DLF Mark Twain


	To return, then, to our current Twain project: In the realm of the scholarly or critical edition of a literary work, XML seems to need no justification: it is the perfect marriage of form and function. XML is an ideal technology for displaying and organizing text at the level of the sentence, the word, even the bibliographic note. It makes manifest the kind of fine attention to textual detail that is the hallmark of the critical edition. It also enables the kind of integrated search and display functionality that could render these critical editions even richer and more suggestive as research tools.

	As an archive and a scholarly editorial project, the Mark Twain Project and Papers at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library is in the rare position of being able to provide immediate access to both primary and secondary sources. The Papers are keen to develop an online system for integrating these two functions – thus creating critical editions of Twain’s writings that allow for a level of interactivity and integrated reading experience that is unimaginable in a print edition. At its most basic level, the digital Project will fold Mark Twain’s private papers, comprehensive historical annotation and complete critical apparatuses into the texts themselves. The project aims to provide unprecedented digital access to critical editions of all of Mark Twain’s writings, starting with the works and papers that have already been published by the UC Press in print form and with thousands of additional letters by Mark Twain never before made available in a single source.