0.10 Give us editors! re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the  (Page 3/18)

Vast collections and clever services provide a starting point for human analysis. Consider one particular example from my own field. Most Latin literature was produced after, and much builds upon, the tiny surviving corpus of Classical Latin. To take just one example, the sheer amount of neo-Latin editions available online numbers over 30,000, according to the Philological Museum, (External Link) . We have an endless supply of intellectually accessible and eminently useful undergraduate and MA-level projects, with our students building upon their training in Classics, analyzing the results of automated systems, and producing introductions, commentaries, and annotated translations of individual documents. We can then publish these as components of increasingly sophisticated digital libraries that can parse their structure and mine the machine-actionable information within them: the scholarly labor applied to each edited document becomes training data that then improves the automated results for the rest of the document in question, as well as the corpus of digital Latin. The use of automated technologies to transform traditional reference works for Latin into machine-actionable knowledge sources has also been considered in Bamman and Crane 2009. If we move towards community-driven models of updating and preserving such editions, preserving the original contributions within a versioning system but allowing the documents to evolve as their authors pursue their careers, these editions can serve as starting points rather than as fixed and obsolescent snapshots.

If we understand editing as the process of enabling others to think about an object from the past, then the editorial process applies as much to spaces (e.g., the development of the Unter den Linden in Berlin), buildings (e.g., the Brandenburg Gate), and objects (e.g., the Quadriga atop the Brandenburg Gate, a chariot drawn by four horses driven by Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory), as to topics (e.g., the development of Prussian nationalism of which Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate are expressions).

Editors can be as much artists as scholars, for the editor who contextualizes an object directs the reader, listener or viewer to a finite set of data that align themselves into meaningful patterns. Editors in this sense differ from authors insofar as they direct their audiences’ gaze away from themselves and towards the object of contemplation. The point is not to vanish—to vanish is to deceive and to imply a transparency that simply does not exist. Rather, editors must provide the clearest possible account of their own biases. The need to make the algorithms, decisions and methodologies that an editor used in the creation of a digital edition more transparent has been called for by Monella 2008 and Bodard and Garcés 2009. In this, they resemble their colleagues in the sciences, who explain how the data was collected and how they conducted their experiments so that others can draw their own conclusions about the strengths and limitations of their work.