Hi All,

Since I'm in the process of building my own digital critical edition (http://petrusplaoul.org) I thought I'd chime.

First off thanks to Dot for a thoughtful paper and I really agree that the distinction between digitized and digital editions is not well understood in our field and that this misunderstanding lies at the heart of any resistance. I think it is special impediment to getting scholars to create digital editions or for that matter do their transcriptions TEI XML or really any kind of semantic markup, or to even understand why semantic mark-up is important.

To Godfried: I agree that longevity of the presentation vs. content are two different issues. However, I think that web-based editions (because of the web's ubiquity) ensure a level of permanence that editions built on non-web-platforms do not achieve.

Andrew brings up a number of good points, but I'd like to reiterate his final point: NONE OF THESE ISSUES ARE INSURMOUNTABLE.

I'd be interested to hear reacting to my own attempts to create stable citations (which I'm still developing, but which is visible on my site). All changes to every lectio are tracked using GIT (source control) and particular versions are given a version tag. As the text improves, old version remain accessible through a drop down list. Simply click on the earlier version and the older version will appear. (the drop down list also includes a link to a version log which gives the user a description of the status of the current version). Thus, a user simply needs to cite the paragraph number and the version he/she is using (v. 2012.11 etc). Then if the text changes, a reader can simply select version 2012.11 from the drop dow list and they will see the exact same version that was used in the citation. You can see a couple of examples of this here: http://www.petrusplaoul.org/text/textdisplay.php?flag=dTlecture67 and http://www.petrusplaoul.org/text/textdisplay.php?flag=prollecture1

I generally feel the same way about the point that digital editions are "miserable" to read. They certainly can be. But they don't have to be, a clean uncluttered book-like view is easy enough to design and can make reading very easy and fluid. That's been my goal at least.

So those are just of my thoughts. Sincerely, jaw p.s I'm still constantly working on my digital edition, so if you stay long enough, you'll be sure to find some bugs which I would be happy if you reported at https://bitbucket.org/jeffreycwitt/plaoul/issues?status=new&status=open