The FALMER Project: Toward an Electronic Critical Edition

What will be the critical editions in the electronic era? Hubert de Phalèse, a research center in La Sorbonne-Nouvelle University (Paris III), in accordance with its pragmatic approach to literary computing problems, decided to launch this debate by putting on line a critical edition of the complete works of Lautréamont / Isidore Ducasse (http://www.cavi.univ-paris3.fr/phalese/hubert1.htm). This edition is an integral hypertext (in which nearly every word of the text is linked with a comment), which gathers all that one usually finds in the critical editions, but on a scale which does not have equivalents on paper: variants, philological, literary and encyclopedic comments, biography, bibliography, iconography, index, etc.

This prototype poses, concretely, a certain number of problems, on several levels:

Technical: Which interface is to be used? The purely automatic search engines (including the uses of Java and other script languages) appeared unsuited and a new device of computer-assisted indexing was developed. It makes it possible to provide to the user a lemmatized index and, especially, lexical cards which can be enriched at will. The current solution of setting on line presents some inconveniences but it has the advantage of proposing to the greatest number of users the consultation of the edition and of inviting them to take part in it.

Contents: The new support is, virtually, infinite. What is a critical edition to contain now that we are not concerned any more with its volume? All the versions of the text, for example, can now be proposed with the reading. But does one have to publish the intertexts, contemporary works, criticism, etc? How can the interconnection, in network, of several resources enrich a critical edition? Under which scientific and legal conditions?

Validation: Can this type of edition be regarded as more reliable than the paper editions? According to which protocols will such editions be judged? One of the risks is the apparition of a great quantity of work without scientific guarantee. How will the possibilities of collective work and permanent updating will modify our design of what a philological work should be?

Publication: Who will deal with the building and the diffusion expenses of such electronic products? Will the redistribution of the budget headings in this type of edition lead the academics to transform themselves into diffusers or will the traditional editors change their practice? In addition, new prospects open with the critical edition, which it will be necessary to evaluate and explore to know the real potentialities of them.

Work in group: Data processing and the Internet support the participation of a growing number of speakers around an intellectual work. Which will be the roles of each one (project director, data processing specialists, humanists, students, active readers, etc.)? The concepts even of authors and readers will not have any more the same direction.

Real time: The possibility of permanent update offered by an Internet site makes it possible to revalue the traditional concepts. It is not indeed essential any more to put on line a completely completed work, and the noted errors can be immediately corrected. In addition, this type of edition makes it possible to account for the topicality of research in the field, which connects it with a review (of which the periodicity is much higher besides than for any scientific review).

Interactivity: The possibility of putting in contact creators and users of electronic publishing, by means of the electronic mail, also connects this type of edition to a permanent conference. It is possible, in the long term, that scientific communities (specialists in an author, for example) gather around great electronic projects, that they would make live by publishing the results of their work there.

Cost: The very low cost of setting on line such an edition (I except the working time of researcher)s makes it possible at the same time to consider some undertakings in the face of of which the traditional editors move back (very large corpus, work of interest only for few specialists) but also to allow researchers to publish under some good working conditions works of weak size or that don't fit in the framework of current university editions.

Multi-media: What can be the contribution of multi-media to a scientific work like a critical edition? All in this field remains to be invented, because the traditional edition accustomed us to purely textual tools, primarily for reasons of cost. The sound and visual illustrations will bring to the literary text a very interesting dimension (publication of manuscripts, interpretations, iconographic documents, contemporary pieces of music, etc), from the teaching point of view as in the research field, but it is necessary to be wary of the easy effects which accustomed us, the general public, to electronic publishing. It is all the more urgent to answer these questions that the share of electronic documentation in literary studies would have, as in the other documentary fields, to increase until gradually replacing the traditional supports. Consequently, the survival of the texts and their formal characteristics will be closely related to the devices which will ensure their transmission, their conservation and their reading.