Gaming the Edition: Play, Collaboration, and Shared Tacit Knowledge in the Editorial Process

In response to this challenge, members of INKE (inke.ca)’s Modelling & Prototyping team are developing ways to “game” digital scholarly editions, with an emphasis on helping new editors learn more about the processes of scholarly editing. The team’s research is motivated by the assumption that scholarly editors can and often do act as game players, whose conditions of possibility afford a small degree of flexibility. Working within these conditions allows both editors and game players to acutely attend to the parameters, procedures, and workarounds that shape decision-­‐making. Gaming the edition thus involves foregrounding the overlaps between gaming and editing, and then—in the case of INKE’s working model—constructing an environment where new editors develop competencies through play, collaboration, and shared tacit knowledge (i.e., learning by doing).

This paper will not only unpack the INKE team’s framework for play, collaboration, and shared tacit knowledge in digital editing environments; it will also deliver its model for gaming the edition (including schematic diagrams). Among other game-­‐like features, the model underscores the importance of challenge, reward, procedural rhetoric, and non-­‐linear, dynamic narratives in the future of scholarly editing. Although the team has not yet built the prototype, we will show audiences why it is needed now.