The Role of Scholars in the Era of Digital Texts

In her introduction to Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory, Kathryn Sutherland asks if there is "a real danger that the scholar-worker, toiling for years in the remote regions of the library stacks in the hope of becoming expert in one small field, will be transformed by the computer into the technician, the nerdy navigator able to locate, transfer, and appropriate at an ever faster rate expert entries from a larger set of information that he/she no longer needs or desires to understand" (Sutherland 10). Her inquiry is based on an issue that still plagues many scholars: with quick access to so much digitized information, how do we evaluate what we still need and desire to understand? Of course, her question implies that evaluating printed information is an evaluation based on less access and therefore a smaller set of information, and evaluating printed information is not an uncomplicated issue; it is one which scholars reconsider constantly. One such group—literary scholar-workers—may spend years "toiling" over similar versions of a printed text in order to produce a singe representative edition. In the case of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus, for example, there is no extant manuscript, nine versions were printed between 1604 and 1631, and the first appeared almost nine years after Marlowe's death. Those that appeared in 1604, 1609, and 1611 are similar and are collectively known as the A-text. The 1616, 1619, 1620, 1624, 1628, and 1631 versions are also similar and known as the B-text. Which one should a reader or scholar consult?

Remarkably different, the A- and B- texts have inspired an extensive amount of critical commentary and scholarly editors since W.W. Greg appear to agree on one ...

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2. Binda, Hillary. "An Overview of this Electronic Doctor Faustus." Accessed October 2004..

3. Greg, W.W., ed. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus' 1604-1616: Parallel Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950.

4. Lavagnino, John. "Completeness and adequacy in text encoding." The Literary Text in the Digital Age. Finneran, Richard J. (Ed.), Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996.

5. Schreibman, Susan. "Computer-mediated Texts and Textuality: Theory and Practice." In Siemens (Ed.). A New Computer-Assisted Literary Criticism? Special edition of Computers and the Humanities, 36:283-293, (2002).

6. --"The Versioning Machine." Literary and Linguistic Computing, 18:1 (2003).

7. Sutherland, Kathryn (Ed.). "Introduction." Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and Theory. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1997.