Of course an electronic edition of this kind is as much a collective as an individual creation and the task of realising such functionality depended on the skills of the Electronic Publishing department at Oxford University Press and of the software engineers at OptiMedia. Dr Meisel does a good deal to place the edition in the context of previous collections of Prime Ministerial speeches and notes the changing nature of political communication over the past couple of centuries. He is right in have done so. If a single concept lay behind the disk, it was that collections of speeches no longer went to the heart of the thing and that it was necessary to extend the remit of such editions to take account of the dominance of television. Surprisingly this had not been before done in Britain, nor even in the US, as far as I am aware.
Television is everything in politics and TV broadcasters produce material at a frightening rate.
This disk provides one answer to that problem. Other answers are going to be needed, however. The budget for this disk was 325,000. Few British politicians will ever achieve the kind of world standing necessary to give an edition of their collected statements the faintest hope of economic viability. With goodwill from the broadcasters, the sums involved would not be large.