Mechanick Exercises: the Question of Technical Competence in Digital Scholarly Editing

Abstract

What does a digital scholarly editor need to know? Ever a cause for anxiety and wistfulness among oversubscribed textual scholars, this question takes on a particular urgency as born-digital scholarly editions become viable. Within the digital humanities one finds two characteristic responses to this problem. One is to continue the logic of list-making, resulting in the copious desiderata of programming languages and databases one sees in some digital humanities job advertisements. Another is to delegate labour—and with it, knowledge—to team members, with the lead editor substituting first-hand technical competence with skills in project management and, consequently, in funding procurement. This chapter briefly surveys both responses to the competency gap in digital scholarly editing, but argues that neither adequately serves us. If the emerging field of digital textual studies lacks a clear answer to my initial question—what does a digital scholarly editor need to know?—it is because the question depends upon the complex relationships between labour, epistemology, and technology. This chapter argues that the question of competence in digital scholarly editing functions as a stalking-horse for the unresolved debate over the divisive question, “what is text?”.