About Online Edition Project

This online edition was edited by Izumi Omura (Team Leader, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan), Shunichi Kubo (Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan), Tadashi Shibuya (Kagoshima University, Kagoshima, Japan), Norimasa Watanabe (Kanto-Gakuin University of Tokyo, Japan), Tomonaga Tairako (Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan), and Lixin Han (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China). This editorial group has been working on this project since 2007, holding daily editorial discussions via e-mail and putting together editorial conferences at Sendai, Tokyo, Kyoto, Kagoshima, and Beijing.
　The editing process had three rough stages. First, the editors collated the online text of MEJ 2003 with fine images of the original manuscripts. The former was provided by the IMEF (International Marx-Engels-Foundation), and the latter was provided by the IISH (International Institute for Social History, in Amsterdam) and the RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, in Moscow). This work corrected and supplemented the information on immediate variants and late variants of MEJ 2003. Second, the editors edited base texts (= Layer 2) from the texts which had been corrected and completed, and edited Layer 1 by supplementing the deleted portions of immediate variants. Third, they added the elements of late variants to the texts of Layer 2 and edited layers such as Layer 3.1 (L, R), and so on, as shown in III-2. All members of the editorial group participated in this first stage of the editing process. In the first stage editing work, they proceeded with reference to the published books of The German Ideology. In this first editorial work, it was very useful that Shibuya (1998) noted his findings of his investigation into the original manuscripts in great detail, and his verbal commentaries to the editors were very helpful.
　The second stage of the editing work was the whole form unification, the completion and correction of the first stage work, and the matching and inspection with the proofs of MEGA② I/5 provided by IMEF. OMURA, KUBO, SHIBUYA and WATAMNABE were in charge of this work. The editing work of the third stage was the matching of the result of the second stage with MEGA② I/5 (2017) and the creation and realization of the web edition, supported by Sirube inc. (https://sirube.co.jp/) . OMURA and KUBO were in charge of this.