| Title | Beyond representation |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | some thoughts on creative-critical digital editing |
| Contributor | Christopher Ohge(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.14 |
| Landing page | https://books.sup.ac.uk/sup/catalog/book/sup-9781917341073/chapter/15 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Christopher Oghe |
| Publisher | Scottish Universities Press |
| Published on | 2025-04-29 |
| Long abstract | Creative-critical digital editing aims to be a pragmatic complement to the dominant ‘depth’ models of traditional scholarly editing that attempt to offer the ‘correct’ description, representation, or data model of a work within the space of a book or document. A pan-relational, creative-critical editorial approach to publishing instead focuses on a different kind of depth that connects texts to new contexts and literary experiences with new technological tools. Pan-relational editing creates new connections by creating new descriptions and visualisations of texts which are tethered to whatever purposes are needed for a given situation or audience ‘to make them serve our purposes better’, as the philosopher Richard Rorty put it. A creative-critical framework offers the best way to ‘cope’ with the varieties of potential experiences in the textual situation. This mode of thinking resists privileged print-based editorial theories as much as it resists technological determinism because it moves beyond the dominant mode of representing documents or texts as the primary output and instead puts the focus on curating textual data. Textual editing and digital publishing could combine with ‘creative criticism’ to be ongoing and incomplete, partaking of a process of close reading and distant analysis, learning and unlearning, and redescriptions of textual criticism that are embedded in the creative process and other aesthetic experiences. What digital publishing can ideally do, then, is to give space to competing and alternative discourses of the same text and to facilitate connections to other aesthetic contexts. The most promising ways to accomplish this goal would be, in the short term, to give users better designs and tools for engaging in the creative processes inherent in editorial projects. In the long term, an atomic database approach would allow creative play with any textual element, achieving that ideal of a digital edition as a ‘multi-dimensional space of possibilities’. |
| Language | English (Original) |
Christopher Ohge is Senior Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. He serves as the Associate Director of the Herman Melville Electronic Library and an Associate Editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online, where he has worked on digital editions of Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, and of Melville’s Marginalia in Arthur Schopenhauer. He was formerly an Associate Editor of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley, where his editorial credits included the third and final volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, several digital texts on the Mark Twain Project Online, and the forthcoming edition of The Innocents Abroad. The author of the book Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience (2021), he has also published widely on nineteenth-century literature, textual scholarship and digital methods in leading journals and edited collections. In 2023 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) and the Mellon Foundation to complete a digital edition of Mary Anne Rawson’s anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud (1834).