Reflecting the changes that have occurred in the digital world, the anthology as a genre has experienced significant changes. In the case study of the Women Writers Project (WWP), these changes in electronic editing and digital textuality will be brought to the fore. The WWP has in turn been called an archive, an edition, and an anthology, and the case study will establish how it fulfills all three definitions.

One must recall the anthology's purpose in the print realm: to gather together a material with an aspect in common. Because print anthologies face the limitations of sheer volume, the purpose of the anthologies was to present the essential necessary to understand the aspect in common. The digital anthology can allow the reader to search through the digitized texts and to discover a common aspect that suits the reader's scholarship.

The concept of readerly discovery makes the creators of digital anthologies hesitant to edit the digital collection or to emphasize a certain scholarly agenda within the collection. This hesitation led to a policy of documenting sources, allowing the reader to find the sources in print. Simultaneously, a theory emerged that proposed the digital collection could act as a commentary on the composition of printed anthologies. Both approaches converged on one conclusion: the reader needs to be active and participate in the selection of their own texts, for their own purposes, and should have as much access as possible.

In the digital realm, this meant that source texts needed to be reproduced exactly, and can retain a unique existence in the digital world rather than being altered in the editing process. Encoding allows many text options for the reader. While encoding could interfere with the digitized text representation; nevertheless, there are new possibilities presented to the reader.

Combining these theories creates the tendency to view a digital anthology like an archive, defined as a body of source material upon which scholarship can be based. The physical details of the original are important, and the reader should have access to the physical sequencing and appearance of the page image.

Hence, the expectations of a digital collection are not that much different from a print edition, anthology or archive, since these three definitions undergo a similar activity. The difference between these three works is the reference point they take from the print world, the emphasis with which they cue the reader. In this discussion, a digital anthology functions as a collection of texts assembled for the purpose of providing easy access to materials that are either unavailable in other forms or that gain value from being collected together.

The case study which illustrates this history and thought is the Women Writer's Project. The case study plans to detail the choices and methods the WWP uses in creating the online archive.

The WWP emphasizes a detailed transcription, allowing the primary sources to be reproduced for the reader; the goal being that all original linguistic detail and documentary contents are reproduced from the original. Supplementary texts are then encoded to the diplomatic transcription. Such an approach owes its debt to Jerome McGann. The reader can also search within the collection to find genre and textual commonalities.

Another goal is to capture the source data, therefore the representation of the text preserves the important details of the original format. What is not reproduced from the original are graphic features. Such an approach places the emphasis on the textual in the transcription.

The WWP fits into the methods of other digital anthologies by providing searchable text and a page image when possible. In addition, the WWP provides the reader with its methodology of its editorial and transcriptional methods.

In transcription, the WWP gives credence to a legible and complete first edition or one published in the author's lifetime. Proofreading is performed both with markup and without, and tools have been developed to maintain accuracy within a certain edition. Consistency is difficult to maintain, and the WWP relies on their encoders and on built-in checks to maintain consistency.

The WWP can serve as an example to other digital anthologies, providing the reader with as close a transcription of the original as possible without editorial interference. With developments in technology, individual editions can be linked to digital collections, representing both the smallest and largest view of the digital world at once.