This glossary includes a list of terms related to digital and scholarly editing. The terms defined here might take on different valences in different contexts; these definitions assume their use in the context of the field of digital and scholarly editing.This list is necessarily non-exhaustive, of course, and its definitions are kept simple for the sake of clarity. But this glossary should help demystify some of the  field’s key words and phrases. For a fuller introduction on digital and scholarly editing as a field, as well as to access additional reading and resources on the topic, see our Bibliography for Digital and Scholarly Editing here. Otherwise, the below terms should help sketch out some basic topics and concepts related to the processes of editing.

Born-Digital v. Digitized: While born-digital texts are ones that are produced in digital form from the start, digitized text are ones that are converted from print or analog equivalents into a digital format.

Collation: In textual criticism, collation is the process (digital or otherwise) of comparing different copies or variants of a text (see entry on “Variants” below). This process helps scholars see moments where the text differs and allows them to think about the relationship between these variants and the revisionary and editorial processes that produced them. This process can also help challenge notions of a text as “fixed” (see entry on “Textual (In)Stability” below).

Contextualization: The process of identifying and representing something in relation to the time, place, and situation in which it happened. Contextualizing a text, author, event, etc. often includes narrativizing historical, cultural, and social forces that contributed to or influenced an artifact or piece of data in some way. This is an important part of recovery, editing, and teaching processes as it helps us responsibly situate an object or person within a larger milieu. 

Critical Fabulation: A method of writing that uses archival research in conjunction with storytelling and speculative narration to fill in the gaps of the historical record. Coined by Saidiya Hartman in her essay “Venus in Two Acts” and expanded upon in her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, critical fabulation aims to recover marginalized groups like women of color even (or especially) in the wake of archival gaps.

Digital Edition: A version of a publication that is produced digitally. A digital edition, like a print edition, is edited carefully, but the digital format can require different editorial labors and can produce different content than in a print edition. For example, digital editions can include links, videos, audio, interactive features and mapping, amongst other elements. Thus, the process of creating and editing a digital edition can require considerations like navigation, presentation, and technical accessibility, at the same time as it requires textual content editing.

Editors and Editorship: Editors are people responsible for commissioning, curating, refining, revising, and otherwise preparing content for publication. The labors involved in editorship are far ranging and can include everything from producing an open call for material to buttressing a piece with more research and providing actionable feedback. Recent scholarship has pointed out how editorship also typically requires many unseen and underappreciated–sometimes raced and gendered–labors, including managing relationships between authors, other editors, and publishing outlets alongside other forms of care work. For more on this large range of labors, see Sarah Blackwood’s article “Editing as Carework.”

Editorial Heuristics: A set of techniques that guide one’s editorial practice, strategies, process, and methodology. There are many different approaches people take to their editing; rather than a strict set of techniques, the various editorial heuristics one might explore should be thought of more as an always-evolving set of standards informed back feedback that the field of editorship continues to grapple with. Below are some examples of a few potential types of editorial heuristics, although they should not be considered mutually exclusive of one another, nor is the list exhaustive. 

Feminist Editorial Heuristics: A feminist approach to editorship, guided by a dedication to exploring and documenting gendered labors in the editing field, promoting human-centered and collaborative editing practices, and facilitating greater access to writings by women, people of color, and other marginalized groups.

Anti-Racist Editorial Heuristics: An anti-racist approach to editorship, guided by a dedication to recognizing a range of experiences, establishing clear but fluid processes for editing and peer review that value humanity and labor over production, and a commitment to diversity and inclusion amongst writers, reviewers, and editorial boards. For more on this heuristic, in particular, see the Coalition for Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices. 

Fluid-Text Editing: Offers a text that makes visible to readers a range of revisions that have occurred to that text. In typical editing, revision–which inevitably occurred–is rendered invisible in the act of making edits. A fluid text is a written work that exists in multiple versions due to acts of revision. In actuality, all texts are fluid in that all texts undergo revision–large or small. But in fluid-text editing, that revision process is made visible, often by work done by scholars in a digital edition. See, for example, the Herman Melville Electronic Library, which uses TextLab as its digital tool for fluid-text editing.

