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Letter From the Editor

Dear Readers,

Thank you for stopping by! I'm so glad you took the time to check out my edition. Throughout this Wiki, you will find nuggets of my editing rationale and, throughout this code, the many witnesses and components of a complex, edited text. As a major proponent of Open Access/Open Source research, I hope any visitors will consider this public repo a safe environment that facilitates meaningful interactions. Please feel free to contact me at the address below with any questions or comments. Happy Reading!

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Editing an edition, regardless of the author, is a varied and complex act. Many methods, critical approaches, principles, and traditions must be considered before an editor can endeavor to present a reliable text. This being said, the single constant in the history of textual studies is that new approaches and concepts of representation are always emerging; particularly now as the influence of technology and new media transforms the ways in which we interact with these physical artifacts and witnesses. This shift in representation is both encouraging and thought-provoking as it becomes clear that the younger audiences coming to these works are often first introduced to them in a digital form rather than a physical one. How must this alter their idea of a text and its history?

I knew from the start of this project that this edition would live online. A great deal of my undergraduate education was spent working with texts in this manner, but I had never tackled a project that I knew would be born, live, and survive completely digital. My goal in creating this digital-variorum edition was to present a text that would appeal to both the first-time reader as well as the returning-scholar; an edition that unravels and interacts with its constituent parts as we, the readers, collide and rearrange the meanings we deduce. That is why the variorum edition is the ideal candidate for a poem with such a rich textual history—a variorum is simply an edition which collates all existing versions of a work, including those prepared by other editors. I wanted to create an edition that was discoverable—meaning an interested user could interact with elements of my editing rationale in the form of nuggets instead of a deluge of information they may not necessarily need nor want—but that was also a whole-text account of the poem’s transmission.

There are some key differences between print and digital editions that must be considered before an editor embarks on their editing adventure. The digital edition, uniquely, is uninhibited by space restrictions caused by budget or printing and binding abilities, whereas digital transcriptions and digitized images only occupy as much space as is necessary to store them in the cloud. This blows the door to creative representation wide open, allowing the editor to fully conceptualize each bit of evidence they’ll bring forward to make their case and how they can place it on the page. In developing a website to house my witnesses, I was able to explore many methods of representation and collation that simply would not have been possible were print space an issue. Also, information and interconnected threads can be as easily hidden in an online edition as shown, meaning the editor can take a step back and allow the reader or user to interact with as many elements of the rationale as they feel compelled to discover. I wanted to create an appealing, relaxed, edition that gently leads the user down the path Wordsworth laid for us. While I do not feel as though I've achieved this in the first iteration, I feel confident that the second release—completed in time to be presented to the Wordsworth Trust in early March—will give me the opportunity to bring the edition one step closer to this winding road of possibility.

Best, Taylor Brown