The Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts
Eectronic editions offer historians, literary critics, linguists, and editors exciting new ways to study texts. Unlike printed books, electronic texts lend themselves to sophisticated searches, concordancing, collations, and other forms of text retrieval. Editors may present in full both "good" and "bad" manuscripts, permitting literary historians to study the history of the reception of the text as shown by scribal changes or marginal annotations. Comprehensive databases from a wide variety of dialect regions will be available to historical linguists for phonological, morphological, and syntactical studies. Students of stylistics will be able to make more complete studies of metrical, lexical, or syntactic patterning than are possible with printed texts.
