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Hybrid Edition

The hybrid edition goes far beyond simply presenting texts in identical print and pdf or e-book form. That approach treats the digital version as a convenient copy of the print edition. Instead, the edition has been fundamentally conceived from a digital standpoint, even as it retains a steadfast commitment to the importance of the print medium. Taken together, the two media form a comprehensive environment for the study of Hannah Arendt’s work, in which the totality of her texts can be extensively explored, used, and analyzed in various formats.

The texts of the print edition, constituted through careful philological study and editorial work and outfitted with critical commentary, will appear and function very much like traditional scholarly editions. Readers interested in Arendt’s work from within and also beyond the academy will rely on the book medium in the future as now. Even in the digital age, print editions are the most stable and lasting medium for text transmission; moreover, personal copies, with their annotations, marginalia, dog-eared pages, and associated ephemera, are indispensable research tools. Thus, the hybrid edition makes available in print form texts that ask to be read with pencil in hand, so to speak, including all published works authorized by Arendt, unpublished versions of the same works that differ significantly from the published versions, and texts that were never published in any version in Arendt’s lifetime. The print volumes contain detailed indices by subject and person, as well as philological, historical, and biographical commentaries (each in the language of the corresponding text) and extensive afterwords (in both English and German).

The print volumes, however, are not the basis for the digital edition; instead, the print volumes are only one way of presenting and accessing the comprehensive field of philological information about Arendt’s writings—e.g. deletions, overwritings, and insertions in her manuscripts and typescripts—that the editors have encoded in the digital transcription of the document. In the web portal, this information—which is essential for critical reading—is directly visible to users in the form of diplomatic transcriptions, and need not be laboriously deciphered from a critical apparatus, as is often the case in traditional historical-critical editions. 

The web portal, developed in parallel to the print versions, thus picks up where the print books leave off: In addition to all the texts from the print versions, extensively enriched with metadata, it offers facsimiles (to the extent available), diplomatic transcriptions and XML/TEI documents of each text, as well as text variants.(Texts with significant edits or reworkings are termed versions, while variantsrefers to texts that have been minimally shortened or changed only slightly.) 

The digital edition allows users to analyze different texts in parallel presentation on the screen and conduct full-text searches for concepts, names, and citations. A multilayered time-line contextualizes each work in a new complex form. The digital edition creates a single comprehensive bibliography, including marked up copies preserved in Arendt’s personal library at Bard College, that will allow readers to assess all works Arendt quoted or used for her writings.

All texts are made available according to current standards of quality assurance and handling of editions in the digital age as they have been formulated in the German-speaking world by, among others, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für gemanistische Editionen, the Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik, and ultimately by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in the context of formulating criteria for peer review of scholarly editions. Central to the recommendations are long-term accessibility of source files in repositories, use of established markup languages like TEI/XML, persistent referencing, and configuration with open interface formats (OAI). In addition, documentation of content (selection), editorial guidelines, and technical implementation will be continually made available, as well as indexinginformation on the description and cross-linking of content and digital objects in an intuitive form, allowing individual, user-driven access and output format.