Until recently,  most textual editors worked in disciplines that recorded the written record -- not only in manuscript and print form --  but in any text bearing object, including stone, metal, and wood. In the 1980s, D.F. McKenzie, in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts argued for a more embracive conception of text, to include any form of transmission, not simply of the written word, but of ideas, whatever form they may take. He thus defines text as any 'verbal, visual, oral, and numeric data in the form of maps, prints, and music, of archives of recorded sound, of films, videos, and any computer-stored information, everything in fact from epigraphy to the latest forms of discography.' (13) McKenzie was prescient in including the born digital: texts that originate on a computer which include not only machine readable text, but multimedia and code.

Thus textual editing in the 21st century includes not simply the forensics traditionally associated with textual editing of tracing a text over time back to the original version or sifting through an author's manuscripts to recreate the writing process, but uncovering the trail of correction and revision by examining the drives and discs of an author (see Matthew G. Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms).

After the Second World War, textual editors began to move to computers to model text, originally for text types such as concordances and indexes. But  increasingly, particularly after the advent of the World Wide Web, it is a medium that is surpassing print as a way to make available scholarly editions. The ways in which the text of these editions is marked or tagged underpins underlying theoretical perspectives embedded in the markup itself.

Further Reading

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2007.

D.F. McKenzie. bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. First published 1985.