Who are we editing for? How digital publication changes the role of the scholarly edition

Digital publication has changed the way that I think about scholarly editing, and it has done so largely in thinking about our audience. Having started my editing career working on a microfilm edition, then a four-volume print edition, and a small TEI-based digital edition with the Margaret Sanger Papers, I had a chance to start fresh in 2015 when I took over as editor of the long-running Jane Addams Papers. This was a project that had already published a large microfilm edition and index in the 1980s, and half of its planned six-volume print edition.  

Providing wide access to documents has always been my primary goal as an editor and as the tools have changed, it seems that the nature of our editions must change along with them. When we primarily published in book form and microfilm form, the focus was on scholars at the research institutions who purchased those products. As digital publication began to spread, paywalls for scholarly journals and some scholarly editions kept our audience in that same traditional grouping.  

But what happens when you open the edition up, and build it as a freely accessible website? How does the broadening of our audience change the way we edit our texts and the kinds of context we provide for our users? Should it? How does a broad general audience change the way that we transcribe documents, how should it impact the annotation policies that we apply to them?  

Our experiences with the Jane Addams Papers Digital Edition have shown us that digital editions reach far broader and far younger audiences than we expected. We anticipated that college students would make great use of the edition, as well as scholars and the general public. And they have. But we learned that teachers and students in K-12 are an untapped audience for scholarly editions, if only we meet them halfway. For us, that meant designing thematic guides to help students and their teachers use the digital edition for National History Day Projects, writing some lesson plans for middle-school teachers, and developing AP History assignments that use the Addams Papers to explore American history. The guides, teacher resources, and the documents they suggest are the most popular pages on our site, month after month, year after year. They tap into something that the searchable digital edition cannot do.  

Opening our editions up to the whole world via digital publication creates challenges and opportunities for editors. We have to think through how to make our documents accessible not just in terms of open access, but also in making them understandable to scholars, teachers, students, and the general public.