Beyond representation: some thoughts on creative-critical digital editing

Creative-critical digital editing aims to be a pragmatic complement to the dominant ‘depth’ models of traditional scholarly editing that attempt to offer the ‘correct’ description, representation, or data model of a work within the space of a book or document. A pan-relational, creative-critical editorial approach to publishing instead focuses on a different kind of depth that connects texts to new contexts and literary experiences with new technological tools. Pan-relational editing creates new connections by creating new descriptions and visualisations of texts which are tethered to whatever purposes are needed for a given situation or audience ‘to make them serve our purposes better’, as the philosopher Richard Rorty put it. A creative-critical framework offers the best way to ‘cope’ with the varieties of potential experiences in the textual situation. This mode of thinking resists privileged print-based editorial theories as much as it resists technological determinism because it moves beyond the dominant mode of representing documents or texts as the primary output and instead puts the focus on curating textual data. Textual editing and digital publishing could combine with ‘creative criticism’ to be ongoing and incomplete, partaking of a process of close reading and distant analysis, learning and unlearning, and redescriptions of textual criticism that are embedded in the creative process and other aesthetic experiences. What digital publishing can ideally do, then, is to give space to competing and alternative discourses of the same text and to facilitate connections to other aesthetic contexts. The most promising ways to accomplish this goal would be, in the short term, to give users better designs and tools for engaging in the creative processes inherent in editorial projects. In the long term, an atomic database approach would allow creative play with any textual element, achieving that ideal of a digital edition as a ‘multi-dimensional space of possibilities’.