Scholarly Notes and Digital Humanities

Our presentation will have two components: A progress report on the "Editorial Practices and the Web" project (and some closely related work) and a discussion the implications of this work for the nature and infrastructure of digital humanities. The preparation of scholarly editions of historically important texts is important in the humanities, but expensive. A minor change in editorial procedures to allow editors' working notes available in a collaborative environment increases the return on investment by reducing duplicative work, increasing editorial productivity, making additional resources available to the public, and preserving resources ordinarily lost when funding ends. Scholarly notes are created throughout the humanities. So a focus on scholarly notes provides a basis for convergence and collaboration among quite diverse constituencies across the humanities.