Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What's in a Name?

What are the implications of the terms we use to describe large-scale text-based electronic scholarship, especially undertakings that share some of the ambitions and methods of the traditional multi-volume scholarly edition? And how do the conceptions inherent in these choices of language frame and perhaps limit what we attempt? How do terms such as edition, project, database, archive, and thematic research collection relate to the past, present, and future of textual studies? Kenneth M. Price considers how current terms describing digital scholarship both clarify and obscure our collective enterprise. Price argues that the terms we use have more than expressive importance. The shorthand we invoke when explaining our work to others shapes how we conceive of and also how we position digital scholarship. What are the implications of the terms we use to describe large-scale text-based electronic scholarship, especially undertakings that share some of the ambitions and methods of the traditional multi-volume scholarly edition? What genre or genres are we now working in? And how do the conceptions inherent in these choices of language frame and perhaps limit what we attempt? How do terms such as edition, project, database, archive, and thematic research collection relate to the past, present, and future of textual studies? Drawing on a range of resources, including the Walt Whitman Archive, I consider how current terms describing digital scholarship both clarify and obscure our collective enterprise. In addition, I will use the final term, thematic research collection, to discuss yet-to-be-developed parts of the Whitman Archive dealing with place-based cultural analysis and translation studies as a way to illustrate the expansive possibilities of this new model of scholarship. Digital textual studies seem to me inadequately described by the terms now available. Project is amorphous; archive and edition are heavy with associations carried over from print culture; database is both too limiting and too misleading in its connotations; and digital thematic research collection lacks a memorable ring and pithiness. The terms we use have more than expressive importance. The shorthand we invoke when explaining our work to others shapes how we conceive of and also how we position digital scholarship. We need a new term that is vivid enough to be memorable, elastic enough to cover a class of like things, and yet restrictive enough to allow us to include some scholarly undertakings and not others. Ordinary readers and academics alike rely heavily on the work of editors, yet the standing of editors in the academy has for decades been shaky at best. For many people, electronic work is even more dubious: what relatively short history it has is marked by distrust, denigration, and dismissal. We all know the charges, however distorted they may be: digital work is ephemeral, unvetted, chaotic, and unreliable. When suspicion of the value of editing combines with suspicion of the new medium, we have a hazardous mix brewing. There is a danger that if humanities scholars do not undertake the key work of textual transmission, this work will be done by librarians and systems engineers — that is, it will be done by people with less specialized knowledge of the content. In the fraught circumstances of the academy, driven by a prestige economy, humanities scholars are well advised to be highly self-conscious about what we do and how we describe it.