This edition begins with the image, with the visible. This seems particularly appropriate for a critical edition of John Ruskin 's Modern Painters vol I - the book that 'gave new eyes' to the Victorians. Accordingly the core of this edition is constructed from images derived from high-resolution scans (facsimiles) of the most significant lifetime editions. The machine-readable versions of the texts also exist and are central to certain functions, but these have developed out of the facsimiles rather than the other way around.
The decision to use facsimiles of original editions as our reading text(s) was simple to make in terms of the sense of history we wished to put across, but has led to complexities in terms of the programming for the edition. (For a broader perspective on the facsimile/transcribed text issue, see Woof, "Text, Music, and Image as Digital Artefact", pp. 131-33.)