The mission of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions has evolved steadily over time, reflecting changes in both editorial practice and the MLA’s own understanding of the role such a committee ought to play. In 2013, the CSE revisited its charge and undertook intensive discussions (including MLA conference sessions) about the impact of digital scholarly editing on the CSE’s mission and scope. These discussions drew on the — by now substantial — record of scholarship and theory on digital editions, including Peter Shillingsburg’s General Principles for Electronic Scholarly Editions, discussed at the committee’s 1993 meeting, Charles Faulhaber’s Preliminary Guidelines for Electronic Scholarly Editions (1997, 2002) which builds on that earlier document, and the CSE’s subsequently revised Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions, which incorporates many aspects of those earlier considerations – in addition to the 2006 volume of essays that had its origins in deliberations of the committee, Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth’s Electronic Textual Editing.

The result of these discussions was a white paper, drafted by Julia Flanders and Ray Siemens with the involvement of the full committee, and issued by the Committee on Scholarly Editions in September 2015, as Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age: A White Paper of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions. It was approved by the MLA Executive Council at its October 2015 meeting, and published shortly thereafter, in 2016, with slight revisions and an executive summary as the MLA Statement on the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age. Following its release, the white paper saw engagement on a number of dedicated conference panels, including the 2016 meetings of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and the Society for Textual Scholarship, and at the 2017 MLA conference.

The text of the MLA 2016 publication, MLA Statement on the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age can be found at https://www.mla.org/Resources/Research/Surveys-Reports-and-Other-Documents/Publishing-and-Scholarship/Reports-from-the-MLA-Committee-on-Scholarly-Editions/MLA-Statement-on-the-Scholarly-Edition-in-the-Digital-Age. The earlier Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age is available on the MLA’s Humanities Commons at https://scholarlyeditions.mla.hcommons.org/2015/09/02/cse-white-paper/, with a facility for comment.