British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
14TH BRITISH ACADEMY POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP SYMPOSIUM
Abstract
Editing Texts in an Electronic Age
Dr Chad Van Dixhoorn
Conventional printed collections of texts and letters are often considered Mesozoic reptiles from the past: unlikely and temporary survivors in the age of the internet. This paper accepts that the publishing climate has undergone dramatic changes. But it argues that some academic editing projects will not easily adapt to constantly evolving electronic forms and are probably best propagated on paper. I take as my sample dinosaur The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly (1643-1652), a developing 900,000-word edition of an early-modern text to be published by Oxford University Press in five volumes.
Dr Chad Van Dixhoorn is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, and a research fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He completed his BA at the University of Western Ontario, his MDiv and ThM at Westminster Theological Seminary and his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He is currently the editor of The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, a project supported by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.