The Humanist List calls attention to the new edition of a Scandinavian journal, Human IT, which includes some work in English, notably an essay by Daniel Paul O'Donnell. O'Donnell discusses his editing of the Old English poem Caedmon's Hymn based on "SGML-encoded diplomatic transcriptions of all twenty-one known witnesses to the poem." O'Donnell attempted to create a filter that allowed readers to choose different features and versions of the text. But in this essay, O'Donnell rethinks the need for the human editor and discusses "a system in which the computer would generate, but a human edit, the final display texts presented to the reader."
O'Donnell moves toward the somewhat obvious point that "technical advances of the last eight years have greatly improved our ability to extract and manipulate textual data--and our ability to build editions in ways simply impossible in print." But he finds particular significance in meeting his original two goals: "a method for avoiding reinputting primary source documents" and "a description of the locus of editorial activity." O'Donnell concludes with an intriguing note for producers and consumers of digital tets: "in an increasingly collaborative and interactive scholarly world, it appears that the ghost in the machine may reside in the stylesheet."
Creator: Daniel Paul O'Donnell
Publisher: Human IT
