Genetic editing is an approach to scholarly editing in which an exemplar is seen as derived from a dossier of other manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...

s and events. The derivation can be through physical cut and paste; writing or drawing in a variety of media; quotation, annotation

Annotation

An annotation is a note that is made while reading any form of text. This may be as simple as underlining or highlighting passages.Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument...

 or correction; acts of physical defacement; etc. Genetic editing aims to reconstruct the sequence of actions on the manuscript and exactly which parts of the manuscript were acted upon. Where multiple manuscripts have been combined (through for example cut and paste or quotation). Genetic editing is strong in European, particularly French and German, textual criticism

Textual criticism

Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...

. Completed works of genetic editing are known as genetic editions.

Whereas traditional scholarly editing can be seen to as constructing a new document drawing together and comparing many source documents to cast light on a work, genetic editing closely examines a single extant manuscript and traces back each aspect to cast light on the work.

Genetic editing is named by analogy with genetics manuscripts (individuals) are derived from other manuscripts (or previous states of the same manuscript) and with the derivation tree being a partial ordered tree

Tree (data structure)

In computer science, a tree is a widely-used data structure that emulates a hierarchical tree structure with a set of linked nodes.Mathematically, it is an ordered directed tree, more specifically an arborescence: an acyclic connected graph where each node has zero or more children nodes and at...

.

As of 2011, there is an active proposal to add genetic editing support to the Text Encoding Initiative

Text Encoding Initiative

The Text Encoding Initiative is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities. The community runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and maintains a technical standard, a wiki and a toolset....

's XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

format.

Examples

• HyperNietzsche http://www.hypernietzsche.org/
• Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition (1984; Gabler, Steppe, and Melchior) ISBN 0824043758