Peter M. W. Robinson What is a critical digital edition? Centuries of scholarship, and many hundreds of editions, have made us familiar with critical editions in print form. 1 There might then appear to be an easy answer to the question posed by the title of this paper: a critical edition in digital form is just a translation of a critical edition in print form. Of course, we might discuss at length just what is meant by translation, but in essence the print and digital editions would have the same substance, expressed in different media. In this paper, I propose that it is indeed true that there is a continuity between critical digital editions and printed critical editions. However, the continuity does not take a simple form, so that one could achieve a critical digital edition just by turning an existing printed edition into computer-readable files. Rather, I suggest that critical digital editions extend the paradigm of critical editing, in ways which demand a sharper sense of just what it is we do. I argue further that while the capacious freedoms of the digital medium might suggest that there is neither place nor need for “critical” editions in the new world, this perception is misplaced. Indeed, these very capacities mandate a critical attention to the tasks of evaluation and presentation even more than was the case for editors in the age of print. Critical editions and critical editors will be needed, and indeed may be valued as they were not in the print age. One ought to begin with a firm definition of a printed critical edition. Here is our first difficulty: there is now no straight-forward consensus about just what is a critical edition in print form. 2 Forty years ago, it might have been possible to point at a single book and say: that is what a critical edition is and what it ought to be. An American might have taken one of the centenary Hawthorne volumes as an example; an Englishman, one of the Oxford Classical Texts series; a German, one of the Hölderlin 1 A very early form of this paper was presented to the inaugural ESTS colloquium in Leicester in November 2000, under the title “So you think an electronic edition will solve all your problems”. Discussions at that colloquium, and especially the good fortune of being able to read the other contributions to this volume, reshaped that paper into this. 2 See, as just a few of the many discussions around this subject, the essays collected in David Greetham Scholarly Editing (New York: Modern Language Association, 1995) and Greetham’s own Theories of the Text (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999); the writings of Jerome McGann (for example, “What is Critical Editing?” Text 5 (1991), 15-29); and of Peter Shillingsburg in, for example, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice (Athens/ London: University of Georgia Press, 1986; second edition, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1996).