The Work and the Listener

Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies offers an important perspective on the value of the work-concept in textual scholarship. This response to his book, written for a seminar at the 2021 Society for Textual Scholarship conference, takes up threads leading outward from his argument, and in three sections considers the potential of bibliography beyond books, textual scholarship beyond editing, and archives beyond metaphor. I read Paul Eggert’s productively challenging and thoroughly enjoyable new book, The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies, from a strange position — more than one, in fact. First, I am part of the book’s primary audience of textually inclined literary scholars — all of my degrees are in English, I hold a cross-appointment to my university’s English Department — and yet my institutional home is a Faculty of Information, with my teaching primarily in the fields of book history, bibliography, digital humanities, and culture and technology. Second, I have written extensively about scholarly editing and have been involved with the Electronic New Variorum Shakespeare editions for over fifteen years, and yet I am not a scholarly editor.1 Third, although I still consider myself a literary scholar, that identity is mostly rooted in the study of Shakespeare, and particularly in text-performance questions. This third difference may be the most consequential for my reading of The Work and the Reader: it means my literary interests have never been purely literary, and my understanding of textuality is not primarily defined by written words. A play is language, but unless it is closet drama, a play is also gesture, costume, sound, space, blocking, sets, lighting, stage directions, and other non-linguistic elements. To study drama, especially plays with continuous and ongoing performance traditions, is to study what has been called “the most socialized of all literary forms” (Wells and Taylor 1. Full disclosure: I did commit acts of scholarly editing as a graduate student, in the form of a Master’s thesis, completed in 2002, in which I created a digital critical edition of the anomalous early modern English play The Taming of a

I read Paul Eggert's productively challenging and thoroughly enjoyable new book, The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies, from a strange position -more than one, in fact. First, I am part of the book's primary audience of textually inclined literary scholars -all of my degrees are in English, I hold a cross-appointment to my university's English Department -and yet my institutional home is a Faculty of Information, with my teaching primarily in the fields of book history, bibliography, digital humanities, and culture and technology. Second, I have written extensively about scholarly editing and have been involved with the Electronic New Variorum Shakespeare editions for over fifteen years, and yet I am not a scholarly editor. 1 Third, although I still consider myself a literary scholar, that identity is mostly rooted in the study of Shakespeare, and particularly in text-performance questions.
This third difference may be the most consequential for my reading of The Work and the Reader: it means my literary interests have never been purely literary, and my understanding of textuality is not primarily defined by written words. A play is language, but unless it is closet drama, a play is also gesture, costume, sound, space, blocking, sets, lighting, stage directions, and other non-linguistic elements. To study drama, especially plays with continuous and ongoing performance traditions, is to study what has been called "the most socialized of all literary forms" (Wells and Taylor 1987, 15). In other words, the works that drew me into textual scholarship originally -and continue to draw me to Eggert's book -do not just have readers; they also have viewers and listeners.
With apologies for this biographical excursus, then, I hope in this response to use my outsider-insider perspective to read Eggert's book differently, and to make those differences useful. There is some danger in recovering familiar ground in our responses to Eggert's book -especially on the reception of McKenzie and McGann in editorial theory -but in the revival of the work-concept, and the way The Work and the Reader frames that revival, there are valuable openings for new conversations. In that spirit, I'll resist the temptation to focus on Eggert's third chapter, on digital editions and Hamlet, having already addressed similar questions elsewhere in my own work on Shakespeare (Galey 2014 and2015). Instead, my response will follow some threads outward from what I found to be the most potent chapter in The Work and the Reader, the more theoretically inclined second chapter, "Reviving the Work-Concept: Music, Literature, and Historic Buildings". This chapter takes us into territory that's not bounded by the phrase in Literary Studies in the book's title and does what I believe textual scholarship urgently needs to do in the twenty-first century: look beyond literature and beyond books (without leaving them behind) and demonstrate its relevance to a broad range of material and creative forms. The concept of the work proves its usefulness, even its necessity, in this broadening of scope. But it is the scope question that interests me more, and which I intend to pursue down avenues that Eggert's book opens up but doesn't explore -its ultimate concerns lying elsewhere, and reasonably so.
In the sections that follow, I turn first to the question of textual scholarship's materials and scope. Following this, I will deal with questions about the centrality of editing in textual scholarship, and the relationship between edition and archive. 2

Bibliography Beyond Books
The second chapter of The Work and the Reader begins with an "extended anecdote" about musical performance intended to show that "the work-concept has not died", and "point[s] the way towards an explanation that is broader than the literary perspective so far pursued" in the book (Eggert 2019, 19). In his account of composer Peter Sculthorpe's appearance at the 2010 Canberra International Music Festival, Eggert challenges us to consider not just the work and the reader -though there was reading going on, in the form of musical scores -but also the work and the listener. As he puts it, [I]f music is a transaction, it does not come alive without performance in the presence of an audience. Although transmitted from the past in scores and as held in memory, it achieves a present-ness in performance. It does not fully exist as music without that-even as the special characteristics of each successive performance enter into the history of the work over time.
(2019, 20, emphasis in original) The idea that the history of a musical work is also the history of its performances would sit well with many musical historians, especially in improvisational genres such as jazz, rock, metal, and freestyle rap. Indeed, the "present-ness in performance" Eggert describes here is surely something we can appreciate in 2021, after a year and more of shuttered theatres, arenas, clubs, and other musical performance spaces, large and small. What interests me here, however, is the apparent necessity of a category-switch at this point in The Work and the Reader, where the book steps away from literary texts in order to understand them via triangulation with another artistic form, in this case music (and architecture, later in the chapter). Scholars of music and literature have often strayed productively into each other's domains, led there by the interconnected nature of their materials. It can be valuable to follow the work-concept beyond literature, and into other forms like music and architecture, as places where we can think through literary and book-historical questions. However, it is also important to ask how textual scholarship can contribute to the study of music, performance, and other non-literary forms. This particular chapter in The Work and the Reader does both, and continues a valuable direction begun in Eggert's 2009 book, Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architecture and Literature.
For textual scholars, this kind of boundary-crossing points not only to the trans-disciplinary nature of a concept like work, text, and document, but also to the strange disciplinary space that textual studies occupies with respect to other fields. Alan Liu has characterized book history as a "trickster" field in the Lévi-Straussian sense (2013,410), and David Greetham goes even further to describe textual scholarship as a postmodern "anti-discipline" that cannot be pinned down to any one place on the epistemological map (2010, 56-7). (Following Greetham, I tend to treat bibliography, book history, scholarly editing, and other fields as falling under the broad umbrella of textual scholarship as a category -all of which, in a longer historical view, may be called philological disciplines; see Greetham 1994.) Space does not permit me to unpack the long history of bibliographical thinking beyond books, which runs from W.W. Greg through Greetham to the present, but even the journals of the Society for Textual Scholarship and comparable bibliographical societies have included articles on music and other kinds of "non-book texts", as McKenzie called them (1999, 31 and passim;e.g. Womack 1998;Wilmeth 1999;Broude 2011;Young 2016).
In similar spirit, The Work and the Reader describes a musical scenario where a performed score "achieves a present-ness in performance" as Eggert puts it (2019, 20), and where a performer's memory of a particular chord surpasses the composer's, resulting in a lesson about creativity, performance, and authority. What, then, can the work-concept as a regulative idea teach us -and what can we learn about it in turn -if we consider other genres of music where improvisation plays a greater role? For example, popular jazz recordings of the twentieth century would be fascinating contexts in which to consider the complexities of work, text, document, and performance. It's notable that there are interesting textual problems in the published recordings of three of the most canonical live performances in jazz history: the Benny Goodman Orchestra at New York's Carnegie Hall in 1938; Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie at Toronto's Massey Hall in 1953; and Duke Ellington at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956. All three of these concerts have recently been re-released in versions -in editions -that significantly revise the ways the concerts were presented in their original releases.
The editorial history of Ellington's 1956 concert is particularly interesting to place beside The Work and the Reader because it shows us not only musical texts as "agented acts of composition", as Eggert puts it (2019, 4), but also multiple forms of agency: not just Ellington the bandleader and performer, but also Ellington the composer, on stage and in the recording studio. When Ellington gave the first public performance of his newly written three-part "Newport Suite" in 1956, which at the time barely had a title, he was dissatisfied with his orchestra's performance and the recording itself. Shortly after the concert, he headed into the studio with his orchestra and producer George Avakian to re-record much of the "Newport Suite" and several other songs that were imperfectly captured by the Columbia record company's microphones. The LP released by Columbia later that year went on to rejuvenate Ellington's flagging career and reintroduced his music to audiences in the emerging era of rock 'n' roll and rhythm and blues (helped by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves's scorching twenty-seven-chorus solo in the middle of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue", undoubtedly the most famous moment in the concert; see Morton 2008).
