Book Reviews

RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage reviews books, reports, new periodicals, databases, websites, blogs, and other electronic resources, as well as exhibition, book, and auction catalogs pertaining directly and indirectly to the fields of rare book librarianship, manuscripts curatorship, archives management, and special collections administration. Publishers, librarians, and archivists are asked to send appropriate publications for review or notice to the Reviews Editor.

Matt Cohen, Kenneth M. Price, and Caterina Bernardini, eds. Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025. Hardcover/Paperback/eBook, 312p. $30.00/$30.00/$120.00. (ISBN: 9781517916671/9781517916688/9781452972534).

This collection brings together essays that consider not only what digital editions have been, but also what they might become in this moment of rapid technological and social change. Contributors offer both theory and case studies. The editors organize the contributions into two parts. The first traces the history of textual scholarship as a discipline, while the second considers how the practices of scholarly editing and digital collection building intersect. Emerging from a symposium, the volume is less a single unified argument than a deliberately plural conversation, one that places pressure on inherited assumptions about the relationship between scholarly work and its publics. As the editors note, this moment demands a “rethinking of both the design and the public role” of scholarly editions (ix).

The book situates itself squarely within several ongoing conversations in textual scholarship and adjacent fields. It responds to the maturation of digital scholarly editing as a practice, one now shaped by decades of infrastructural development and by the institutionalization of digital projects within academia. At the same time, it engages with the critical turn in archival studies, feminist and antiracist scholarship, and computational literary studies. Contributors repeatedly emphasize that digital editing can no longer be understood as a neutral technical activity: it is embedded in questions of power and representation, including who gets edited, who gets access, who benefits from such work, and who is harmed. The volume also participates in a broader reorientation toward community-centered scholarly editions, echoing developments in library and archival practice.

Several essays stand out for their conceptual clarity and practical implications. Julia Flanders’s discussion of the social edition, for instance, provides a compelling framework for rethinking editorial work as a network of relationships rather than a bounded product. By foregrounding “multiple, negotiated agencies” and comparing epistemological, affective, and social virtues, Flanders reorients the edition toward shared authority and community engagement (15). This essay serves as a conceptual anchor for the collection, articulating many concerns that recur elsewhere in the collection.

One of the most practically valuable contributions in the volume is K.J. Rawson’s essay on digital archival ethics, which offers a framework that practitioners in libraries and archives could readily adapt into local policy and procedure. Rawson translates ethical commitments into a series of guiding questions that can be applied at multiple stages of project development, from selection and description to access and dissemination. By centering the people represented in collections alongside users, this contribution prompts practitioners to consider potential downstream harms before materials are made publicly available. Particularly useful is the emphasis on slowing down decision-making through structured reflection, e.g., asking who benefits from access, who bears its risks, and whether certain materials should be restricted or mediated. The essay characterizes access not as an unquestioned good but as a responsibility requiring ongoing evaluation. To that end, the piece models policy and procedure that aim to reduce the risk of harm while still supporting meaningful access.

Essays on the Colored Conventions Project and Indigenous publishing also emphasize approaches driven by the needs of specific communities, while pieces on the long life of the Whitman Archive highlight the enduring challenges of sustainability and institutional support. Taken together, these essays demonstrate the field’s willingness to engage with difficult questions about its own practices.

The diversity of approaches and topics sometimes comes at the expense of coherence. Readers seeking a vision of one singular future of digital scholarly editing will find instead a set of loosely connected perspectives. This is intentional, however. The editors ask readers to consider multiple potential futures that could compete or co-exist. In addition, while many essays gesture toward practical implementation, the collection overall remains more conceptual than procedural. The day-to-day realities of project management, funding constraints, and institutional barriers are mentioned, but meeting these challenges is not the focus of the collection. The introduction notes that digital projects are often “expensive to produce” yet fragile and difficult to sustain (xxiii). This tension might have been more fully developed across the volume by attending even more to issues of labor.

In addition to paperback, hardback, and ebook formats, the collection is also available online as an open access edition at manifold.umn.edu. The Manifold edition includes four response essays that provide a fitting coda to the collection, collectively synthesizing and sharpening its central concerns. Each respondent takes up a different facet of the volume—whether questions of power, description, disciplinary boundaries, or institutional precarity—but all underscore the extent to which digital scholarly editing is entangled with broader social, political, and infrastructural conditions. Of these, Michelle Caswell’s contribution is especially powerful in its clarity and urgency. By outlining questions for project teams to ask about power, positionality, and community, Caswell challenges the field to move beyond making abstract commitments to ethical stewardship and toward actually practicing a politics of care. Through projects featured in the collection, like the Digital Transgender Archive and the Colored Conventions Project, Caswell illustrates how such a politics can be operationalized: performing honest power analysis, interrogating the project team’s positionality with respect to the digital project’s subjects and users, and shaping project goals and methods to meet the needs of specific communities.

Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing is an important and timely contribution to the field. It will be particularly valuable to scholars and practitioners working in both textual scholarship and digital collections, especially to those interested in the ethical and political dimensions of such work. Different essays would be well-suited to different graduate courses in literary studies, public humanities, and library and archival practice. The collection succeeds not by offering definitive answers but by opening a space for critical reflection. It invites readers to reconsider what editing is and whom it serves, emphasizing that digital scholarly editing is not simply a technical endeavor, but is also a form of world-building work. — Chelcie Juliet Rowell, Harvard Library (CC BY [https://creativecommons.orq/licenses/by/4.0])