ABSTRACT
Jane Austen's fiction manuscripts are the first substantial bodies of autograph writings surviving for any British novelist. In 2006 the Arts and Humanities Research Council granted three-year funding for a project to digitize the manuscripts. The use of digital technology for editorial work changes the working methodology whatever the planned output, print or electronic, with more radical change when there is a digital output. Lynne Siemens (2009) has provided a good description of the tensions one can find within the team of a digital humanities project, the main difficulty being one of reciprocal understanding across disciplines. The first activity in preparing a digital edition is modelling, by which we mean the analytical process of establishing the kind and purpose of the edition, its implied community of users and what features best represent their various needs. The manuscripts themselves provide examples of several kinds of genetic development or reworking over time.
