Unsworth

Unsworth, John. "Second-Generation Digital Resources in the Humanities"
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/DRH2000.html

In this keynote address, Unsworth briefly defines and characterizes second generation digital resources. They are those resources which "are born digital" (complex collections including commentary, annotations, apparati, etc...) and make use of first generation digital-resouces (digitizations of physical artifacts), thus mirroring to an extent the traditional academic distinction between primary and secondary sources. The flourishing of such projects (like the online archives we've been looking at) highlights several changes in the artstic, scholarly, and editorial communities, but, more importantly, it consequently calls for several others: publishers will "have to start thinking more like libraries", libraries are faced with need of incorporating this new kind of publications into their collections, and authors (who will suddenly become a nuisance not only for publishers, but also for libraries!) need to find ways to receive the just credit for their digital work while engaging in "ten-year projects in a medium that seems to change every ten minutes", at the same time dealing with the necessity of an impersonal, as-objective-as-possible language (and "the death of ambiguity is also the death of nuance, metaphor, and poetry"...). Some of the advice that Unsworth offers to the parties involved is based precisely on these parties making an effort to cooperate with one another: "We need to do some end-to-end projects that involve authors, publishers, and libraries in a coordinated (and documented) joint effort [...] [and] Failing that, we need to do more bilateral projects that involve, say, libraries and scholars or scholars and publishers". Unsworth's ideas surely sound good on paper; translating them into reality in such a $$$-driven society will surely result a much grimmer picture. Bot more importantly, is there not a hint of hypocrisy in Unsworth's "brotherly love"-infused message? As an ignoramus in the field, I must abide by what I've been hearing in this class, but if it is indeed true that there is a competitiveness, which borders on spite and bitterness, between different institutions behind some of the most important digital editing projects (say, the Virginia people and the UNC people), how can we expect a collegial cooperation between authors, libraries, and big-buck publishers when there isn't even such a relationship between authors and authors?

Smith

Smith, Catherine. "Hypertextual Thinking." Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning With Technology

Smith's article begins begins with a philosophical evaluation of hypertext as it exists today and moves on to propose a "different vision of hypertext". She summarizes some key concepts from the works of contemporary philosphers Susanne Langer and Walter Kintsch, detecting in both a shared notion of the human mind: "thought is a dynamic system of involvements" (275), and making this postulate into the starting point for her theorization of new models of hypertext, which she hopes to see profilerate in a near future. Smith envisions a "conceptually enriched" type of hypertext that allows for "thick cognition (276). [Clearly, some of the ideas she so convolutely argues for in this piece, published in 1994, are taken for granted today by even the most casual internet users: her hope that "a user could presented with theme links, not only structure or keyword links", and that "users could teach the system what they want to know", has been granted even by the dreaded Wikipedia]. As for the implementation of hypertext in pedagogy and didactics, Smith's main contention is that in order to produce a wave of hypertextually-thinking and hypertext-using scholars, capable of fruitfully stretching the intellectual horizons, a thorough heuristic will be needed. I do think that here she touches on an issue that is still very real today, as I find that my colleagues and my students (as well as myself...), part of a generation with unlimited access to the hypertextual universe of the WWW, are for the most part ignorant about how to make productive use of what the web has to offer. In my experience as a grad student, prof. say "never quote wikipedia!", "beware of google!", or "don't use online translators!", but it's a plain fact that everyone does make a massive use of internet resources (professors included), yet still very rarely (seminars like ours being the rare exception) are students provided with structured advice or a consistent set of guidelines on how to make good use of hypertextual and web resources.

meta-resource page

Your weekend just keeps getting better! After the Tarheels march to the Final Four, this: my meta-resource page on the illustrations of the Divine Comedy, while still a work-in-progress, is now triumphantly online. Visit it at

http://divinecomedyillustrations.weebly.com/

See you on tuesday.

from theory to practice

Just a note to inform y'all that for the first time I have concretely applied the knowledge acquired in this class to my own academic work (yay!). Last week, I wrote a paper about a poem by Aldo Palazzeschi, titled "La Passeggiata". I have liked this work for quite a while, and was glad to be able to finally discuss it thoroughly. When I picked up a copy of the book it was originally published in (the Futurist collection "L'Incendiario", published in 19o9 by Marinetti himself), I noticed some diffrences with the version I was accustomed to accessing online (which, I would later find out, reproduces the one in Palazzeschi's complete poems, published in the early 90s). This led me to a whole research of the poem's textual history in print, and I discovered that there are three different versions, the one from 1909, one from another collection published in 1930 (which introduces the major variations), and another from the early 70s, shortly before the author's death (which is the one reprinted in the complete works). I pondered the differences carefully, weighing them against the author's biography and the historical situations at the time of publishing (the first version was published at the hight of Futurist fervor, and when Palazzeschi himself was an official member of the movement, the second during Fascism, once the author had long renounced Futurism), and I came up (I hope) with some interesting conclusions. I also feel that the extra time and effort I spent doing my own "textual criticism" helped me gain a more thorough understanding of the poem altogether, and led me to some observations, not strictly related to textual scholarship, which I would not have otherwise arrived to. The point is, whereas in the past I would have just pulled up whatever version of the work and went from there, I think that thanks to my exposure to the ideas and concepts we've been exploring, I wrote a much more informed, and ultimately better paper.