New Media: Technologies that enable communication and enhance interaction between users as well as between users and content. The framing of “new” media can be misleading, as media don’t simply replace each other in linear succession. Instead, they evolve in more complex, interconnected ways, often referring back to media that came before or influencing that media directly. Since the 1990s, the term “new media” can even refer to media that more explicitly remodels older forms of media, or media that has a more self-aware approach to how it is refreshing itself. For more on the complex feedback loops that generate emerging new media, see Lisa Gitelman’s book Always, Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture.

Politics of Citation: What/who gets cited, how it gets cited, where it gets cited, and how often are all part of the editing process. It is also a particularly fraught part of the editing process, given how white, heteronormative men tend to be cited more often as authorities than other scholars, thinkers, and writers. Citational practice is powerful in how it signals, often in coded ways, whose knowledge matters and what literary or scholarly legacies are being taken into account. In fact, citation practice can itself build literary and scholarly legacies in that it is always ongoing and always building; citation is iterative. For all these reasons, the politics of who and how to cite is an emerging topic in the field of editorial studies and an important consideration for any working editor.

Print Edition: A version of a publication that is produced in physical print, like a book or a newspaper. A print edition is edited carefully and therefore a result not just of an author’s work, but of many other, behind-the-scenes actors like editors, publishers, designers, etc. Now that digital editions also exist, part of the editorial process can be determining what is effective in print formats that might not be effective in digital and what might be possible in digital formats that isn’t as possible or useful in print. 

Revision: In a basic sense, revision is the act of changing, tweaking, or modifying a text or object in some way. While this is the traditional cornerstone of editorial labors, it is also a fraught site of power contestation. As Adrienne Rich has written, re-vision is “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an olde text from a new critical direction,” but it is also “an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves” (Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” 18). Thus, revision as a process carries with it a feminist responsibility not just to “correct” or “improve” but to think differently and be open to new perspectives on what previously may have appeared static. 

Scholarly Editions: Generally speaking, these are versions of a text re-edited and re-issued by a scholar and/or scholarly publication. In a scholarly edition, texts that were previously published or unpublished will be reprinted but with the benefit of contextualization, researched footnoting, and other editorial changes (which can include reformatting, revisions to the text itself, etc.). Most scholarly editions also include an introduction by the scholar-editors spearheading the edition which not only contextualizes the piece and its author, but may also put the editors’ own editorial choices more into the context of a larger scholarly field, argument, or motivation. Scholarly editions can be print or digital editions. They can also come in a variety of subgenres or approaches: authorial, critical, documentary, social, genetic, eclectic, best text, etc.

Textual (In)Stability: Texts often appear stable, but an awareness of editorial process and revision makes us increasingly aware of the persistent instability of texts. The text itself might change, or its format, presentation, or transmission might change (amongst other things), which still ultimately impacts the text itself. Part of editorship studies is accepting the inevitable instability of texts and exploring what that flexibility means in the context of particular texts, authors, period, processes, etc. For more on the instability of texts, see our entry on “Fluid-Text Editing.”

Textual Witness: A manifestation of a work (i.e. a specific or early copy of a manuscript or document) that is used in textual criticism to attempt to reconstruct an “original” version of a text. The textual witness is judged by an editor to be emended as little as possible and therefore reliable as a kind of baseline by which to analyze other variants. While useful for making visible acts of revision, editorial labors, and other variations, textual witnesses should also be considered carefully with an awareness of the debatable nature of what makes something “original” or a “best text.”

Transmission: The act or process of spreading or passing something–often, in this context, knowledge or data–from one person or thing to another. In editorship studies, it’s important to acknowledge how our transmission of materials impacts or influences their content and an audience’s understanding of them. Editorial choices and form, format, content, organization, presentation, etc. all deeply impact that way information is transmitted and therefore processed by a reader or larger audience. Thinking critically about the editorial decisions we make, how they influence what is being edited, and how they impact the way a publication is disseminated is an important part of editorial studies and the labor.

Variants: A form or version of something that differs in some way from other forms of the same thing. Textual variants include differences in wording between manuscripts of a text, such as in spelling, word order, or the addition or omission of words. Editorial processes can create different variants of a work. Additionally, textual variants can pose an editorial problem of determining which is the “standard” version of text. Editorial decisions must be made, then, in working with variants, a problem explored at length, for example, in scholarship on Emily Dickinson’s variants and publication history. Ultimately such variants illustrate textual instability (see “Textual (In)Stability” entry above).