‘Archive’ and ‘scholarly edition’ are not securely differentiated categories. As readers we inhabit the same textual field as the documents and texts we seek to define. To record is to read and analyse sufficiently for the archival purpose; to interpret, for the editorial purpose: i.e. to mount an argument about the archival materials directed at a readership. The archival impulse anticipates the editorial, and the editorial rests on the archival. They are not separate or objective categories. Their relationship may be figured as a horizontal slider running from archive on the left to edition on the right.

Every position on the slider involves interpretative judgement, but the archival impulse is more document-facing and the editorial is, relatively speaking, more audience-facing. Each depends upon or anticipates the need for its co-dependent Other. The archival impulse aims to satisfy the shared need for a reliable record of the documentary evidence; the editorial impulse to further interpret it for known or envisaged audiences by taking their anticipated needs into account.

The sliding scroll-bar model dispenses with recent anxiety about archives replacing editions.

Chapter 4 argues that calls for crowdsourcing digital scholarly editions have misconceived the nature of the scholarly edition and its changing relationship to its readers. The relationship is argued to be essential. A survey of post-war scholarly editions reveals a shifting understanding amongst editors of the needs and capacities of readers. However, an increasing tolerance for the reporting of variant readings has come at the cost of shrinking print runs (some figures are provided). The digital environment is argued to offer a solution by putting into operation a distinction between the archival and editorial functions of the scholarly edition. The latter should henceforth be understood as an argument directed at the reader about the archive. This conception is shown to open the way for editors to transgress those literary-historical and literary-critical domains where, because of the 100-year horizons of print editions, editors have traditionally been reluctant to tread.

From the 1980s a pincer movement on editorial prerogatives came into play. The post-structuralist movement gradually undermined the assumption that works required a single reading text based on final authorial intention. Texts were also revealed to have a social dimension, as the meanings of their versional, redesigned and reprinted forms are ‘realised’ by successive readerships. The inherited but rarely inspected work-concept was thrown into doubt.

Conscientious editors who nevertheless felt the need to intervene on behalf of a new readership seemed to be left with no ground to stand on.

This chapter argues that a failure to theorise the work-concept is at the root of the problem. It shows that we need a broader concept of textual agency and an emphasis on the role of the reader in the functioning of what may now be cast as the embodied or living work. The role of the reader applies also for the scholarly edition, which emerges as a form of argument, aimed at the reader, about the archival materials it deploys.

Other possible work-models are considered, especially those implied in the writings of Franco Moretti and Rita Felski, based on the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour.