The digital age has found its way to literary critics, but scholarly editors have not altered their primary objectives with the advancement of technology. The basic goals and method advance without changes as the former entails “preservation, access, dissemination, and analysis-interpretation” and the latter defers to formalization. Critical editors still investigate the textual variants of each work and negotiate the differences and similarities between them in an effort to ultimately establish an authentic copy. Also, scholars encounter obstacles gaining access to variants, or working through too many forms of a particular work. Among all these similarities, the striking and unrepresented difference that “Editing in a Digital Environment” unveils is the potential production of D.F. McKenzie's concept of a social text.

McKenzie hoped to shift textual editing from focusing solely on the linguistic elements of a work to include “the material character of the relevant witnesses” to the linguistic features. Although McKenzie's concept never materialized during his lifetime, the possibilities of digital media provide avenues for such a manifestation. Within digital representation, scholarly editors and readers find the incorporation of many textual forms in one location. They no longer need to face physical boundaries of location and size of each codex because editors can place textual material, historical background, pictures, and music (innumerable resources) within one project. However, the digital text is rife with new difficulties. Counterfeit texts, false claims of complete works, and restricted access to texts are a few of the inherent problems in the digital domain. Once working within a particular digital work, editors face the difficulties surrounding markup.

Textual theory stresses the importance of the adaptability of text, but changing forms doesn't provide the stability editors demand in an edition. Binary code represents plain text in a structured formation within a digital work, which provides the desired underlying stability. Markup, or a “tagged string of characters,” becomes the necessary agent to change the fixed textual form as it acts “as a conversion device between textual and interpretational variants. Far from stabilizing the text, the markup actually mobilizes it.” Functioning as a sort of diacritical sign, markup can shift the underlying text into the desired structure (as well as the hidden and apparent structural features) of subsequent editors of the text. Limiting the advantages of markup is the lack of a uniform model to instruct new editors how to use it. There are several initiatives and projects that attempt to stabilize markup language such as TEI and the Semantic Web project, but there has yet to be a rooted base for editors to follow. Markup's mobile nature lacks stability, but the editor should embrace the open nature of markup's application.

Instead of producing definite forms and layers to text, markup elicits “a highly reflexive act, a mapping of text back onto itself: as soon as a (marked) text is (re)marked, the metamarkings open themselves to indeterminacy.” Such self-reflexive acts allow digital forms of texts to function autopoietically, which would satisfy McKenzie's unfulfilled goals of a social text. The countless associations between texts, regardless if they are linguistic, photographic, musical, or another form of media, can work within a single digital edition. The Rossetti Archive displays some of the capabilities and effectiveness of the social text described above. Buzzetti and McGann built “a machine that organizes for complex study and analysis, for collation and critical comparison, the entire corpus of Rossetti's documentary materials, textual as well as pictoral.” Additionally, the vital self-reflexive functions of such a text can be tracked with ease through user logs. In turn, any author accessing the text can see the evolution of the material and its branched forms. The possibilities of a social text, which most effectively manipulates markup capabilities, have not quite been realized in its entirety through a digital text. However, the contributions of projects such as the Rossetti Archive show great promise for the scholarly editors to come.