Documentary editing. A term that became current in the later 1970s to describe the process of creating reading texts intended to capture the substance and quality of the source texts so that the editorial texts would have substantially the same evidentiary value as their sources.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that documentary editions have found a very welcoming home in cyberspace. Documentary editing has often been considered a lower form of scholarship, as suggested by its being commonly called “noncritical editing,” a name that barely hides the conviction of its being a non- or prescholarly endeavor. However, this allegedly humble form of editing has now taken a leading role in the digital arena, boosted, it seems, by the availability of digital facsimiles.