Digital scholarly editing and the crisis of knowledge technology

The affordances of the digital age have precipitated a crisis of authority. Whom do we trust? How do we prove ourselves trustworthy? The heuristics of authority, in particular at the information filtering and presentation layers, can be co-opted by actors able to manipulate them, and us. At the same time, social tolerance for uncertainty and complexity is low, to the extent that removing them has become a key success metric within both backend systems and user interface design. This rapid shifting of knowledge technologies, in particular as regards the manner in which sources convey their authority in the transition from their affordances as analogue to digital media (where unfiltered source availability is high and the visual languages of authority, from web design to ‘deep fakes,’ are easily appropriated), is an incomplete process that has muddied our ability to judge he signals of trustworthiness and credibility. 

These are problems democratic societies are struggling with on a fundamental level. Unfortunately, however, too often the solutions being proposed emerge from the same culture of software development that created the problems in the first place: as Pasquale describes it, ‘...authority is increasingly expressed algorithmically ... Silicon Valley and Wall Street tend to treat recommendations as purely technical problems. The values and prerogatives that the encoded rules enact are hidden within black boxes’ (Pasquale, 2015).   

Hiding the ‘encoded rules’ informing knowledge creation within ‘black boxes’ is precisely the kind of process the work of scholarly editors, in particular digital scholarly editors, has evolved over decades to avoid. Instead, this is an expertise that documents the complexities resulting from the work of filtering accounts, establishing authority, managing uncertainty, and documenting provenance. The clear link between the problems of information overload and technological overreach and the affordances of digital scholarly editorial expertise to “situate knowledges” (Haraway, 1988) is yet to be systematically explored, however. 

This chapter proposes a framework for negotiating trust and authority that exploits the affordances of digital scholarly editing by privileging the iterative rather than the definitive (McGann, 1996; Schreibman, 2013; Sahle, 2016; Broyles, 2020), the process rather than the product (Siemens et al., 2012; Pierazzo, 2014; Sahle, 2016; Doran, 2021), and the active, even radical role, of the editor, transparently acting as an active collaborator in the sensemaking process, rather than an ‘invisible hand’ (Siemens et al., 2012). It will draw together the long tradition of digital scholarly editing with the emerging subfield of critical digital humanities (see Hall, 2011; Liu, 2012; Berry, 2019) and address in particular the two key points of a) how we can explore and expand the current norms within analogue, digital and indeed hybrid scholarly editing processes toward a model that emphasises the constructed and consensual nature of knowledge, embraces the uncertainty, complexity and contextual dependency of cultural materials and makes knowledge claims and decision-making processes transparent; and b) how this model can be documented and expanded to become applicable in other kinds of human, machine and hybrid knowledge-making processes, in particular systems wielding algorithmic authority.