Welcome

Editing Deliberately uses the manuscript of Henry David Thoreau's Walden to provide a step-by-step introduction to the practice of digital scholarly editing. It explains some of the fundamental concepts of this practice, explores some of its principal methods and common challenges, and offers some practical suggestions for editors embarking on new projects.

These pages are designed to assist digital humanists who are new themselves to digital scholarly editing or are looking to introduce students to it for the first time. We also hope that some of our examples from Thoreau's notoriously complicated manuscript — together with our exploration of the issues they raise for editorial practice — will prove interesting even to seasoned editors.

Finally, we hope that our attempt to approach digital scholarly editing through one of American literature's most important and beloved texts will intensify interest in and increase appreciation for that text itself. We believe that our orientation to the manuscript, where readers can see the evolution of Thoreau's thought in his own hand, will serve students and teachers less concerned with textual scholarship than with what Walden says and how its evolution illuminates writing as a process.

NB: THIS SITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION.