The scholarly edition
as document genre
and bibliographical tool

Mats Dahlström
Inst. för biblioteks- och informationsvetenskap, Högskolan i Borås

• Publications (articles, papers, essays, lectures, presentations, talks etc., many of which in full text, some of which in English)

My Ph.D. studies fall into the category of document theory, digitisation, textual criticism, and material bibliography. In short, I study a particular kind of bibliographical tool, namely the scholarly edition (SE), and treat it as a document genre. Based on material bibliography, I attempt historically oriented analyses of structures, textual organisations and document architectures of Web distributed SE:s, with a particular emphasis on the transition from print to digital media. Based on historical bibliography and genre theory, on the other hand, I also attempt to regard the SE as an activity tool in a sociohistorical context. The theoretical framework of the thesis further makes use of both bibliographic theory (conceived of broadly as the fundamental conceptual and theoretical basis of cataloguing) and media theory work.

The SE, originating in textual criticism and the desire to represent multiversional works in book form, has ever since its beginnings been caught between the limitations of the "flat" codex book and the "spatial" qualities of the edited, bibliographical work (more fully discussed in an early thesis outline published as article). Tools for representing the 3D qualities of the work complex have been e.g. indices, cross-references, concordances, notes, stemmata, glossae and apparatuses (notably the variorum apparatus). With new (digital) media, scholarly editors have tried new ways of representing the kind of versionality that seems to characterise canonical and classical literary works. What is gained and what is lost in this possibly ongoing transition of representational form? What does it do, if anything, to the bibliographical concepts of 'document', 'text' (see my article "When Is a Webtext?"), 'work' and 'edition'?

Through close analysis of the structure in a few SE:s on the Web, I hope to be able to convey an understanding of a complex bibliographical document genre such as the SE and its underlying practice of editing as a form of media translation (or remediation), and to indicate some trends in the development of the SE as a bibliographical instrument brought about by changes in its material, technological and social contexts (cf the review I wrote in Variants in 2002).

Document genres are sociotechnical typifications, and as such conditioned by time, social function and use, content changes, and specifically, the parameters of the material, technological and symbolic media. Conversely, the technical and bibliographical tools at use in various library and information activities are never genre neutral, but on the contrary steeped in particular document genre assumptions and respective social functions. Comparative analyses of how document genres and their structures and forms change over time, space and medium might offer valuable insights into the interplay between social context and the conceptual tools of knowledge organisation (KO) and LIS. This entails, among other things, to try to understand both the technology and the sociology of documents and genres.

Examples of questions asked are: how does the development of scholarly activities and archives on the Web affect, if at all, the document genre of digital SE:s (cf my Oslo paper on print versus electronic editions)? Is the SE as genre being torn apart into new genres by the new media, or are we rather witnessing a change in labor division between various document outputs in order to cope with new media parameters (further discussed in a paper at the Electronic Publishing conference 2000 in Kaliningrad)? How are various editorial strategies being implemented in codex editions and in web distributed editions, using their respective material economy and sociology? What are the implications, if any, for knowledge organisation in this respect, particularly if we regard the SE as a bibliographical instrument for clustering document collections around the concept of an authorially intended work? What theoretical frameworks (in e.g. genre theory or activity theory) can be established for analysing the connection between the practice of editing as a social organisation of knowledge and its product, the SE, as a document genre within the category of bibliographical instruments? This opens up for a complex understanding of the social (and historical) dimensions of our bibliographical tools.

Supervisor: Ph.D. and associate professor Joacim Hansson
Assistant supervisor: professor Lars Höglund
(both at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University College of Borås / University of Gothenburg).