The Beginning, The Middle, and The End: New Tools for the Scholarly Edition

This article discusses a set of prototypes currently being designed and created by the Interface Design team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. These prototypes attempt to supplement the user experience in reading digital scholarly editions, by supporting a set of tasks that are straightforward in a digital environment but in a print edition would be sufficiently more difficult as to be prohibitive. We therefore offer these experimental prototypes as a collection of new affordances for the scholarly edition, although they may reasonably be extended, with some variation, to other kinds of digital text.