"Reconsidering
and revising the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions' Guidelines for Scholarly
Editions"
by
John Unsworth
University of Virginia
part of the panel on "New Directions for Digital
Textuality" at the 2001 Conference of the Society for Textual Scholarship
Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Auditorium,
Concourse Level.
8:30-11:30 a.m., Thursday, April 19, 2001
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/sts2001.html
This
presentation will discuss, and call for comment on, the principles and
motivations behind the recent resolution of the MLA's Committee on Scholarly
Editions to revise (completely) its guidelines for scholarly editions. It will also invite your participation in
that revision.
As any STS member will know, the Modern Language
Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions has its origins in the Center for
Editions of American Authors (CEAA), established by the Modern Language
Association in 1963 to coordinate, evaluate, and fund editorial work in the
United States. From its foundation, the
CEAA was closely associated with Fredson Bowers and with the Greg-Bowers theory
of editing, often called the copy-text theory.
As members will also know, the Center and its practices were the
subjects of controversy at the time (see for example Edmund Wilson, "The
Fruits of the MLA," in The
Devils and Canon Barham: Ten Essays on Poets, Novelists and Monsters,
London: Macmillan, 1973). The CEAA was
succeeded in 1976 by the Committee on Scholarly Editions, a change in name that
Thomas Tanselle described as indicating a
broadening of ... scope . . . .
[N]o longer limited to editions of American authors, it now provides
simply a ‘Center for Scholarly Editions’—editions of any kind of material from
any time and place—and it has shown itself to be concerned with promoting
greater contact between editors in different fields"
--from "The
Editing of Historical Documents" Studies in Bibliography (31 [1978],
1-56).
Another significant change accompanied the change in
name: the CSE dropped the funding and coordinating functions of the CEAA: its
sole purpose is to offer advice and evaluation to editors of scholarly
editions.
In my original proposal for this panel, at this point
in the argument, I said:
This broadening of periods, languages, and editorial circumstances
challenged the copy-text theory's hegemony within the CSE, since (as many
editors have noted) the copy-text theory is not equally appropriate or
applicable to all types of material in all periods and all states, much less to
all theoretical orientations or editorial purposes.
I had asked the Chair of the CSE, Bob Hirst, to review
the proposal for accuracy, and in response to that sentence he wrote me,
saying:
You seem to imply that all this change is coming from outside the
hunkered down group of copy-text editors! . . . it has been chiefly copy-text
editors over the decades who have insisted on refining and changing the
application of copy-text theory. After
all, Tom Tanselle is the only editor I know who's actually published an essay
advocating "Editing without a Copy-Text." And long before that,
Bowers published his essay on "Radiating Texts," that is, texts for
which the very idea of a copy-text was inapplicable. So from my point of view, the hegemony of copy-text theory (both
inside and outside CSE) is mainly in the eye of the beholder, as opposed to the
everyday practitioner. Practitioners have always sought to broaden or change
everything from the "final intention" goal to (in Tanselle's case)
the very idea that any one text should be automatically preferred in cases of
doubt.
So, perhaps it is overstating the case to say that the
CSE has been dominated by the copy-text theory of editing, but from my
perspective, as a committee member these last five years, I do think that the
broadening of focus, from a more limited concern with editions of
Anglo-American texts, largely of the 19th and 20th
centuries, to editions of texts in other languages and periods, has called into
question many assumptions about what constitutes scholarly editing—assumptions
inherited from the CEAA by the CSE. The
question of developing guidelines for electronic editions further
challenged those assumptions—with respect to copy-text, because the electronic
edition’s ability to represent and coordinate multiple states of a text in
electronic form undermined some of the practical need for copy-text, even if it
didn't necessarily overthrow the goal of recovering authorial intention that is
fundamental to copy-text editing.
The
CSE's attempt to produce guidelines for electronic scholarly editions began in
Peter Shillingsburg's "General Principles for Electronic Scholarly
Editions" (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/MLA/principles.html). This document was distributed at the MLA meeting
in Toronto, December 1993. With the
advent of electronic scholarly editions, the CSE felt it was necessary to
extend and adapt their general principles to scholarly editions in this new
medium, so Shillingsburg’s document subsequently became the basis of a set of
guidelines principally authored by Charles Faulhaber, called "Guidelines
for Electronic Scholarly Editions.”
These draft guidelines underwent a number of revisions in CSE meetings
and were eventually accepted, as a draft, and posted on the Web, where they are
still available at the Berkeley sunsite [http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/MLA/guidelines.html].
Faulhaber’s
draft guidelines were essentially a stand-alone set of recommendations for
editors of electronic scholarly editions, and as such, they duplicated some of
the material included in the guidelines for (print) editions, and they were
more or less modeled on those guidelines.
The draft guidelines for electronic scholarly editions were submitted to
a group of practicing editors of electronic scholarly editions, and experts in
the technical design and delivery of such editions, for review and
comment—basically, these individuals were asked to think about applying these
guidelines to their own work, and they were asked to comment on how applicable
or inapplicable, helpful or unhelpful, relevant or irrelevant the guidelines
were, from their points of view.
This group included Morris Eaves (now a member
of the CSE, and an experienced editor of Blake in print (with the Blake Trust)
and in electronic media (with the Blake Archive)), Hoyt Duggan (editor
of an electronic edition of Piers Plowman, with the University of Michigan
Press and the Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts), Lou
Burnard (European Editor of the Text Encoding Initiative, or TEI, and an
experienced consultant on many different electronic editing projects), Daniel
Pitti (principal editor of the Encoded Archival Descriptions DTD, widely
used in developing finding aids for archival collections and project manager at
the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities), Bethany Nowviskie
(graduate student at the University of Virginia and then project manager for
Jerome McGann’s Rossetti Archive, and herself an editor of Swinburne): the
group was convened by me (not any sort of editor, except a journal editor, but
advisor, with Daniel Pitti, to a number of electronic editing projects and
chair of the TEI Consortium).
