ABSTRACT
In a densely speculative essay, Hans Walter Gabler has argued that scholarly editions born digital will be liberated from the tyranny of the material origins of the authorial text, and from the concomitant supposal that it is the editor's commission to replicate that text as faithfully as possible. The sociality of texts, then, may require an entirely new sociology of editorial curation. But beyond the problems presented by our own working practices, the texts to be edited may contain their own intrinsic resistances- resistances, in particular, to the totalising textual and editorial ambitions of the digital scholar. The choices an editor makes when first undertaking a digital edition of a printed book- choices of technology, choices of metadata, choices of creating, coding and preserving data, not to mention the more traditional skills of the scholar, are often hard enough when the editor is concerned solely with representing the printed word on the page.
