This chapter positions digital editions within a broader and longer tradition of textual scholarship, book history, and scholarly editions. In it we consider the spatial, conceptual, and methodological approaches to editorial practice used in print editions and show the ways in which digital scholarly editions both extend and remake existing editorial paradigms and practices. In particular, we consider three elements of digital editions: networked structures, interactive reading, and multimodality. Throughout the chapter we consider both the potential and the ongoing challenges of making and using digital editions.

This chapter considers the concept of an ‘edition’ from two different perspectives. In the first half, Bob Kaster writes as an editor preparing a critical edition for conventional publication, first retrieving the relevant data - chiefly, the versions preserved in manuscripts - then analysing them to form a theory of the text’s transmission that began with the author’s original copy. Much attention is given to the ‘stemmatic method’, used to sift variations among the transmitted versions, aiming to establish the archetype - the latest copy of the text absent which no other copies would survive - or to show that no archetype can be reconstructed, or even to show that the notion of an ‘author’s original’ is misconceived. In the second half, Sam Huskey writes as the director of the Digital Latin Library, a project that aims to move critical editions of Latin texts to a digital paradigm. To demonstrate that such a transition does not render obsolete the methods and skills described in the first part of the chapter, but rather depends on them, traditional editions are described as databases of information encoded visually (e.g. with typography and layout). The experiences of two editors making this transition close this part of the chapter.

As the impact of the internet has rippled in ever larger circles over the past twenty-seven years, Pound’s presence on the web has slowly made itself felt: as web aggregators starting anthologizing poetry, selections from his work, particularly the shorter poems, were showcased on websites like Poetry Foundation, Bartleby.com or Poetry Archive. Universities, in their turn, began hosting modernist literature projects, such as PennSound in Philadelphia, where parts of Pound’s work are presented and commented on next to that of other modernist writers. Online libraries or book clubs hold scanned versions of the New Directions edition of The Cantos in closed access. Commentators publish their own work with extensive quotations in blogs or digital magazines, and artists upload artwork inspired by Pound and his poem. Wikipedia now boasts a long article on Pound himself, one on The Cantos and one on a ‘List of Cultural References in The Cantos’.