Murtagh, Shane
(2015)
Digital Critical Editing, Digital Text Analysis,
and Charles R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This thesis considers why critical editions have not established themselves in the digital
medium to the same extent as documentary editions and offers some potential ways to
remedy this. The written thesis is accompanied by a digital critical edition of Charles R.
Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, which acts as an example of and case study for the
arguments set forth in the written thesis. This edition can be accessed at
app.melmoththewanderer.com or at https://pacific-harbor-2932.herokuapp.com/.
Documentary editions have found a secure position in the digital medium because they
have a solid pre-digital theoretical foundation in the work of Jerome McGann and D.F.
McKenzie; digital documentary editions have also become part of the narrative of the
rise of the digital humanities. Digital critical editions, however, have neither of these
advantages. Editors must instead work to create digital critical editions that can not be
easily achieved in the medium of print. This thesis proposes two potential ways that this
can be done. Firstly, digital critical editions can benefit by being designed as usable
editions that aid users in accessing the different parts of the text. This involves a slight
reconception of the critical edition in the digital medium where the job of the editor is
not the establishment of a single, stable text but is the establishment of multiple views
of the text. Secondly, digital critical editions will also benefit from increased interaction
with the field of digital text analysis. This can be achieved in a number of ways: by
making the edition’s data available in multiple formats for analysis, by topic modelling
a corpus of texts contemporary to the edition’s text and making visualisations of those
topic models available to the user in the edition’s paratexts as a novel way of
contextualising the edition text, and finally by allowing users to interrogate the results
of those topic models while they browse the core text of the edition.
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