I have not followed all of this thread--but editing the Frankenstein Notebooks (1996)has given me a perspective on this [those who do not want to read this posting are here given my thesis--that both the representation and the original are necessary for scholarship--I also add a warning about photofacsimiles of first editions]:
1] I did my initial diplomatic transcription of the draft and the fair copy of the manuscripts of Frankenstein from nearly 400 high resolution black-and-white 8x10 glossies--and that saved inordinate time, allowing me to work for a year doing the transcriptions at my office without traveling to the Bodleian Library in Oxford [I also benefited by collation charts and watermark specifics, supplied by Bruce Barker-Benfield, so that I could, at least in part, mentally reconstruct quires of the notebooks in which Mary Shelley drafted her manuscripts [2 hard cover notebooks for nearly all of the draft; 2 extant soft cover notebooks for about 12% of the fair copy].
2] I then spent a full 5 weeks in Oxford checking my transcriptions and making scores if not hundreds of corrections to my transcriptions because the photographs, however excellent, did not enable me to determine that what appeared to be punctuation or even words were actually, in the manuscripts, bleed-throughs, show-throughs, offset ink blots, and other "interference". Moreover, inspecting the physical paper enabled Barker-Benfield and me to determine the nature and sequence of Mary Shelley composing in the notebooks [as evidenced by the sewing holes, the glue residue, the offset inkblots, and other things that could not be fully interpreted in the photographs]--and to determine that the fair copy was actually printer's copy [as evidenced by the folding of the leaves, the ink fingerprints from compositors, and additional sewing holes].
3] I then returned to Delaware to correct my transcriptions [and gather new questions to ask of the manuscript, which required another 10-day trip to Oxford to work again with the manuscripts].
4] I doubt if I am saying anything that has not been experienced by other editors: clearly the representation is of great help--but the manuscripts must be consulted.
While making these points, I also encourage people to beware of photographic facsimiles of books--I once based a transcription of Frankenstein on Leonard Wolf's helpful photofacsimile of the 1818 edition in his Annotated Frankenstein (Potter, 1977). Why not do apprpriate Wolf's text in the comfort of my office, I asked myself, rather than work in the Special Collections here at Delaware with the "real" first edition--how could the Wolf photographic representation of the 1818 edition lie? Well, to my dismay, when I did read aloud (against my transcription from Wolf) every word and comma from the "real" first edition, I discovered that the text in the Wolf edition had 14 errors and misrepresentations of the text of the first edition (some of you may remember that he did not respect individual pages--he cropped pages and put as many of the original lines from the 1818 edition that he could get on each of his pages--and in the process, he cropped umlauts and diacritical marks and hyphens and other things--and the edition he photographed was one that actually dropped a word when the frame loosened up).
So please tell your graduate students in Methods courses that they must consult originals even if they have a representation that appears to be more than adequate--or "appears" to be perfect.
robinson@udel.edu Charles E. Robinson English Department University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716