Digital Philology and Editing Texts

This chapter examines how digital technologies have reshaped both the theory and practice of scholarly editing within classical philology. It begins by outlining the conceptual foundations of digital scholarly editions, then traces the legacy of print-based editorial traditions in classics, before exploring the epistemological shift brought about by digital methods such as markup, structured data modeling, and transmedial publication. Drawing on case studies as well as established catalogs and evaluation frameworks, the chapter surveys current best practices and infrastructures for editing classical texts. It gives particular attention to digital workflows ranging from imaging and transcription to the representation of variant readings, computational collation, stemmatology, and annotation. It then outlines the main technologies—tools and infrastructures—of digital classical philology, addresses the challenges of sustainability, preservation, and scholarly credit, and concludes by advocating for a broader and deeper adoption of digital editing methods, especially for complex multi-witnessed traditions.