Digital Editing and “Experience [. . .] looked upon as a kind of text” A Provocation in Three Exhibitions

Abstract

This provocation argues for a form of digital creative-critical editing to serve as a pragmatic complement to the dominant “depth” models of traditional scholarly editing. What results is a pan-relational praxis of editing that focuses on connecting edited texts to new contexts and literary experiences with new tools, instead of using a depth model to offer the correct description, representation, or data model of those texts. Creative textual criticism could then be considered ongoing and incomplete, partaking of an iterative process of close reading and distant analysis, and redescriptions of textual criticism that are embedded in the creative process and other aesthetic experiences. These ideas are demonstrated in three brief exhibitions of Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and the abolitionist Mary Anne Rawson, all of whom are loosely connected to Arthur Schopenhauer, who once posited in Counsels and Maxims that “Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary”. Such “commentary” inspires a new mode of pan-relational “reflection” and networked discourse which can only be implemented with digital technologies. What digital editing can do, then, is to give space to competing and alternative discourses and processes of the same text and to connect that text to other aesthetic contexts.