title: Digitisation, Augmentation, Dissemination: Charting The Ecology Of The New Scholarly Edition
title: Digitization, Augumentation, Dissemination: Charting the Ecology of the New Scholarly Edition
titleType: Other
Creators: name: Martinez, Merisa
name: Kelly, Aodhan
name: Powell, Daniel
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2015

description: Digital scholarly editing is in a state of flux, as workflows and channels of scholarly communication face disruption via newer technologies, models of creation, and innovative patterns of consumption and re-use. This poster reconsiders the digital scholarly edition (DSE) as a rhizomatic knowledge structure, a set of textual loci for intellectual activity where editing is a distributed, iterative web of processes with no set beginning or definite end. The edition is a multiplicity of information, personalities, objects, and activities; nevertheless, we believe that certain plateaus, certain moments of stability, emerge as points of entry into this dense matrix of interactivity. These are:

•Critical digitisation, the translation of analog information to digital form;

•Remix and collaborative augmentation of digital resources, in isolation and as part of larger networks;

•Dissemination and reuse of publications and data, with production and dissemination blurring together when such transformed relationships occur in digital environments.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put forward the rhizome as a governing ontological metaphor through which we can understand flows of information, of activity, of interactions:

unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature . . . . In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. (21)

We claim that the scholarly edition of the 21st century, taking shape within and across digital spaces, analogue objects, multiple vectors of participation, aggregation, and reuse, is best understood as a totality of such circulations, never fixed, and always taking shape at particular times for particular purposes. We further claim that these insights are in reaction to observation and study of previous scholarly editions. In effect, the edition--and the material manifestations of knowledge creation and re- mediation--has always been rhizomatic. Digital technologies allow us to see more clearly what has always been the case.

Citations









Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and Foreword by Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).John Bryant. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

M. Sharples, P. McAndrew, M. Weller, R. Ferguson, E. FitzGerald, T. Hirst, et al. Innovating Pedagogy 2012: Open University innovation report 1 (Milton Keynes: The Open University, 2012).