Give us editors! Re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the humanities

"In Classical Studies, at least, the benefits of open access and content have, in the view of those most actively working with digital corpora as corpora (as opposed to giant virtual indices), outweighed the benefits of more recent but restricted editions. We have chosen to base our corpora upon the best public domain editions. Where later editions contain information that affects debate, members of the community can identify these passages and add their own annotations. If rights holders assume a more pragmatic posture, we can align new editions, even when we depend upon Greek and Latin text generated by OCR, with earlier curated, public domain editions...."