Digitizing the Pyrates: Making a Digital Critical Edition of Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates (1724-1726)

Critical editing in a digital environment has changed how bibliographic practices are employed. This thesis investigates how digital critical editing impacts eighteenth-century literary studies. The way scholars examine questions of author attribution and employ bibliography practices has changed with the advent of digital tools. Since the mid nineteen-nineties, digital editing has taken on various forms, from hypermedia archives to crowdsourced projects. A critical apparatus that provides a high-level of interactivity to elucidate the intricacies of a text over its production in a given time is often overlooked in these projects. By producing a digital edition that compares the first four editions of A General History of the Pyrates (1724-26) using the Versioning Machine V.4.0 and conducting a user experience survey regarding the edition’s functionality (both are at http://ingridreiche.com/Resume/Thesis.html), the goal of this project has been to show how eighteenth-century print culture was a highly collaborative space where authorship was unstable.