The recommendations of this group are available on the
Web [at
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/vettors.recommendations.html],
but I’m going to summarize them here.
The most important of those recommendations was the first, namely that
there should not be separate guidelines for electronic and print scholarly
editions, but rather (and here I’m quoting, with a little synthesis, from the
document produced out of that meeting):
That in place of the
current guidelines for print and for electronic editions, the CSE should
develop a single, three-tiered document.
Tier 1 (common principles):
This opening section should be the briefest and least frequently revised section of the guidelines. It should offer no medium-specific advice and no advice that applies only to editions of certain kinds of material or editions in certain editorial traditions. It should speak only to very general principles: For example, it might advise the editor to specify the relationship between original source material and your representation of it. If the input is a sample rather than the whole of the available information, the principle of selection should be stated. In general, the idea of this section is to prompt editors to consider and make explicit their methodology.
All scholarly editions probably require, then:
§
establishing
a reliable text and stating the grounds on which reliability is being
established (including perhaps, but not necessarily, authenticity)
§
stating
the relationship between edition and source material,
§
documenting
the principle of selection or sampling,
§
documenting
the edition’s method of representation (e.g., “presentation of text” in a print
edition, encoding practices and/or stylesheets in an electronic edition)
Thomas Tanselle’s recent essay on “primary documents”
is a convenient statement of these ideas (Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Statement on the Significance of Primary
Records,"
Profession 95 (an annual MLA journal), p. 27-28).
Tier
2 (editorial best practices):
The second tier should consist of best practices within specific
traditions of editing, and those practices should, in each of their particulars
and examples, be coherent with the “necessary characteristics.” This document could be revised more
frequently, and should include checklists developed within these specific
traditions. [….] This section would be particularly
challenging to compose, and in fact would likely need to be commissioned in
parts from different scholarly communities (and revised every ten or twenty
years). Commissioning reports from
these perspectives would, on the other hand, be the most valuable part of this
exercise for the CSE itself.
The document ultimately produced could and probably
should say that there are disagreements about what constitutes a scholarly
edition, here’s where they are, here’s what they’re about. And in view of that, the purpose of the
guidelines is to help editors make explicit their methods and their aims. It
might be appropriate at this tier, also, to specify principles not applicable
across traditions or media (for example, the principle that once published, the
electronic edition should never be changed, or should changed only under
certain circumstances, etc.).
Tier 3 (technical best practices):
The third tier would be a technical best practices
manual, giving examples that are relevant today. This document would, necessarily, be revised on a regular
basis. This document should include one
or more technical checklists (for example, the current checklist issued to
vettors of editions for the CSE, which addresses relevant technical matters in
reviewing the process of producing a print edition—or a parallel checklist
addressing issues in production of an electronic edition, e.g., if the edition
claims to be TEI conformant, does it in fact meet the requirements of a
TEI-conformant edition? If it is in
SGML, does it parse according to a DTD?
If it is XML, is it well formed? etc.).
Interesting questions will arise in this section—for example, what is
the edition? Does “the edition” include
the functionalities of things like retrieval software, user interface,
etc.? Are look and feel an integral
part of the edition?
As a result of those recommendations, the CSE is
undertaking a wholesale revision of its guidelines for both print and
electronic editions, combining them in the structure recommended above, and
commissioning experts outside the committee to produce descriptions of
"best practices within specific traditions of editing." In fact, I would like to invite editors who
are here today to propose providing the CSE with brief essays describing the
methodology and best practices within existing well-defined schools of textual
editing.
I should add that offering to provide a brief essay of
this sort does not necessarily indicate that you consider yourself an
unqualified adherent or a paragon of the editorial methodology in
question. The purpose of these essays
is to provide guidance to novice editors, entering the field or perhaps
starting a new project, and trying to decide which methodology best suits the
purposes of the project and the nature of the materials—or perhaps to provide
guidance to publishers, reviewers, and other interested but non-expert parties
who need to understand the significance and the value of a particular editorial
method.
By contrast, the purpose of the first tier of these
guidelines would be to allow both experienced and novice editors to identify
basic values and principles that are shared across divergent methods and
materials. The purpose of the third
tier of guidelines would be to provide guidance for practicing editors,
publishers, and vettors of editions, as to the particulars that are important
to understand and observe in producing scholarly editions in various
media.
As will be obvious from what I’ve told you so far, I’m
a relatively recent member of the Committee on Scholarly Editing and a relative
outsider to another CSE, the community of scholarly editors: I have, however,
come to understand some of the history and some of the tensions that have characterized
the relationship between these two CSEs.
I hope that the revision that’s proposed to the guidelines for scholarly
editions, electronic and otherwise, can accomplish two things:
I’ll close by saying that this second purpose seems
particularly important at this historical moment, both for scholarly editing
and for younger scholars working in electronic media. Institutional uncertainty about how to value work done in
electronic media arises, in part—and perhaps in large part—from not having a
methodology with which to associate, or according to which to evaluate, that
work. Younger scholars who are—well or
poorly—editing texts in electronic form and putting those texts up on the Web,
would benefit from having at least a few methodological choices outlined for
them, to choose among. And as vigorous
and congenial as this gathering and the community it represents may be,
scholarly editing and textual studies would benefit by announcing the relevance
of your expertise to a rising generation of scholars and teachers for whom the
first attraction might be the medium of dissemination rather than the method by
which materials are prepared for dissemination. You need new blood, and they need some way of distinguishing—for
themselves and for those who evaluate them—between scholarship and, well, everything
else on the Web.