The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies has posted a lightly edited version of “Digital Manuscripts as Critical Edition,” a talk given by Christoph Flüeler (University of Fribourg) at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. In his examination of the relationship between originals and digital reproductions, Flüeler calls for a “critical theory of the digital manuscript” that addresses the potential for digitized manuscripts to themselves constitute a critical apparatus.
What we need to do is to ask the following question: what preconditions must be met in order for a digital manuscript to be understood as a reliable resource for scholarly research, such that a scholarly researcher can, without any great misgivings or doubts, utilize the digital object as the basis for serious research and make use of it to the fullest possible extent?
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