Jerome McGann, Literary Scholarship in the Digital Future, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 13, 2002. Only accessible to paying subscribers. McGann starts with a forecast: "In the next 50 years, the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination." But then he asks who will do this editing. He worries that recent trends in the academic study of literature have elevated theory and interpretation over editing. "Electronic scholarship and editing necessarily draw their primary models from longstanding philological practices in language study, textual scholarship, and bibliography. As we know, those three core disciplines preserve but a ghostly presence in most of our Ph.D. programs." He also worries that those ignorant of print culture and its traditions will not fully understand the task of editing, and vice versa, that those limited to print culture will overlook precious and unprecedented opportunities to make digital archives into "dynamic interpretive environment[s]".
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/13/2002 10:06:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
