primary and expository material in the form of translations, editorial notes and contextual primary sources, along with a general introduction to the overall Newton Project (of which this sentence is a part). The contextual materials on the Newton Project rival or surpass those on any other scholarly digital site in terms of scale, and include detailed and explicit descriptions of editorial policy in areas such as transcription and annotation; a comprehensive presentation of all the biographical materials written about Newton in manuscript and printed form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Newton-related personal papers of Keynes; a large amount of textual material relating to the popularisation of Newtonianism in the eighteenth century; a series of podcasted interviews about Newton and his intellectual environs conducted in 2009-11; interpretive essays on Newton’s political and religious writings; and a full description of Newton’s library. With such a vast range of materials available for the reader or researcher, the Newton Project is clearly more than a digital edition. For that reason, it might be termed a digital research environment, though again, it would be unwise to attempt to define such an entity too precisely.

Although there is a substantial amount of contextual material on the Newton Project site, the scale of the archive also makes conventional editing extremely difficult. In addition to thousands of passages extracted from primary sources, there are hundreds of stand-alone chapters whose relationship both to each other, and to some larger ‘work’ of which they must have been a part, is still unknown. Indeed, since similarly titled chapters were promiscuously reproduced in different projects, it is hard to see what constitutes a work in these circumstances, and there is nothing close to a privileged text that could exist as a reasonable ‘copy text’.Increasing scholarly attention has recently been focussed on ways of classifying different sorts of ‘digital’ output. One concern of these discussions has been the question of whether digital editing takes a different form, or has different goals from conventional editing. The response to this issue can depend on how generally one conceives of the task of editing. If it is supposed to concern the production of some sort of introductory or contextual information about the document and the text, then obviously the goals of print and digital editing are similar. However, there are special, distinctive aspects of editions that are hosted online (as opposed to being on CD-ROMs), and in particular, of datasets whose core content is either born-digital text or non-textual data (such as film or music). These features concern, inter alia, the manner in which the information is acquired, stored and displayed, the size and complexity of the dataset in question, the nature of the IP agreements required to publish texts in perpetuity, and the potential audiences for the output. It is of course, a peculiar quality of digital text that it can function both as an end-in-itself, i.e., act as a linear narrative that can be read as one would read a print narrative, and also as a searchable dataset.[4] The last point is central to understanding the relationship between the logic of production and the needs of the audience, since scholarly users of the site have invariably preferred that the Newton Project concentrate its energies on the release of searchable text. It should not be forgotten that almost none of the religious materials the Newton Project has released since the start of 2008 has previously been seen by more than handful of scholars.[

Recent literature points to a distinctions between a digital ‘edition’, a digital ‘archive’, and a digital ‘research environment’, though there is substantial disagreement over what these terms denote, and whether they can beThe Newton Project as a Scholarly Editi

Apart from the transcriptions of the various editions of Principia and Opticks, all the documents authored by Newton published in the current REF cycle have been produced from manuscript sources. The rendition in a diplomatic/normalized form of the heavily overwritten religious texts and the complex scientific and mathematical works have forced the Project to push to the limits the potential of the frameworks provided by the latest instantiation of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines ( TEI-P5) and MathML. At the top of each text researchers can now see the date and process of online publication of each document (its ‘revision history’), and advanced users can now see the schema and XML coding that undergird the digital document. Where possible, documents have contextual material in the form of catalogue details, translations into English, and links to images of original documents. A general introduction to the documents is provided in the following section. The texts are freely available to the general public, a feature that offers significant benefits in terms of outreach and the potential for future crowdsourcing

The digital medium is particularly appropriate for hosting the writings of a man who evinced what can only be described as a visceral hatred for print culture. Although his interest and expertise in both church history and prophecy was known to many people, no print edition of any of his non-scientific writings, authorized or otherwise by Newton, appeared in his lifetime (though he did show selected works to acolytes). His research remained constantly work-in-progress and there was no terminus to his various projects in the form of truly ‘final’ treatise (this of course applies equally to his great printed works). An evolving and expanding digital site is eminently suitable for publishing these private researches, for showing them to their full extent, and for representing the detailed and dynamic process of his thought.[3]primary and expository material in the form of translations, editorial notes and contextual primary sources, along with a general introduction to the overall Newton Project (of which this sentence is a part). The contextual materials on the Newton Project rival or surpass those on any other scholarly digital site in terms of scale, and include detailed and explicit descriptions of editorial policy in areas such as transcription and annotation; a comprehensive presentation of all the biographical materials written about Newton in manuscript and printed form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Newton-related personal papers of Keynes; a large amount of textual material relating to the popularisation of Newtonianism in the eighteenth century; a series of podcasted interviews about Newton and his intellectual environs conducted in 2009-11; interpretive essays on Newton’s political and religious writings; and a full description of Newton’s library. With such a vast range of materials available for the reader or researcher, the Newton Project is clearly more than a digital edition. For that reason, it might be termed a digital research environment, though again, it would be unwise to attempt to define such an entity too precisel

Although there is a substantial amount of contextual material on the Newton Project site, the scale of the archive also makes conventional editing extremely difficult. In addition to thousands of passages extracted from primary sources, there are hundreds of stand-alone chapters whose relationship both to each other, and to some larger ‘work’ of which they must have been a part, is still unknown. Indeed, since similarly titled chapters were promiscuously reproduced in different projects, it is hard to see what constitutes a work in these circumstances, and there is nothing close to a privileged text that could exist as a reasonable ‘copy text’.Increasing scholarly attention has recently been focussed on ways of classifying different sorts of ‘digital’ output. One concern of these discussions has been the question of whether digital editing takes a different form, or has different goals from conventional editing. The response to this issue can depend on how generally one conceives of the task of editing. If it is supposed to concern the production of some sort of introductory or contextual information about the document and the text, then obviously the goals of print and digital editing are similar. However, there are special, distinctive aspects of editions that are hosted online (as opposed to being on CD-ROMs), and in particular, of datasets whose core content is either born-digital text or non-textual data (such as film or music). These features concern, inter alia, the manner in which the information is acquired, stored and displayed, the size and complexity of the dataset in question, the nature of the IP agreements required to publish texts in perpetuity, and the potential audiences for the output. It is of course, a peculiar quality of digital text that it can function both as an end-in-itself, i.e., act as a linear narrative that can be read as one would read a print narrative, and also as a searchable dataset.[4] The last point is central to understanding the relationship between the logic of production and the needs of the audience, since scholarly users of the site have invariably preferred that the Newton Project concentrate its energies on the release of searchable text. It should not be forgotten that almost none of the religious materials the Newton Project has released since the start of 2008 has previously been seen by more than handful of scholars.[

Recent literature points to a distinctions between a digital ‘edition’, a digital ‘archive’, and a digital ‘research environment’, though there is substantial disagreement over what these terms denote, and whether they can be5]y..on5]’.3].on5]be5]’.