However, as the 1999 CD reissue of Ellington at Newport (Complete) made evident to listeners, the 1956 LP was substantially a studio-based intervention into a supposedly straightforward document of live performance. As Darren Mueller (2014) has shown, in an article with strong if unspoken affinities with textual scholarship, the 1999 reissue gives us both the studio re-takes of the "Newport Suite" and other songs as well as apparently undoctored recordings of the live performance (recovered thanks to recently discovered tapes made by Voice of America, using different microphones on the Newport Festival stage). In these versions of an evolving work, we can see Ellington as composer, performer, bandleader, and editor of his own recordings, in collaboration with the Columbia producer, Avakian. The heavily edited 1956 and supposedly unedited 1999 versions of Ellington at Newport show us not only Ellington regulating his own work, with the "Newport Suite", but also Gonsalves's twenty-seven-chorus reminder that some works, including epic tenor sax solos, come into being in the moment of their performance.
Here the work as a regulative idea -as a connective thread linking multiple recordings, documents, and versions -blends into the idea of music as work: as something worked on and worked at. This musical example from the world of bibliography beyond books reminds us that not all agented acts of creation move with the temporality of literary composition and revision. Some keep time with the tempos of other artistic forms, and one wonders how a book like The Work and the Reader might give us conceptual tools to combine with elusive yet highly textual forms like jazz.

Textual Scholarship Beyond Editing
One of my few points of disagreement with The Work and the Reader lies in its treatment of McGann's and McKenzie's influence on the field. 3 Looking back to debates in editorial theory, Eggert comments that "the new socialtexts approach appeared [at the time] to have powerful implications for the operations of scholarly editors, who had traditionally aimed at establishing the texts of works as intended by their authors" (2019, 3). However, he argues, "this displacing of attention from texts understood as agented acts of composition, revision and production onto texts understood as collaboratively or socially achieved gave editors no purchase on the phenomenon or any right to emend the text" (2019, 4). This may be true insofar as we conceive of emendation as the core of scholarly editing, but rather than rehash editorial theory debates from past decades, I would instead step back and ask why, today, we should treat scholarly editing as the yardstick by which we judge a concept like McKenzie's sociology of texts. Are there not other, more productive conversations to have about the social and collaborative natures of texts?
As someone who works in book history, I read Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts as a provocation not to edit differently, but to read differently and to teach differently -those latter two activities being at the core of what I do, more so than scholarly editing. Editions and editing are tremendously important, and I believe editorial theory to be a key part of textual scholarship's potential to expand beyond book-based texts, but neither should editing be allowed to define -or limit -the extent of textual scholarship's contributions to understanding the world of twenty-first century textuality. Textual scholarship must be about more than editing. This is a relatively small quibble, however, and I would emphasize that The Work and the Reader discusses editions in ways that are relevant beyond the increasingly small circle of textual scholars who will become editors of prestigious print scholarly editions in the twenty-first century. As the golden age of traditional scholarly editing, enabled by vanishing postwar affluence, has come to an end in North America, the rise of book history as a field has created avenues by which students can work with material texts without envisioning an academic career path as a scholarly editor. Scholarly editions are key tools for these students, and editorial theory encourages critical thinking about the natures of texts, even if one isn't setting out to edit them.
The place of editions, editing, and editorial thinking within this holistic understanding of textuality -and of the forms of textual scholarship -is captured eloquently in Eggert's introduction: digital social editions, of the kind Eggert cites in this section, reflect little actual knowledge of textual scholarship and the expertise it requires.
