Kenneth M. Price’s seminal essay interrogates the vocabulary through which digital textual scholarship understands itself, arguing that terms such as edition, project, database, archive, and thematic research collection do not merely describe scholarly forms but actively delimit their conceptual and institutional possibilities. At stake is not semantic nuance alone, but the epistemological framing of digital humanities itself: each term carries inherited assumptions from print culture, librarianship, or computation, often obscuring the hybrid and expansive nature of contemporary digital scholarship. Price demonstrates that edition remains burdened by the selectivity and closure of print; project is too administratively amorphous and temporally finite; database is technically reductive and metaphorically unstable; while archive and thematic research collection more accurately suggest inclusiveness and extensibility, yet fail to communicate the full scholarly labour of editorial intervention. Drawing on the Walt Whitman Archive as a paradigmatic case, Price shows that digital scholarly environments exceed the traditional edition by integrating facsimiles, metadata, maps, correspondence, translation, and contextual research into open-ended, evolving systems of interpretation. Particularly compelling is his account of the archive not as passive storage but as an active scholarly form—a site where editing, annotation, and cultural analysis converge in dynamic relation. His speculative proposal of the term arsenal is especially revealing: not a militaristic metaphor, but a provocative figure for the digital humanities as workshop, dockyard, and collective site of craft, assembly, and exchange. Price’s central contribution lies in recognising that naming digital scholarship is itself a critical act, one that determines how such work is valued, funded, practised, and imagined within the humanities. Price, K.M. (2009) ‘Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(3).