McCarty

Willard McCarty's article covers the main aspects of humanities computing's history, its history and the major questions intrinsic to the (non)discipline (see Orlandi), attempting to make sense of "how our insight is sharpened and imaginations empowered to gain genuinely "new liberties of action" from computing, and how these liberties may be used in refurbishing the humanities for an electronic age". he begins by tracingthe historical developments in the field, from Father Busa tomistic project to the internet and the implementation of computing in the classrooms. He then moves on to discussing the different branches in the field. These branches are the algorythmic (geared to "the development of software for the analysis of source materials"), the metalinguistic (focused on devising "computationally rigorous metalanguages by which computationally elusive entities may be tagged and so reliably processed"), and the representational ("arranging, formatting or otherwise transforming the appearance of data"). McCarty then outlines the fundamental epistemological question surrounding humanities computing: how to approach past works/artifacts and "non-computational things of the present"? How should humanities computing relate with other academic cultures? and how we deal with need, to use McGann's words, of "imagining what we don't know"?

In his conclusion, McCarty states that we should not attempt to answer the question of what humanities computing is, but rather explore it and refine our understanding of it. Such a proposition, like many we've come across this semester, reveal the curious dynamics of a field that is still somewhat in an embryonic phase, but nevertheless attempts to develop firm theories about itself. McGann and his constantly coming up with new theories (as the Prof. relates), repeatedly contradicting himself in the process, is perhaps the best exemplification of this phenomenon.

Questions

Jones, Paul. Open(source)ing the Doors for Contributor-run Digital Libraries

Regarding Jones' argument that "we can have contributor-run libraries", I would be interested to hear the library science people's opinion. Is there an elitist sentiment among today's librarians, and a fear of becoming "no longer needed" that triggers an attitude of defensiveness towards approaches such as those proposed by Jones?

Is Jones' idea of a contributor-run library as "noisy, vibrant" incompatible with the (Platonic?) idea itself of library?

Can we really speak, as Jones does, of "intellectual discourse" being fostered by a large mass of contributions by people whose credentials are never truly known? Is there not risk of creating an environment that suffers from "wiki-itis"?

Cricket, anyone?

James Knight. The Truth is Out There--Honestly.

I cherished this brief piece, if only for the actual websites it lists. I have long been a user of wordreference.com, for its Italian-English and English-Italian dictionaries. Until a few years ago, I would have never thought of using the latter, but I've reached a point that every time I write a paper at least one word comes to mind in the other language, and this site (good but not great) has helped considerably. I also think the online English dictionary at dictionary.reference.com is excellent, providing for each word entries from several different major dictionaries as well as quick links to its also excellent thesaurus page with synonyms and antonyms. I have also briefly dabbled with and with 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, very interesting. One of my favorites, however, remains www.etimo.it, the complete (documentary) edition of Ottorino Pianigiani's classic Italian etymological dictionary, still the standard of excellence in my home country, and (for English) www.etymonline.com (highly recommended!).


(As I write this entry, I become aware of another compuer-related "mutation" in the standard process of writing: the present-day habit, be it fruitful or not, of writing while online. I can't speak for others, but I have become accustomed to doing most of my writing (whether for school or otherwise) with the internet running, one click away, teasing me from a minimized window at the bottom left of my screen. I routinely consult it, for specific refrerence (dictionaries, unc libarary page, even the dreaded wikipedia), curiosity (google the name of one the authors I'm reading, for example) loose inspiration (read a 13th century sonnet while I'm writing about 1910s avant-gardes, just to get the music back in my fingers...), or mere escape (espn.com). The great and powerful Time Warner high-speed, however, has just betrayed me (I immediately ran to the phone, called, and was informed of an outage in my area), and to an extent, I feel left in the dark, mutilated, paralized....)

