edition (scholarly)

A scholarly edition is a publication that provides an important work of literature or historical document that has been prepared by experts in the field. These can be in print or digital forms (or a combination of the two). An example of a scholarly edition in print would be a volume of a play by Shakespeare that includes a long introduction, lots of footnotes or endnotes and variants of the text. Scholarly editions in digital form generally serve the same purpose as the print editions but can provide other features such as including digitised images of original manuscript documents, a search functionality and it can have interactive elements such as maps and videos. Digital editions have less restrictions in terms of space, so they can sometimes include a large collection of texts at which point it may be called a digital archive.

(Kelly 2015, 125)

Contributed by Aodhán. View changelog.