The tracing of the life of a work is initially a bibliographical matter. Yet one soon finds that the bibliographical questions have editorial implications; that editorial questions are in turn book-historical and literary critical; and that, finally, all of them trail clouds of theory that complicate their category distinctions. (2019,8) In this spirit, The Work and the Text opens with an elegant example of this kind of editorial, bibliographical, and book-historical awareness, as Eggert describes his own (proof)reading of an edition of Mary Gilmore's poetry. It's a rare account of reading that treats the poetry and the scholarly apparatus as working in harmony, and the "mini textual history [. . .] captured on each well-designed page" (2019, 2) -presumably textual notes -serves to mirror the personal history and experience that Eggert describes as context for his reading. The world enters his reading, just as variants enter the history of the text -and of the work -and become present to the reader through textual notes. The otherwise unloved and unread textual note in a scholarly edition nonetheless represents an awareness of textual variation -of the winding paths of the life of the work. For example, to return to a case I've already discussed at some length in The Shakespearean Archive (2014,, there are numerous cruxes in Shakespeare which have taken on a life of their own as cruxes, not as problems waiting to be solved by editors. Othello offers one of the most compact and durable Shakespeare cruxes. A reader of, say, E.A.J. Honigmann's Arden edition of Othello (1997), having just reached the suicidal Othello's self-comparison to "the base Indian" who "threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe" (5.2.345-6), might then glance down to this note at the foot of the page (330): 345 Indian] Q, F2; Iudean F This compact formula tells us simply that the First Quarto (Q) and Second Folio (F2) read "Indian", while the First Folio (F) reads "Iudean". There are interpretive consequences either way, which I won't unpack here, but serious Shakespeare scholarship today would never entirely disregard one reading for the other; awareness of the crux as such, as a negative dialectic, has become a necessary part of any scholarly reading of this famous Shakespeare passage, even if readers or editors prefer one reading over another. Honigmann chose "Indian", but "Iudean" shares the page because this is a scholarly edition. The situation is similar to the negative dialectic Egg-ert describes, drawing on Theodor Adorno, "between meaningful text and material document", which leads not to "a transcendent ideal -the work -but rather [to] co-dependence" (2019, 11, emphasis in original).
The textual note, as a distillation of scholarly labour and judgment, happens to be the most precise and well-honed format we presently have for representing textual variation, but the phenomenon it addresses is widespread and not limited to written texts, let alone literary ones. Video games have variants, as do films, musical recordings, graphic novels, digital artworks, and many other forms. The 1999 CD reissue of Ellington at Newport, mentioned above, makes some variants available to the listener by including the studio re-takes along with the live performance. This form lacks the visual economy of a textual note, but the different versions clearly marked in the CD liner notes function similarly to a textual apparatus. Even if it is not feasible for scholars to create editions of works in these non-literary forms (for the most part), the phenomenon of textual variation remains no less a part of what they are.
With many works of popular culture, awareness of their complex textual condition is not merely the preoccupation of a specialist subculture, but an animating concern of mainstream fandom. Witness the recent controversy over director Zack Snyder's radical re-editing of his 2017 superhero film, Justice League, or what may be the most infamous variant in cinematic history, known as the "Han Shot First" scene in the original Star Wars (1977). 4 These examples stand outside the purview of literary studies -and even I am in no hurry to watch Synder's four-hour version of his film -but they are central texts in popular culture of the present day. There are plenty of examples to be found among older, more canonical works of popular culture, too. In a time when we worry about interest in textual scholarship, enrollment in degree programs, and membership in textual societies, we might do well to realize that popular culture regularly offers up works whose textual condition requires an understanding of versions and variants. Even if those works don't lend themselves to scholarly editing, they demonstrate why editorial thinking should matter for textual scholars and for those beyond this field.

Archives Beyond Metaphor
The Work and the Reader, like the 2015 Committee on Scholarly Editions white paper on digital editions (CSE 2015) and many other recent publications and projects, places archives and editions in a separate-but-connected relationship that will be familiar and accepted by many in textual studies and the digital humanities. In this section, I offer a critique of this framing from the perspective not of an archivist, but of a textual scholar trained in literary studies who has spent the past decade working down the hall from archivists as colleagues and with emerging archivists as students in my classes. I have been lucky to pursue textual scholarship in this environment, which is very different from a literary department, but the rich and sizable scholarly literature of archivists still exists in the blind spot of many, perhaps even most textual scholars who write about archives. Historians such as Carolyn Steedman (2002) have criticized poststructuralists such as Derrida for making claims about archives -or, more accurately, what they call the archive -with little regard for the empirical realities of archives and archival research. Eggert makes similar criticisms in his article "Brought to Book: Bibliography, Book History and the Study of Literature" (2012), and I certainly share his frustration with those who reduce the complexities of archives to a metaphor and give them no further thought.
However, there is a risk of reproducing our own version of that same error if we make claims about archives without reading and citing literature in the field that has been foremost in advancing archival theory and practice for decades: not history, nor literary studies, nor critical theory, but archival studies itself as an academic field parallel to textual studies. Whenever we yoke the terms edition and archive together, whether in opposition or on a continuum, we need to remember the conversation between disciplines that should be happening as well. (See Theimer 2012 for a similar argument.) But with the increased currency of the term digital archive in the digital humanities, it has become all too easy to neglect the fact that archivists, like editors, have a rich and active scholarly literature of their own in journals like Archival Science, Archivaria, and American Archivist, and in edited collections such as Currents of Archival Thinking (MacNeil and Eastwood 2017), where they sometimes engage topics in our field like scholarly editing (MacNeil 2005 and2008).
