Talk:The White Negro

The scholarly or critical edition has long been a staple in the upper-level, undergraduate classroom. It’s a tool that attempts to introduce a literary text and present it within a critical and theoretical framework. The critical edition offers a long introduction and overview of the literary text, the annotated text itself, and often supplementary critical essays, timelines, pertinent biographical information, and other situating apparatus. With the rise of the Digital humanities, the critical edition is poised to not only remain a way to introduce undergraduates to a text’s scholarly contexts, but could become the definitive hub for all scholarly research and conversation about the text. Unlike the paper edition, a critical digital edition could contain many layers of information presented by experts, places for amateur experts to contribute their readings, multimodal content, and spaces for continued, dynamic exchanges of interested communities. This presentation will outline some of the challenges facing the editors of the critical digital edition and show some examples on how such an endeavor could be approached using Mailer’s “The White Negro” as an example text. —Grlucas (talk) 09:15, 30 June 2019 (EDT)