Old Medieval texts are the perfect playground for electronic editing. These texts are often beautiful in appearance and thus work well when they can be digitally presented. Copyright is not an issue in regards to the content of the texts, so numerous digital projects are being pursued to make these texts and add extensive editorial commentary. The computer has offered a new domain for textual editing of medieval texts that has been going on for centuries. Print editions have largely been based on a close reading of a single text which sometimes included a facsimile alongside the text, whereas digital projects can include many other aspects of study.

The Canterbury Tales Project was born in the early 1990s. It is dealing with a large body of manuscripts and there is no official version or document. In the 1920s John Manly and Edith Rickert attempted to collate all known versions of the manuscripts but was unable to provide a definitive historical edition. As a result of the advent of computers, the task Many and Richert’s set for themselves is a more probable one. However, the majority of editions existing today simply present the text itself.

The Canterbury Tales Project began with the idea of presenting an account of the text that combines a textual commentary combined with other information scholars would find useful. The team originally decided on doing a full transcription based on the numerous manuscripts and then using a computer to compare them and discern the differences, beginning the the Wife of Bath's prologue. They began the project after the birth of Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) which enabled the project to make transcriptions in electronic form for easier comparison. The transcription itself immediately posed problems for the team, however. Each letter had to be identified and coded into the document using a code per letter that the computer would recognize. Given the nature of the source, however, this proved much more difficult than first imagined. The transcribers were working with manuscripts, each written by a different scribe with a different handwriting. They concluded that letter variation was not a sure way to prove which scribe had written what document since they often changed inside a single manuscript. The team had to decide which letter variations to preserve (the long s, for example, was drawn in numerous ways in each manuscript) and which to ignore as unimportant to the largely goal of the project of textual differences. In the end, the slight variations of the letters were less important than the spelling and the words themselves — something the transcribers sought to preserve. They also strove to retain varying letter heights of initial capital letters and the like, in case they might prove useful to another editor one day in the future.

Eventually the question of what to publish emerged. In 1996 the team published their first “document” — the Wife of Bath's prologue on CD—ROM. Included on the disks were all transcriptions the team had made, electronic images of the original manuscripts, a database of words and spellings the team had kept track of for the end users benefit, and various other descriptive material potentially useful to the user. This was not where the team wished to end the project, however. One of the goals of the Tales project was to attempt to understand why the texts differed, not just where. At least partially the result of numerous hand copying by the scribes is obvious, but the team wished to do more than that. With the help of Robert O’Hara and the idea of DNA sequencing the team was able to produce a scientific “tree” to map the variations in the Tales manuscripts. This is a useful tool in examining where an original word may have been changed and thus allow the editor to look further into the matter and determine what that original word might have been, thus getting closer to an “original” version of any given Canterbury Tale.

The goals of the Tales project shifted over time. As stated in the editors’ introduction to the second publication on CD—ROM, The General Prologue, “One might summarize the shift in our thinking the last two years, underlying the differences between the two CD—ROMs, as follows: the aim of The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD—ROM was to help editors edit; our aim now is to help readers read.” This shift in aims was largely the result of the advancing technology to merge the texts together in a more coherent way. The most recent publication, The Miller's Tale on CD-ROM, strives to do exactly the same thing.

Despite the fact that no author is around to complain about copyright issues when working with Medieval documents, copyright can still be a large issue for finished projects such as The Canterbury Tales. Numerous organizations, people, and schools put resources and money into such a project and it can be challenging when it comes time to publish. An open transcription policy is an excellent way to avoid these copyright issues when dealing with a project of this magnitude. The creators of the project still retain legal rights over publication, but included in the open transcription policy is the understanding with other parties involved that the final product can be published and altered at the creators discretion.

Numerous digital editing projects dealing with old medieval texts have been done and are currently being worked on around the globe. A digital medium does seem vastly appropriate to these classic ancient texts.