Bryant was not himself a programmer or XML specialist, but he did have ideas about what a computer edition might look like, and created detailed storyboards before any actual programming work began. Although these were necessarily static, they used frame- and button-like boxes to suggest how a screen presentation might respond dynamically to reader choices (Figure 4). In 1998 he was named an IATH Visting Fellow and received technical assistance to create a first proof-of-concept prototype of the edition , which translated the storyboards into standard HTML frames (Figure 5).

In late 2003 we received Bryant's manuscript of the edition, consisting of Microsoft Word and PageMaker files containing manuscript transcriptions flagged with hundreds of revision sites and for each separate revision site a revision sequence and a revision narrative. We licensed from the New York Public Library the rights to reproduce their full-color photographs of the entire manuscript. Our goals at this point were (1) to convert all transcription and commentary to TEI-XML, and (2) to design an environment that could deliver combinations of text and image to realize as closely as possible the author's intentions for his edition. Our own finished rendering of the original concept would look like this:

Once we had our basic page display working, all that remained was to code a search page and add the editorial introductions before declaring the edition done and releasing it in March 2006.

Three months later we added an enhancement, our major one to date, an XML-based version of the entire first British edition of the novel, which the University of Virginia Library digitized for us from a copy in their holdings. We created for it a display interface combining a transcription of the text with images (Figure 9).

Neither Bryant nor the Press conceived of the edition as an open-ended project. The editor's work was done once he had finished all the manuscript transcription, identification of revision sites, exposition of revision sequences and narratives, and the introductory editorial essay. Our work was done once we had translated the editor's vision into a fully functional edition that coordinated photographic facsimiles with several transcription formats, and that hyperlinked all revision sites with their editorial expansions. The March 2006 edition was lacking one intended feature, the first British edition, owing to extrinsic factors (our library's digitization schedule). Once that was added, was for practical purposes stable and complete.

Nevertheless, we were aware of the potential for improvements and enhancements, some more immediately practicable than others:

More radically still, it is conceivable that all of our underlying XML markup and presentation might be entirely revised if John Bryant were to incorporate the proposals for temporal encoding in genetic digital editions that Elena Pierazzo has advanced , as both her tagging strategy and theoretical approach vary significantly from his own. A revision of that magnitude would be analogous to issuing a second edition of a book that differs markedly from the original because it has responded to new evidence and/or arguments. All scholarly and scientific publications are potentially imperfect and thus incomplete to the extent that later work can call them into question, but it would be an equivocation to say that they are therefore always unfinished in a formal sense.

Determining where we could add value to the print edition required a preliminary analysis of what makes a scholarly edition valuable in the first place. In such an edition, the basic textual unit is the single document, always accompanied at a minimum by bibliographical information and usually by editorial annotation, and sometimes by translations, enclosed documents, or other ancillary material. (Diaries and journals are a special case: depending on how chronologically structured they are, the basic textual unit may be the single-day entry, the single-month entry, or a longer narrative.) Besides the original text and editorial material, documents contain metadata, cross-references, abbreviations and other special features that are represented using a variety of editorial and typographical conventions, as highlighted in the facsimile of the original letterpress version of a letter from William Livingston to George Washington (shown below). Beyond the document level, most volumes contain scholarly apparatuses (lists of abbreviations and bibliographic expansions of short-title references), editorial and historical introductions, and a detailed index of all proper names and hundreds of topic categories. The translation of all of these print conventions into their TEI-XML equivalents is what must undergird a digital edition. (Our final XML encoding of the Livingston letter may be seen in the appendix.)

Our initial goals for the digital edition were:

Work on began in fall of 2004; a beta version for public display was ready by October 2006; and we formally released a published version for sale in February 2007. Screen captures of the online version of the Livingston letter illustrate how we realized some of our goals (Figure 12, Figure 13). Compasses are used to navigate the four hierarchies identifed in goal 2. A breadcrumb trail allows quick navigation up to any higher node of the current tree. Hyperlinks or mouseovers provide dynamic equivalents of their print counterparts in ways that are familiar to Web users: endnote superscripts connect to their notes via bidirectional linking; abbreviations and short-title references (indicated by dotted underlining) are expanded when the user mouses over the abbreviated text; and cross-references to other documents in are active links.

Along with the document navigation and display, we programmed a search page that combines full-text search with optional filtering based on author, recipient, and/or date range; and we added an online version of the consolidated index that resembles a back-of-the-book index except that document titles and dates replace page numbers and are, of course, hyperlinked.

We had scheduled official release of for President's Day — February 19, 2007. By a month or so ahead of this deadline, we realized that every last cleanup task could not be completed by that date. Online publication meant we could do a triage: fix first the things that affect the most documents, or that are most obvious to the average reader; fix afterwards problems or errors limited to single documents, or ones that would be noticed only by a specialist (for example, an incorrect birth year for a minor historical figure). Corrections of bad links and minor formatting glitches continued for about a month after the February 19 release. Corrections to errors in transcriptions or annotations, as identified by Papers of George Washington staff, have been ongoing. So, too, have further regularization and consolidation: since first publication, PGW staff have provided us with fully normalized lists of names of all document authors and recipients that we have used to update the document metadata, and with a corrected and up-to-date list of repository abbreviations and expansions based on MARC codes that we have used to globally update the XML volume files.

