The Myth of Sisyphus is well know, even to schoolboys fascinated by Greek mythology: for having defied the gods and put Death in chains, Sisyphus was condemned to push a huge boulder up a mountain slope, and when he reached the top, the boulder would roll down the mountain, and Sysiphus would have to roll it up, again and again, for all eternity. In this paper, I will argue that this myth functions as an interesting allegory of the work of digital editors working with the TEI. When they decide to create a digital edition, they defy the limitations of traditional print editions, and give their work better chances for accessibility and perennity. But like Sisyphus, they have to pay a price for that: when a scholar publishes a print edition, he goes through the usual process of a critical edition, prepares his work for publication, then once it is published and printed, he does not need to care about his work: once it has been published, it will never be necessary to search for funds, unless a second edition is planned; libraries all over the world will take care of keeping copies safe in their collections and making them reasonably available to potential readers; the layout and typography of the work benefits from a secular tradition and is not likely to be questioned during the lifetime of the scholar. In a word, the critical editor can move on to his next work, without giving much thought to his published edition. The scholar who engages in a digital edition, on the other hand, is a modern Sisyphus: publishing a digital edition is an exacting, never ending task! For instance: digital editions may often be at the mercy of the whim of IT services, willing or not to offer the necessary framework and evolutive development - this regards the encoding of the edition (with evolutions of the Text Encoding Initiative) as well as the applications needed to make an edition available to its readers the standards and trends of web design evolve very quickly, more quickly even than the technologies behind, and will demand a graphic overhaul every 3 or 4 years. to a lesser extent, the very possibility of updating the edition is a form of pressure in itself. I will review these issues, showing how scholars publishing digital editions find themselves in an absurd situation where nothing guarantees their work will always be available, unless, during their whole career, they take care of maintaining their work - not to mention the uncertain future of their work once they retire. I will discuss potential ways to address these issues and to relieve the critical editor of his Sisyphean task, among which I will suggest a better defined status of published digital editions, and the creation of public institutions offering the equivalent of a legal deposit to digital editions.


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