Skip to main content
Scottish Universities Press

‘The past went that-a-way’: editing in the rearview mirror?

Chapter of: Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.1
    Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
      Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
      Cannot generate record: Missing PDF URL
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: No priced EPUB or PDF URL
  • ONIX 2.1
    • EBSCO Host
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
    • ProQuest Ebrary
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
Title‘The past went that-a-way’
Subtitleediting in the rearview mirror?
ContributorAndrew Prescott(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.62637/sup.GHST9020.1
Landing pagehttps://books.sup.ac.uk/sup/catalog/book/sup-9781917341073/chapter/2
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightAndrew Prescott
PublisherScottish Universities Press
Published on2025-04-29
Long abstractMarshall McLuhan used the metaphor of the rearview mirror to describe one of the most common reactions to new technology. McLuhan argued that, confronted with technological innovation, we fall back on our past engagements with technology and ignore its new potential. In some ways, digital editing can be seen as one of the great success stories of the World Wide Web, but too often our understanding and implementation of the idea of an edition is shaped by our print experiences. We carry over practices which were shaped by the structure, cost and logistics of print production. Moreover, just as McLuhan suggested that we ignore what is heading towards the windscreen while we focus on the rearview mirror, our preoccupation with translating print practice into a digital environment means that we forget about the immense and increasingly pressing issues presented by the growth of born-digital information. The type of editorial methods derived from print practice will not cope with the vast scale of born-digital data or take full advantage of the metadata and other information associated with it. These issues are considered with references to such cases as email archives, social media and Wikileaks data.
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Andrew Prescott

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6474-1068

Andrew Prescott is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. He was formerly Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow and was from 2012 to 2019 AHRC Theme Leader Fellow for the AHRC ‘Digital Transformations’ theme. From 1979 to 2000 he was a curator of manuscripts at the British Library, where he worked on the Electronic Beowulf project. He has also worked in libraries and digital humanities units at the University of Sheffield, King’s College London and University of Wales Lampeter.