So is done? Yes and no. It is a stable release version with some remaining imperfections, but there's a lot more we plan to do with it, even apart from adding content as we digitize new volumes after they appear in print. We've recently met with the PGW staff to agree on a list of priorities for enhancement. The tasks fall into three general categories: Optimization of existing features. Examples: improving search speed and index retrieval; rewriting the search parser to make it more Google-like and to include more boolean operators. New features. Add an advanced search page that will allow users to search by document features or language, for example. We'll add full-text searching on the index. Farther down the road may be keeping up with the Joneses enhancements, like enabling the user to save a personal workspace containing bookmarked documents and search result sets as the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online at Yale has done. Features required by aggregating into the larger Founding Era collection. Over the next year we will be adding editions of the , the , and . In order to build an extensible framework, we have already begun a thorough rewrite of our delivery code and encoding specifications so that our publication system will scale gracefully as more publications are added. But it is impossible for us to project all of the enhancements that may become desirable or possible in the future. We are in a position not too different, really, from that of the editors who began planning American documentary historical editions beginning in the 1950s. They of course knew that their completed volumes would eventually need to be supplemented and corrected as new documents and historical information emerged. What they couldn't envision was a time, our own, when scholarship that exists only in print is increasingly seen as ipso facto lacking an essential quality. Likewise, we can really only guess at what new features advancing technology may make possible. For instance, we have often wished we had time and funding to add rich XML tagging for personal and place names (beyond the author/recipient identifications in existing metadata), and assumed that this would require a major commitment of human labor. But it's not impossible that advances in automated named entity recognition will enable us in a not-too-distant future to pipe through a program that will reliably recognize and tag those names and link them to, say, genealogical databases or a GIS-based interface like Google Earth.

So we don't really expect ever to be able to say more than that is done — for now.

Intrinsic criteria are formalist: they assume that the completeness of an object derives from its inner properties alone, without reference to any social or other external context. In the following table there is a continuum from objects like a monograph (or a lyric poem) that can be judged to possess organic unity, to ones like a collaborative virtual world that cannot. It is no accident that the latter are the ones felt to be characteristically digital.

Category 1 objects are the most familiar in scholarly publishing, hence the most fully integrated into the tenure-and-review system. Bryant's essentially falls into this category. Probably owing to the influence of online publishing, Category 2 objects are becoming more familiar: online preprints are accredited scholarly communications in a growing number of disciplines, and cutting-edge book publishers like O'Reilly with their Rough Cuts series of early-access PDF are adopting a versioned model of publication.

Category 3 objects are also familiar from the print world, where they represent the one kind of open-endedness that does not upset traditional notions about scholarly authority. The is a good example. It has been supplemented, transformed, and extended many times since the first fascicles were issued in 1884. Yet each discrete stage of publication was accepted by the academic community as authoritative for its moment. It is no accident that this category has translated easily to digital format: the only essential difference between the print and online is that the latter is updated far more often.

Category 4 is the one to which the term done seems the most inapplicable. Its characteristic objects are more like processes than products, and it is difficult to think of genuine analogues in the print world outside the realm of experimental literature of the Oulipo variety. A publication like can perhaps be seen as a special case of Category 3 in which discrete stages succeed each other with extreme rapidity, but a virtual world like exists in such constant motion that it requires something akin to calculus for adequate description. Unsurprisingly, Category 4 is the form of digital creation least amenable to naturalization in the academic reward system or the scholarly publishing marketplace.

For a scholarly publisher, intrinsic criteria of done-ness are important but are often trumped by extrinsic factors. The judgement that a book manuscript is done and ready for press requires an agreement among author, acquiring editor, external reviewers, and the manuscript editorial and production departments that is based largely on its formal content. But completely extrinsic factors such as the desire to include the book in a particular season's list will often lead a press to veto an author's wish to continue tinkering with a manuscript. Similarly, an author may not consider a monograph on Chinese art formally complete without the inclusion of several dozen full-page color reproductions on glossy inserts, but a publisher may omit them for the wholly extrinsic reason that the profit-and-loss sheet doesn't budget for them. Once a book is in print, decisions about its subsequent done-ness (i.e., whether to reprint, revise, issue in paperback, etc.) are based almost entirely on economic factors. In the case of digital publications, I will suggest, extrinsic factors become important at an earlier stage and are proportionately more important at every stage of composition and publication.

The following list of extrinsic factors is not meant to be exhaustive; they are the ones that have been most prominent in Rotunda's experience.

Whether you are a publisher or the editor of an open-access publication, allowing extrinsic factors to influence your decision about whether a digital project is done is in no way an admission of defeat or an abdication of responsibility. It is, in fact, the only way to avoid the form of Zeno's paradox whimsically propounded in the epigraph to this section. The progress of knowledge in the arts and sciences is continuous, but in order for it to happen at all, scholarly discourse must be distributed in the form of discrete objects that can be shared, read or viewed, responded to, assimilated, quoted, disputed, and revised. In the marketplace of ideas, it's less important how you decide when your piece is done than that you do decide, label it and put it on display, and prepare to haggle with others over its value.