Wout Dillen

In this paper we explore layered conceptions of access and accessibility as they relate to the theory and praxis of digital scholarly editing. To do this, we designed and disseminated a qualitative survey on five key themes: dissemination; Open Access and licensing; access to code; web accessibility; and diversity. Throughout the article we engage in cultural criticism of the discipline by sharing results from the survey, identifying how the community talks about and performs access, and pinpointing where improvements in praxis could be made. In the final section of this paper we reflect on different ways to utilize the survey results when critically designing and disseminating digital scholarly editions, propose a call to action, and identify avenues of future research.

In a way, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be regarded as the digital scholarly edition’s new paratext: not exactly part of the edited text itself, it still has an undeni- able impact on the way the user reads and understands the edition. This makes the interface an important place for the editor to convey her views on the materials the edition has to offer. Therefore, this paper focusses on the role the editor of the digital scholarly edition plays in guiding the user through its data, and helping her shape her interpretation of those data – arguing all the while that it is exactly in the interface that these interactions take place. Starting from Mats Dahlström’s proposal for digital scholarly editors to leave Ariadne threads to guide their users through the textual labyrinth of their digital scholarly editions, this paper suggests that Dante’s Divine Comedy might make a more appropriate allegory for the editorial model. Taking a cue from Dante’s ‘Virgil’ character, the editor may prefer to remain in the background of the edition, encouraging the user to be fully immersed in the edition’s data – only to quietly step more and more in the foreground as the user moves deeper and deeper into the edition and could arguably use more explicit guidance. After taking a more theoretical approach to this topic, the paper illustrates the kind of editorial decisions that may be involved while designing a digital scholarly edition by taking the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) as a case study. Walking the reader through the many tools and functionalities the BDMP has to offer, this paper explains how this editorial model would apply to the project, focusing especially on the changes the edition’s graphical user interface underwent as it was redesigned in November 2015.

One of the great advantages the digital medium has to offer the field of scholarly editing is that it makes its products much easier to distribute. No longer bound to a shelf, the Digital Scholarly Edition has the potential to reach a much wider audience than a printed edition could. To a certain extent, however, the nature of the materials textual scholars are working with dictates the perimeters within which this dissemination can take place. When working with modern manuscripts, for instance, copyright restrictions may limit the extent to which a project can distribute its resources. In an academic climate where open access is not only becoming a standard, but in some cases even a requirement for receiving funding, such limitations may be perceived as problematic. In this article, we argue that even within the boundaries of copyright restrictions there can still be room to produce and distribute the results of textual scholarship. Therefore, the article zooms in on the way in which different Digital Scholarly Editions of copyrighted materials deal with this issue, using the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP; www.beckettarchive.org) and Woolf Online (www.woolfonline.com) as case studies. To conclude, we investigate other strategies that may be used to share as much research data as we are allowed to, e.g. by sharing metadata and ancillary data, or by using the fair use doctrine to circumvent the problem. Case studies used for this aspect of the article include ModNets (www.modnets.org), the BDMP Encoding Manual (www.beckettarchive.org/encodingmanual), the Lexicon of Scholarly Editing (http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/lse), and the Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET; www.fweet.org).