Copyediting: A Play

Copyediting: A Play is an experimental arttext. It pivots around the ubiquitous on-screen ‘I-beam’ cursor, alluding to the material history of the steel I-beam after which this is named, and delving into the material history of the process of copyediting as it became computerised. The shifts this entailed are considered in relation to recent first-hand experience of authorship and editing. The text opens out as both being in and of itself, as well as a being ‘about’, text as something in process: written, revised and referred to by a shifting, overlapping and temporally fragmenting cast of author and editor ‘characters’ who periodically align with and at other times slip apart from physical bodies.