ABSTRACT
The wide availability and relatively low cost of the representation of sources in a digital environment is dramatically influencing editorial practice, not least in offering the possibility of reproducing and verifying the scholarly work done on the text, and effectively overruling the compactness of the critical apparatus. Textual editions based on digital encoding can, for instance, be easily presented on a website in different layout formats, some of them even offering to users the possibility of building their own visualization of the text. Genetic criticism can discover great advantages in new information technologies, not only because the multiple layout of the transcribed text and the possibility of connecting it to facsimile representations of the source manuscript can cater for diversified user needs, but because the temporal dimension can be better represented in digital than in print format.
