ABSTRACT
This chapter emerges from the recent debates of editorial theory and, on the practical level, from a project for producing electronic scholarly editions. It reflects on the nature of text, explores the implications for text encoding, and outlines a methodology within which text encoding may be able to respond satisfactorily to the theoretically enunciated problems. Humanities researchers comment most often upon existing texts, whether literary, documentary, filmic, biblical, legal or musical. The acknowledged need for an agreed standard of text encoding has also brought its problems for the study of humanities e-texts. The reader, with book in hand, will find that its material logic has been extended most usefully. The foot-of-page textual apparatus will be serving as an epitome of the whole production process. The precisions required by computer encoding, together with the passing of postmodern theory, have set the conditions and created the requirement for us to sort out more of what text means and how it functions.
