Editors' Introduction

Burnard; O' Brien O' Keefe; Unsworth. Electronic Textual Editing: Editors' introduction

http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/intro.xml

Firstly, the editors emphasize the practical and economic constraints on the production and publishing of codex form scholarly editions, which appear to be circumnavigable in the digital medium. Next, they muse on how much the field of digital-form scholarship has grown (they are writing in 2006) since the footnote-like paragraph on electronic editing in the 1992 CSE guidelines, and note how even successive emendations/additions did little more than reify " the split that the 1992 Guidelines took for granted: there were ‘Scholarly Editions’ and ‘Electronic Scholarly Editions’. In presenting the pivotal establishment of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), they praise the compilation of its guidelines, which involved hundreds of scholars from different fields and geographical areas, as "an extraordinary example of international interdisciplinarity". Finally, the editors make a kind of passionate plea to universities and academic institutions to recognize the importance of converting the bulk of "our cultural heritage from print to electronic media", and giving professional credit to those who will take on this massive endeavor. The concluding paragraphs are dedicated to presenting in some detail the contents of the volume. The introduction ends with a preventive admittion/warning that the field of electronic textual editing still has a lot to learn., as might be expected when we consider that "it took five hundred years to naturalize the book, and a hundred and fifty years to develop the conventions of the scholarly edition in print".

Post Scriptum: There is a typo in the title section atop the page: the parenthesis after one of the editors' institute of affiliation never closes. A trivial matter, I know. But is it just amusingly ironic (that such would be the case in the editors' introduction to their digital edition of "Electronic Textual Editing") or does it actually in fact say something about electronic editions?....