We propose two new methods for critically editing Tibetan texts that take advantage of contemporary electronic developments in presentation of data, and in collaborative workings ("e-Sciences"). While developed in the course of our practical work editing canonical rNying ma'i rgyud 'bum texts, we hope these methods will be of interest for editors of texts of many kinds, in many different languages. Electronic innovations in textual criticism t is widely recognised that electronic methods should

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... be able to add a great deal to textual criticism, and much work has been done on finding methods of doing so. So far, several approaches have been attempted: people have worked on presenting colour images of the original manuscripts, 2 on attempts to automate the arduous job of collation, 3 on exploring new methods of analysis, 4 on ensuring a perfect page layout of a complex apparatus, 5 and on developing software allowing people to word-process complex editions in a form exportable to the Text Encoding Initiative TEI. 6 The TEI itself, of course, has been hailed by many as the ultimate in electronic textual editing tools, and we have no doubt it offers many advantages (we wish to emphasise at the outset that our proposal is aimed at complementing TEI, not at displacing it). 7 Many of these electronic 1 Many textual scholars have attempted this through using TeX and LaTex. 6 Stefan Hagel's Classical Text Editor. 7 Many others have remarked on TEI's drawbacks. It is extremely forbidding in its complexity, and except for those with well developed computing skills, TEI should probably not be attempted without professional or semi-professional assistance. TEI also offers such an extensive array of riches to those wishing to mark up their texts that it is full of redundancies for most purposes-for example, editing Tibetan texts. It also demands a high degree of definition before the editorial process actually begins, while at the same time restricting overlapping categories. For these and various other reasons, TEI is not always seen as satisfactory: the eminent text critic Jerome McGann summed up his prolonged involvement with TEI in the following words: "TEI's greatest legacy is the demonstration it makes of its own inadequacy as a means for computerizing the information content of humanities materials." (Jerome McGann, lecture given I