Lee Patterson notes in regards to the Piers Plowman project edited by Kane and Donaldson that criticism of the project would be ineffective. He concludes that the only way such criticism would be “‘effective would be if [it] were part of a sustained effort to provide a contrary hypothesis’ (69)” in the form of another edition. Patterson’s belief arises from the fact that the Kane-Donaldson edition is comprehensive in nature. What follows will be a discussion first of why another authoritative text would be the only text to replace the “fully realized” Kate-Donaldson edition,as well as a discussion of theoretical projects especially those dealing with electronic textuality.

First, a project like the Piers Plowman project asks scholars to “imagine what they know or think they know.” Because the idea of a definitive edition has fallen out of favor because of its perceived impossibility, the Kane-Donaldson theoretical (skeptical) view of the critical edition as a means for reporting “‘our given historical knowledge’” has gained support. Related to Randy McLeod’s idea of “unediting,” creating archives of multiple replicas of a text remains in the realm of the theoretical because of the information that can be gained from demonstrating the relationships between documents. This critical view is evident in Franklin’s work with Emily Dickinson’s poetry as both text and layout, even though it may have been unintentional.

These projects are suitable for digital technology because of the resources available to capture facsimiles and documentation. Electronic hypertextuality can demonstrate documentation and searchability that leads to “critical reflexiveness,” which in turn can be used to show the theoretical nature of these projects. Besides the searchable archives, electronic projects also allow for “a reflexive system capable of self-study.” The Rossetti Archive, which began in 1993, attempts to bring together both documentary and critical editing. Electronic tools, like those used in the Rossetti Archive project, aid in studying these critical viewpoints, which shifts it to a theoretical level— imagining what we don’t know. This conundrum of trying to know what we are imagining we don’t know is evident in the Rossetti Archive project undertaking.

For the Archive, two understandings were at work: it can “build the history of its own construction into itself . . . [and] it can expose those historicalities to each other at various scales and levels.” Those working on the project believed by using electronic hypertextuality and providing digital images, critical and facsimile editing could be combined. Because both image/hypermedia-oriented and text-based structures would be crucial in constructing the Archive and neither view could be abandoned, markup using SGML was developed and utilized in original software now known as Inote. SGML was even utilized despite the foreseen problems involving “textual concurrencies” demonstrated by the fact that SGML functions in terms of “discrete textual units” and the Archive project was made of complex concurrencies. In 1993, “[o]ur plan was to use the construction process as a mechanism for imagining what we didn’t know about the project.”

After the first year, a record was kept documenting the modifications to the archive as it was developed and imagined based on found “indeterminacies.” Even major reconstructing is recorded in the archive as problems were discovered, such as external issues regarding copyrighted material. When images were not available because of copyright holders, the Archive was organized in relation to photographs of Rossetti’s artwork. Other changes include ornamental line breaks, a referencing system that identifies “equivalent units of text in different documents,” and issues of concurrent compositing. These changes, again, are “realized imaginings of what we didn’t know, and second, clear instances of a theoretical power beyond the range of strictly speculative activities.” Problems that were realized but did not have solutions that were actualized include a good system for prose markup and a markup system that would allow “on-the-fly,” multiple composite arrangements of textual material.

Through working on the Rossetti Archive, the difference between theory and speculation is apparent where theory “operates through concrete acts of imagining.” By using digital media and running into problems, it allows for the envisioning of the unknown. This is clearly evident in the creation of the software utilized, Inote. Inote was created in order to meet the demands of annotating images so “computing via images” could take place. Furthermore, it had the function of allowing the attachment and hypertext linking of text materials to image points. However, this material was not organized in any apparent order and led to the question “what is the formal structure of a text page?” The solution was not to look at text in “rhetorical sequence” but to organize it in spatial areas linking through SGML textual information directly to image information. This development is now evident in The Blake Archive.

Because electronic textuality is closely connected with images, more work in this field is necessary. Work with images, and the filtering and chromatic play with such images as represented in the Rossetti Archive, can further demonstrate what we haven’t even imagined in terms of critical thought. As evidenced by the modifications to Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, applying digital technology as a means of criticism can reveal “not what we didn’t know, but what we didn’t know we knew” just as working with hypertextuality can elucidate unimagined information about texts.