Digital Editing

Working on a revamp of the MA in Digital Humanities at King's I have started to think about creating a new module where I can teach something I care about and I am good at: Digital Editing.

I spent a bit of time browsing Lisa Spiro's Zotero Group (terrific resource, if you ask me!) and I have realised that none of the syllabi listed there speak about digital editing, there are a lot of them that cover XML and the TEI, but none explicitly address the issue of editing digitally, which is a bit weird, considering the number of articles and papers at conferences that discuss it. I think the reason is that it is considered a topic that is a bit too advanced for an MA programme (which is a bit weird as I studied editing during my BA back in Italy... )

The other possibility is that it might be considered too connected to a "traditional" humanities discipline more than to DH, namely literature (English, German, Italian...) or History, or Philosophy, or... which is true in a sense, but editing is also a trans-disciplinary methodology. When it comes to digital, even more so. There are in fact a set of competencies and methods that can be applied across the board, namely:

• data modelling
• text encoding
• text analysis
• imaging
• web design

All of which, of course, in addition to the traditional competencies that are required to do such a job, such us:

• understanding of what a primary source is and how it works
• understanding of the text one has to edit
• understanding of the circumstance in which the text was produces
• understanding of which circumstances the text has circulated and has arrived to us
• the use of such understandings in the act of editing

Is there here a scope for an interdisciplinary module for our MA in Digital Humanities? This is  what I'm trying to find out. Any suggestion?