The ‘Beta Dilemma’ – A Review of the Faust Edition

Abstract

The Faust Edition is a historical-critical edition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808/1832). Considered to be one of the most important works of German literature, it took until 2009 before a DFG-funded project started to produce a modern scholarly edition with the purpose of tracing the genesis of the two-part play. The edition is supported by the Freies Deutsches Hochstift (Frankfurter Goethe-Haus), the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the University of Würzburg; the main editors are Prof. Dr. Anne Bohnenkamp, Dr. Silke Henke und Prof. Dr. Fotis Jannidis. In 2016, a first beta version of the edition went online. The version under review here is the beta version 2, released on 17 October 2016, although beta version 3 has by now been published as well (on 28 August 2017). This conundrum befits the main theme of the review which focuses on the challenges posed by the perpetual "beta status" of digital editions and the consequences this yields in the context of academia.

Keywords

• 18th century
• 19th century
• beta status
• data visualization
• genesis
• german philology
• parallel encoding
• tei
• work in progress