ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a number of different forms an electronic edition may take, and suggests that such editions can span a broadly defined field ranging from the critical scholarly edition. A large amount of work at an academic level is performed on relatively small amounts of data, to the large-scale, more or less automated, digitization of considerable amounts of data. It claims that, since tools are now available that make it possible for users to exploit electronic data in a variety of ways, straightforward digitization that makes data available quickly is preferable to a critical edition which is never finished, even if less scholarly value is added. In a traditional critical edition the individual scholar starts out with a set of manuscripts and works towards an end result, either a printed or an electronic edition intended as a finished product.
