Digital editing: the SHA

In her article, "A deep history of electronic textuality," Whitney Trettien examines print-on-demand (POD) digital copies of historical works, arguing that the boundary between content and form in these artifacts is quite clear. When older books are scanned with an OCR program producing searchable electronic texts, such files are pure content. When older books are scanned to PDF format, the resultant files are pure form and their "textuality [is] obscured through the process of digitization". She observes that in many cases, the textual contents of these books do not match the digital cover or container in which they are envisioned, yet such digital objects create a new kind of digital materiality, making it available to historians for analysis. While most such POD books are not the products of scholarly editing campaigns -- they are clearly created for quick sale to the general public -- still they do reveal some interesting historical 'truths'.  

Searching for POD copies of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae offers some interesting examples. The SHA is the collected biographies of the Roman Emperors from the second to the third centuries. As implied by the title, the biographies were supposedly written by six different authors or "scriptores". The only Latin scholarly edition with English translation was edited by David Magie in 1921-22 and comprises three volumes in the Loeb Classical Library series. The example on the left was found on Amazon.ca and retails for $138.71. The cover offers no information about the editor or the date of publication, but includes a reference to the New York Public Library in the bottom left-hand corner. Thus, the source of the text is likely the scanned edition from the NYPL available for free on the Internet Archive. This is one expensive edition.

The copy on the right is also found on Amazon.ca. A photograph of a bust of a Roman emperor appears on the cover. Although unidentified, the features are clearly those of Octavius (d. 14 CE), who reigned more than a century before any of the emperors whose biographies are included in the SHA. Yet, the epithet 'Augusta' in the title derives from the Octavius's imperial name, Caesar Augustus, which he assumed after becoming the first emperor of Rome. Significantly, the SHA is usually said to have been modeled on Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars, which begins with the biography of Octavius himself. Indeed, most early printed editions of the SHA include both texts. Thus, the image is more appropriate than it first seems.

The example on the left is from the Internet Archive. Magie's name does not appear on the cover. Instead, credit is given to Susan Baillou. In the preface, Magie thanks those who assisted him in completing the edition. Ainsworth O'Brien-Moore assisted with the translation of the lives from Antoninus Pius (d. 161 CE) to Pescennius Niger (d. 194 CE) and Ballou supplied the Latin text from Commodus (d. 192 CE) on. Ballou was an expert on the SHA, having studied its textual transmission. While her name likely appears due to computer-generated error, she probably should have been given formal credit, along with Ainsworth. To my knowledge no one has every studied how these scholars shaped this particular edition. This anomaly raises interesting questions about editorial sociability and the editor as author. 


Although these digital books are only digitized copies of printed editions, it is eerie how the digital containers uneasily betray the textual, historical and social contents or truths sealed within. Best, Laura