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October 22, 2025

��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge Adjunct Professor Barbara Bordalejo, a founding member of the Humanities Innovation Lab, delivered a keynote lecture at Genesis 2025, an international conference on textual studies held this October at Vilnius ��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ. The Genesis meetings bring together leading scholars in genetic criticism, the study of how texts come into being through drafts, revisions, and variants. This year’s theme, “Mimesis and Genesis,” explored how creative and scholarly processes intertwine in the making and remaking of texts.

Bordalejo’s address, “The Editor’s Aleph: Mimesis, Genesis, and the Representation of Texts,” invited audiences to reconsider the scholarly editor’s role as an imaginative and creative agent in textual scholarship. Drawing on Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Aleph,” in which a character glimpses the entire universe in a single point of light, she proposed that editors occupy a similar position: charged with translating the simultaneity of textual possibility into the linear form of a readable text.

“In editing,” Bordalejo explained, “we confront the same paradox Borges describes. Our materials contain countless versions, revisions, and contingencies—but what readers receive is a single, sequential representation. The editor’s task is to make that simultaneity legible without erasing its complexity.”

The lecture traced three intertwined dimensions of editorial practice. The mimetic dimension considers how editions construct “possible worlds” for readers through acts of selection and framing. The genetic dimension investigates how textual variants and revisions reveal a work’s evolution. The infrastructural dimension examines how scholarly editions function as data systems—living frameworks that can map, query, and visualize textual change.

To illustrate these ideas, Bordalejo discussed two long-standing editorial projects. Her work on The Canterbury Tales Project demonstrates how even pre-digital collation methods produced massive data infrastructures for representing variation. By contrast, her Online Variorum of Darwin’s Origin of Species shows how digital environments can make revisional histories navigable, letting readers trace Darwin’s evolving arguments across six editions and test interpretive hypotheses about their causes.

“Both the medieval poem and the scientific treatise,” she observed, “become laboratories for thinking about mimesis. In each case, the editor must design pathways that lead readers from unity to plurality and back again—so that they can experience the work as both a single text and a network of evolving forms.”

Throughout the talk, Bordalejo emphasized that scholarly editing is not merely the recovery of an author’s intent but a creative and ethical act of representation. Whether reconstructing the nine lines of Cædmon’s Hymn or charting Darwin’s decades of revision, scholarly editors act as architects of textual possibility—designing interfaces, databases, and infrastructures that shape how knowledge is transmitted.

In closing, Bordalejo turned to the future of the field, noting that machine learning and handwriting-recognition technologies now offer new ways of surfacing variant clusters and anomalies. Yet she cautioned that such tools must remain transparent and accountable: “The editor’s judgment cannot be automated. Our work is to build humane interfaces to complexity—Alephs that open, not close, the possibilities of the text.”

Bordalejo’s keynote was part of a distinguished lineup that included scholars from Oxford, Bologna, and the Sorbonne. Her contribution underscored the ��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge’s international presence in the field of digital textual scholarship and reflected the Humanities Innovation Lab’s mission to explore how emerging technologies can illuminate the processes of literary creation and transmission.