To be clear, I am not suggesting that archivists own the term archive, or that textual scholars and digital humanists should cease to use it for their digital projects. That argument would get nowhere, but more importantly it would obscure the fact that the meaning of the word archive has always been a moving target. For example, in The Shakespearean Archive I pointed out that even in a professional archivists' standard reference work, the term archive is glossed three different ways: as the records; as the building that houses them; and as the institution that manages them (Galey 2014, 15). Which of these is the metaphor? Which is the unambiguous referent, the solid ground where we can confidently plant the flag of empiricism? To claim that one is using the term archive in a construction like digital critical archive only as a metaphor is to overlook the term's complex nature, which cannot be contained in one discipline or one metaphor.
Regrettably, even today textual scholarship still perpetuates a long-running failure to engage archiving -and archivists -beyond metaphor. The loss is ours. If more literary scholars, editors, historians, and digital humanists actually read and referenced the scholarly literature of archivists, we'd find a wealth of thinking on concepts like provenance, original order, respect des fonds, the nature of records, authenticity, and the materiality of cultural production. (For good places to start, see the chapters in MacNeil and Eastwood 2017.) What we would learn from these archival concepts, and from the intellectual traditions behind them, is that archives are edited.
Just as The Work and the Reader argues so persuasively for understanding editions as arguments, so has the past thirty years of archival scholarly literature been reckoning with the agents, subjects, and power structures that shape archives. Ironically, one of Eggert's most central and persuasive claims in The Work and the Reader, that "each scholarly edition [should] be understood as an argument, embodied in its reading text and apparatus", would align well with the strands of archival theory that take their cue from Derrida and poststructuralism (2019,5). This archival understanding is very much at odds with framings of archives and editions, such as that of the CSE white paper, which present an edition as something decanted from an archive or imply that the completeness of the archive is what allows editions to be selective, critically partial, and intellectually risk-taking. Actual archives are defined by their incompleteness: missing records, embargoed correspondence, conjectural orderings and groupings of records (which may or may not reflect the actual practice of those who produced the records), and the limitations and strengths of their finding aidswhich are created by archivists who are just as human as scholarly editors.
The Work and the Reader offers a more nuanced framing of the archiveedition relationship than the CSE white paper, placing them on a continuum with a slider which helpfully draws attention to their interconnectedness: Every position along the slider involves a report on the documents, but the archival impulse is more document-facing and the editorial is, relatively speaking, more audience-facing. Yet each activity, if it be a truly scholarly one, depends upon or anticipates the need for its complementary or co-dependent partner. The archival impulse aims to satisfy the shared need for a reliable record of the documentary evidence; the editorial impulse to further interpret it, with the aim of orienting it towards known or envisaged audiences and by taking their anticipated needs into account. (Eggert 2019, 84) I do not wish to quibble too much with this framing, given the value of the holistic thinking that Eggert is advocating here; as he eloquently puts it, "every expression of the archival impulse is to some extent editorial, and [. . .] every expression of the editorial impulse is to some extent archival" (2019, 84). I share this premise but draw different conclusions from it and would offer two friendly amendments to the slider metaphor, especially for readers of The Work and the Reader who would take up the term critical archive as though it were straightforward, as a tool ready to hand. My first suggestion is not to think of the archival end of the slider exclusively in terms of documents. Granted, archives are where textual scholars encounter documents, digital or otherwise, and working with any primary document -or its facsimile or transcription -requires a critical mindset that textual scholarship fosters better than any other discipline, especially via document-oriented subdisciplines such as paleography, diplomatics, and analytical bibliography (to which I would add text encoding, as a discipline and intellectual process of its own; see Galey 2015). However, the document in the pool of light on the reading room table, or in the glow of the digital screen, can distract from its less visible contexts. This is where knowledge of archival scholarship helps: it calls attention to the contents of the box in which the document arrived at the reading room table, to the grouping together of documents and the orders that result, and to questions of provenance and authenticity that tend not to reveal themselves one document at a time. Archival scholarship calls our attention to what is not there, and why.
