Whatever happened to electronic editing?

As early as 1989, Bernard Cerquiglini anticipated the marriage of new technology and the New Philology; and from the early 1990s onwards, scholars embarked on a series of ambitious electronic editing projects, exploiting the possibilities of the new technology to explore medieval and later textual traditions in unprecedented depth. Over the past five years, however, the sustainability of such projects has become a major problem, since their technological complexity and low impact have made them particularly vulnerable to current institutional, political, and financial pressures. The paper focuses on the response to these developments by three directors of major e-editing projects, Peter Robinson (Canterbury Tales Project, 1993-), Hoyt N. Duggan (Piers Plowman Electronic Archive,1994-), and Jerome J. McGann (The Rossetti Archive,1993–2008), tracing their changing attitude in recent years to electronic editing, and their growing anxiety about its future