New Directions in Digital Textual Studies: Book History, Scholarly Editing, and Curation in Conversation, co-edited with Kristen Schuster. Bloomsbury, 2026.
“Bringing together key scholars for a unique conversation, this book will become an indispensable text for students and researchers investigating the future of editing and curation.”
— Laura Dietz, Lecturer in Publishing, University College London, UK
“In this exemplary collection, Christopher Ohge and Kristen Schuster issue a powerful reminder of the foundational role of textual scholarship within the study of digital technologies in the humanities. But even more importantly, they demonstrate that textual studies represents the future as well as the past of digital humanities, acting as a fruitful lingua franca between disciplines as apparently disparate as literary studies, book history, new media, museum curation, library studies, theology and data science, to open up new possibilities for researchers and curators.”
— Francesca Benatti, Senior Research Fellow In Digital Humanities, Open University, UK
The overlaps between the digital humanities and textual studies –– two major scholarly fields which share common interests and methods –– still demand further theoretical reflections. This volume brings together an exciting collection of book historians, textual editors, curators, and new media theorists to provide templates for and methodological reflections on how digital textual studies research can be done.
Featuring contributions from a variety of early career and experienced scholars and practitioners, this volume uses case studies and methodological provocations to open up digital textual studies, as well as taking a step back to consider the broader theoretical and pedagogical implications they raise. In doing so, it sets the agenda for pragmatic, digital text-based scholarship and methods, providing useful tools and frameworks for anyone in need of an introduction to textual studies that is grounded in digital research and new media.
A New Companion to Herman Melville, co-edited with Wyn Kelley (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022).
“The collection is a valuable achievement that is sure to be of broad interest and use to both new initiates to Melville’s life and work and more seasoned scholars of Melville and nineteenth-century literary and culture”
–– Prof. Jeffrey Insko, Leviathan, Volume 26, Number 2 (June 2024), pp. 120-26.
A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers 47 new chapters using critical, technological, and aesthetic practices to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways.
In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, religion, transatlantic and hemispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers:
- A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work
- Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel
- Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville
- In-depth examinations of Melville’s treatment of the natural world
- Two symposium sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement
Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
(Access the Figures here. Access the Errata here.)
“This is an EXCELLENT book. Useful and timely.”
–– Prof. Peter Robinson, Bateman Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan and founder of Inkless Editions
“In Publishing Scholarly Editions, Christopher Ohge cogently argues for approaching editing in pragmatic terms, explicitly invoking the ideas of William James and John Dewey. Such an approach emphasizes the complexities of writerly acts, publishing exigencies, and readerly interpretations and charts the networks of actions and practices that constitute literary experience. Through a lucid contribution to editorial theory and deftly articulated case studies, Ohge shows the opportunities that scholarly editing and especially digital editing provide for displaying these complexities and networks and opening up, rather than closing down, meaning.”
–– Prof. Samuel Otter, Slusser Chair in English, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Melville’s Anatomies (1999).
‘… smart, concise, and exceedingly practical … Publishing Scholarly Editions is as pragmatic as the theory it articulates, blending theorization, personal reflection, concrete and enjoyable examples, and helpful figures. … All those working in scholarly editing should read it’.
— Prof. Laura L. Mielke, Scholarly Editing 40 (2022), DOI: 10.55520/TK54TDH2.
‘Ohge develops a number of fascinating examples in his book … drawn from his own impressive editorial work … [H]is objective in this engaging and thought-provoking book — one necessary for our juncture in time — is to raise questions more than to offer answers (certainly not easy ones). … Indeed, the last chapter raises a question that is critical to the future of scholarly editing: “What, then, is the meaning and function of the publisher in the digital age?” In reality, this question is essential to the future of humanistic scholarship generally, and Ohge’s probing exploration of it is one of the most important dimensions of his book.’
–– Prof. Geoffrey Turnovsky, Associate Professor of French and Co-Director of Textual Studies, University of Washington, in Textual Cultures 15.1 (Spring 2022).
Publishing Scholarly Editions offers new intellectual tools for publishing digital editions that bring readers closer to the experimental practices of literature, editing, and reading. After the Introduction (Section 1), Sections 2 and 3 frame intentionality and data analysis as intersubjective, interrelated, and illustrative of experience-as-experimentation. These ideas are demonstrated in two editorial exhibitions of nineteenth-century works: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, and the anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, edited by Mary Anne Rawson. Section 4 uses pragmatism to rethink editorial principles and data modelling, arguing for a broader conception of the edition rooted in data collections and multimedia experience. The Conclusion (Section 5) draws attention to the challenges of publishing digital editions, and why digital editions have failed to be supported by the publishing industry. If publications are conceived as pragmatic inventions based on reliable, open-access data collections, then editing can embrace the critical, aesthetic, and experimental affordances of editions of experience.
Versions of Billy Budd: A Fluid Text Edition, co-edited with John Bryant and Wyn Kelley (Melville Electronic Library, 2019).
This born-digital edition of Herman Melville’s last, uncompleted novella offers the first full digital transcription of Melville’s manuscript and establishes a text that comes closest to the manuscript’s unfinished state. It includes a critical, annotated reading text, as well as links to the page facsimiles and diplomatic transcriptions of the manuscript.
The text established in this edition has also been reprinted in Volume B of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 10th edition, edited by Robert Levine (2022), and in the centennial edition of Billy Budd, with woodcuts by Barry Moser (University of Chicago Press, 2025).