Digital archives are no exception, and indeed require as much if not more vigilance for illusions of completeness and transparency. As Julia Flanders puts it, in what remains one of the best discussions of archives and editions of the past twenty-five years, what pressure does the term 'archive' [. . .] put on the conceptualization of the 'edition'? [. . .] If we define the electronic archive by its chief aim -to provide large bodies of primary data -we will find it nonetheless drawn towards the condition of the edition simply by virtue of being prepared, encoded, and to some inevitable degree selected. This editedness cannot be evaded or hidden, though it can be usefully distinguished from the more explicit editing which aims actually to alter the text. (1997,136) Usefully distinguishing the work of editorial emendation, which Flanders mentions at the end, is very much the concern of Eggert's slider metaphor, and he strives to maintain the possibility of this distinction while navigating the complexity that Flanders describes. But her word "pressure" is well chosen and reminds us of tensions that the slider metaphor may inadvertently cover up. My second friendly amendment to the slider metaphor is not to think of it as entirely under one's control, like a thermostat, or even as a transparent indicator of a quantity, like a fuel gauge. (Even fuel gauges are not always to be trusted, as pilots know.) Editors, like text encoders and archivists, should be as transparent as possible about their representational choices in scholarly work, but the most consequential choices are often the ones we don't realize we're making. If editorial theory, archival scholarship, and text encoding share one quality, it is that these fields have spent decades dismantling the illusion of neutrality in their work. If the slider metaphor presupposes someone's hand on the slider, controlling balances like a sound engineer at a mixing console (think of Duke and Avakian in the studio in 1956), then the metaphor risks letting researchers off the hook if they push the slider all the way to the archival end -or if they think they can. As much as I agree with Eggert that all editions are arguments, there are also arguments in play at all points on the slider, and sometimes the most consequential arguments do their work where they seem least visible.
For example, the 1999 CD reissue of Ellington at Newport, which I mentioned above, presents itself in liner notes and promotional material as though its producer, Phil Schaap, had moved Eggert's slider nearly all the way to the archive setting. The 1999 reissue even has affinities with the unediting movement in textual scholarship from the 1990's (see Marcus 1996), complete with a return to the archives to find lost documents (the Voice of America tapes), exposure of alleged excesses of an interventionist editor (Avakian), and release of a supposedly transparent document of the performance, free from eclectic emendation and providing the primary records of the performance (the 1999 Ellington at Newport CD itself, which conspicuously adds the word Complete to its title). As Mueller puts it, in language that evokes the editorial end of Eggert's slider metaphor, "In Avakian's hands, studio technology became a restorative vehicle based around an aesthetic of sonic realism and directed toward the LP's eventual listeners" (2014,16). Yet as Mueller's analysis reveals, Schapp's supposedly archival 1999 rerelease is just as much a sonic construction as Avakian's, and just as much of an embodied argument about the nature of liveness and performance.
The slider metaphor could tempt us to place the Avakian and Schapp versions at either end of the edition-archive continuum, but that would be misleading; as Mueller shows, in both releases there is editing all the way down. It serves as a cautionary example that not all forms of editing announce themselves. Yet textual scholarship, including The Work and the Reader, can help us notice the editing that goes by other names, or by none at all. That was my focus in The Shakespearean Archive, and continues into my work on born-digital and digitized texts (see also Trettien 2013 andCordell 2017 for examples of this approach).
My point is simply that if we think of an archive, digital or otherwise, as a structure that exists prior to editing and other critical interventions into the documentary record, and represents completeness rather than selectivity, and doesn't have interpretation built into its very bones, then we're failing to learn something fundamental from archivists themselves. Neither the term digital archive nor the slider metaphor should let anyone off the hook for accounting for the histories of their materials, and I do not think that is Eggert's intention at all in The Work and the Reader. We might still refer to our digital projects as archives -no field or profession owns the term -but it would be a measure of progress if we treated the term as one that our digital projects have to earn. In his introduction, Eggert draws on an important 2017 article by Katherine Bode, in which she pointedly critiques Franco Moretti, Matthew Jockers, and others who treat literary texts as data while neglecting the insights of textual scholarship and book history. As Bode puts it, digital archives are not immutable monuments in the new landscape of the digital humanities; rather, "digital archives, like bibliographies, are interpretive constructs, and they are still evolving, not only in content but in form, in the process presenting significant practical and conceptual challenges for literary history" (2017,82). This realistic and clear-sighted way of looking at digital archives recognizes that digital tools