Copies and facsimiles

The concepts of original and copy, of source and facsimile, always convey particular understandings of the process of reproducing documents. This essay is an analysis of these concepts, in particular copies and facsimiles, framed within the context of digital reproduction. The activities and cases discussed are picked from two areas: digital scholarly editing and cultural heritage digitization performed by research libraries. The conceptual analysis draws on three fields of scholarly inquiry: scholarly editing, library and information science, and philosophical aesthetics.