Vision

As originally conceived, the Clarendon Hume Editions did not include Hume’s historical writings. New computational methods make it possible for us to continue the series with this critical edition of Hume’s History.

Mikko Tolonen’s Helsinki Computational History group (COMHIS) has piloted methods for detecting text re-use between different editions of the History and has been collaborating with the European Horizon2020 READ Project in the investigation of more accurate means of digitization. The Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities is a world leader in linked open data and its work will be crucial in the development of the online edition enhancing the reader’s experience by enabling immediate and multi-modal access to complimentary online reference material.

The new critical edition of Hume’s History of England will include five distinctive features:

• Hume’s ​History​ in eight volumes: every version of the ​History​ that Hume saw through the press after 1762 was in eight volumes. We believe that returning the History to this format will constitute a meaningful corrective of current scholarly practice.
• A stand-alone print edition that will at the same time support an interactive online version interlinked with a potentially wide variety of other data sets and that will also be the basis of an electronic book in epub format.
• An accurate text complete with a full record of Hume’s alterations.
• Elucidation of Hume’s rather sparse footnotes, elaborating the bibliographical details of the works cited by Hume, along with the first complete bibliography for the History.
• A full introduction along with an index.