Collaboration and the Crowd in Digital Scholarly Editing

Textual criticism, wrote A. E. Housman, is an aristocratic affair. The argument presented by a scholarly edition can usually be usually be characterised as the singular vision of a lone editor or a very small group of editors. But is it possible or even desirable for an edition to present multipleperhaps competingarguments? The emerging model of the digital social edition promises to enable the presentation of differing interpretations and argumentsthe varying perspectives of members of an editorial communityprompting us to reconsider some of our fundamental ideas about the form and function of scholarly editions. This talk reflects on the practical and theoretical issues of applying crowdsourcing to the task of scholarly editing, and examines the precedents set by existing digital social editions.