014) “Digital Documentary Editions and the Others.” Scholarly Editing 35 Sahle, P. (2016) “What is a Scholarly Digital Edition?” Digital Scholarly Editing Theories and Practices, ed. M. J. Driscoll and E. Pierazzo. Open Book Publishers, 19-39. Schreibman, S. (2013) “Digital Scholarly Editing.” Literary Studies in the Digital Age MLA. Siemens, R. et al. (2012) “Towards Modeling the Social Edition.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 27, no. 4,445-461. |
| Language | English (Original) |
Helen Abbott
(author)Helen Abbott is Professor of Modern Languages, specialising in nineteenth-century French poetry and music. Her research explores ways of writing about word–music relationships in poetic language, in critical theories, and using digital methodologies. Her particular focus is the work of (post-)romantic and symbolist poets, including Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, andMallarmé.
Michelle Doran
(author)Dr Michelle Doran is Ireland’s National Open Research Coordinator. In this role, she coordinates the activities of the National Open Research Forum (NORF) and guides the delivery of Ireland’s National Action Plan for Open Research 2022–2030. She is a member of the Council for National Open Science Coordination (CoNOSC), represents Ireland as the National Point of Reference (NPR) for the Informal Commission Expert Group on Scientific Information and sits on the IReL Advisory Committee. Michelle’s background is in humanities research, programme management and digital humanities research projects. From 2020 to 2022 she served as Irish Principal Investigator of the UK–Ireland Digital Humanities Network.
Jennifer Edmond
(author)Jennifer Edmond is Professor in Digital Humanities at Trinity College Dublin, where she is co-director of the Trinity Center for Digital Humanities, Director of the MPhil in Digital Humanities and Culture and a funded Investigator of the SFI ADAPT Centre. Outside of Trinity, Jennifer served from 2017 to 2022 as a Member, and later President, of the Board of Directors of the pan-European research infrastructure for the arts and humanities, DARIAH-EU. She sits on numerous Scientific Advisory Committees, including the Governing Board of the European Association for Social Sciences and Humanities (2022–24) and the European Commission’s Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP, 2016–20). Over the course of the past 10 years, Jennifer has coordinated transnational, local or field-specific teams in a large number of significant inter- and transdisciplinary funded research projects, worth a total of almost €9m, including CENDARI (FP7), Europeana Cloud (FP7), NeDiMAH (ESF), PARTHENOS (H2020), KPLEX (H2020), PROVIDE-DH (CHIST-ERA/IRC) and the SPECTRESS network.
Rebecca Mitchell
(author)Rebecca Mitchell is Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Birmingham (UK). She has published widely on Victorian fashion, print culture, realism, George Meredith and Oscar Wilde. Her work related to textual editing includes the anniversary edition of Meredith’s Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, co-edited with Criscillia Benford (Yale, 2012) and an unpublished manuscript of Wilde’s seminal essay, ‘The Decay of Lying’ (co-authored with Joseph Bristow, Review of English Studies, 2018); she is currently co-editing the final volumes of the Oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Other books on Victorian literature and culture include Victorian Lessons in Empathy and Difference (Ohio State UP, 2011); Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery, co-authored with Joseph Bristow (Yale, 2015) and Fashioning the Victorians: A Critical Sourcebook (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Aengus Ward
(author)Aengus Ward is Professor of Medieval Iberian Studies at the University of Birmingham. A specialist in medieval historiography, he is the editor of the Estoria de Espanna Digital – the first major digital critical edition of a work of medieval Castilian prose, as well as numerous other works on the theory and practice of editing, medieval historiography and manuscript studies.