Archiving, editing, and reading on the AustESE workbench: assembling and theorizing an ontology-based electronic scholarly edition of Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life

This essay presents a case study that considers the motivations and needs of a scholarly edition of Joseph Furphy's Australian novel Such is Life in conjunction with the requirements for the development of the Australian Electronic Scholarly Editing Workbench. The latter integrates a suite of eResearch tools to support the collaborative authoring and management of electronic scholarly editions. The discussion focuses on the theoretical and practical implications of building an electronic edition in such an environment and considers the ways in which the product of these activities begins to move beyond the model of the book. Central to the discussion is the idea of an ontology-based electronic edition, not as an end in itself, but as the ongoing activity of one or more human beings contributing to the creation and assembly of constituent parts with digital tools