The Devonshire Manuscript/A Note on this Edition

The social edition is a work that brings communities together to engage in conversation around a text formed and reformed through an ongoing, iterative, public editorial process. Ray Siemens has called for scholars “to extend our understanding of the scholarly edition in light of new models of edition production that embrace social networking and its commensurate tools… [to develop] the social edition as an extension of the traditions in which it is situated and which it has the potential to inform productively”. Bringing practice to theory, we have modeled the social edition, working as a team to extend scholarly best practice and open-access methodology to collaborative technologically mediated scholarly editing in Web 2.0 environments. We have chosen to build our edition in Wikibooks, alongside (and with help from) the dedicated Wikibooks community. Our goal, through community engagement via Wikibooks, Twitter, blogs, and Drupal-based social media space, is to use existing social media tools to change the role of the scholarly editor from the sole authority on the text to a facilitator who brings traditional and citizen scholars into collaboration through ongoing editorial conversation.