A critical issue

I would like to begin with an observation not related to this week's readings, which may be so glaringly obvious it needs not even being discussed, but which I thought I'd bring up. We have read much about a perceived/anticipated "death" of the critical edition, and can reasonably say that there in fact have at least been, and will be, major changes in , due to approaching the work electronically, through the digital medium. This constitues a change in the conditions of fruition of the work. I would now like to point out how major changes in the process of editing will also be brought about by the changes in the conditions of production of literary works. So long as we are dealing with Dante or Shakespeare or Whitman, the problem does not present itself. But once we move to contemporary authors, a completely different issue arises: There have to be several writers living today or about to be born, who one day will be regarded as giants of literature, fully deserving of the kind of editorial attention we grant to the great masters of the past, and we can safely assume that the majority of them , if not all, will be writing on a computer--producing their works in the digital medium. This phenomenon will inevitably leave editors out of a crucial process in the creation of the work, the process of pre-publication authorial revision that takes place as the author writes, or a day, a week, even a year after the author first pens his manuscript. In traditional scholarly editing (Bowersian or Tansellian or McGannian), a crucial first step always involves the careful analysis of direct interventions on a written manuscript, especially in the case of authors writing themselves, by hand: changes, crossed out words or sections, notations or comments (I think of Petrarch filling his definitive RVF manuscript, now Vatican Cod. 3195, with countless "placet" and "non placet"), even the weight of the penmark and the characteristics of the handwriting, suggesting, for example, whether a passage was written in a trance-like rapture of inspiration, or if every word was pondered lengthily and reached through great struggle... In this day and age, plausibly, most of these processes leave no tangible trace behind: the author simply intervenes on his .doc file, saves it anew, and these steps in the revision process become lost forever, to the editor AND even to the author himself. What are the implications of all this?

Folsom. Thoughts...

I found it intersting to discover, especially in Folsom's article, the many parallels in the histories of the Whitman Archive and of the Blake Archive. Like the editors of the WBA, Folsom and Price set out with a set of intentions--namely, simply to make all of Whitman's work, and as much complementary material as possible, freely available online-- and eventually came to realize through the years how what they were doing was something quite different, which took on a much deeper significance and which plausibly taught them much not only about the dynamics of editing (electronic or otherwise), but also about Whitman's work. First of all, the typical progression seemingly experienced by those behind these online archives, where the editions increasingly (in)form the editors, says something about the very concept of "intention"(our old friend...). I am a firm believer, in fact, that artists (perhaps especially writers) move along a similar itinerary in the process of creating, and if even they set out with a clearly defined concept of their work, the end-product (if there is such a thing) never coincides with it, for the page (or the canvas, or the block of marble) acts as a filter in ways that can never be completely or correctly predicted. But let me not digress. Folsom also praises the electronic database's potential to overcome and perhaps vanquish once and for all the long-established (and oppressive) labels of 'genre', which have survived from Aristotle to the "death of the author", from the Hesiod to Derrida and reader-reception theories. This is another direct point of contant between the Whitman Archive and the WBA, as Whitman as much as Blake challenged the boundaries between genres and mediums to an extent that neither can be adequately understood as an artist with a traditional approach. However, Folsom goes on to introduce the idea of database itself as a genre, and embraces Manovich's plea for "a poetics, aesthetics, and ethics" of the database. (and compellingly, Folsom begins crafting his poetics of database through the poetics of "his" Whitman...) This, it seems to me, is indicative of a most fascinating situation. On the one hand, you have a field (that of electronic editing/online scholarly databases) that is not only still in its infancy, but which many nevertheless fear might not survive to adulthood, because of all the factors that are contingent to its success (luck, funding, costs, technical difficulties, the need for 'saintly' underpayed scholars and for academic institution to credit their work, etc..). On the other hand you have people within this "field" that already are crafting advanced theories about it. I mean, thousands of years passed from the earliest inscriptions on stone to the development of self-aware theories of literature and writing. In our age, we are developing a poetics for something that hasn't even finished being born...

Ross, Chareles L. The Electronic Text and the Death of the Critical Edition

Ross, Chareles L. The Electronic Text and the Death of the Critical Edition

http://sites.unc.edu/viscomi/841/Electronic%20Text%20and%20the%20Death%20of%20the%20Critical%20Edition%20Ross.pdf

In this article, Ross takes issue with the Bowersian (or Gregian, or Tansellian) model of critical edition, and ultimately questions the validity of the entire Anglo-American tradition of textual editing. He rejects the dominant M.O. in the field of textual scholarship--resulting in a codex-form eclectic text, based on editorial desumptions of "final intention", with its accompanying textual apparatus, for, in his view, this is a surpassed approach which "has not kept pace with either literary theory or the needs of readers" (225). Ross advocates an edition that is in tune with the "poststructuralist age" we inhabit, where the reader effectively has the opportunity "to rewrite a whole text or version", and is no longer subjected to the intrinsically teleological critical edition with its "myth" of final intention--no longer a passive consumer. (226) Needless to say, he sees the digital medium as opening the door to this possibility, for even a printed sinoptic edition, like Gabler's Ulysses, is ultimately limited by its material form.

Ross' position, clearly indebted to Barthesian theories of myth, and heavily laden with post-structuralist and deconstruction(ist?) terminology, echoes many of the articles we've read to this point, and seems exactly the kind of talk that would enrage elitist hi-tech skeptics like Cooper&Simpson or Birkerts, with its ambition to transform the reader into editor seemingly threatening the supreme authority of the scholar-"high priest" . While much of Ross' argument is nothing too new to us, he does attempt to contribute constructively to the discussion when he proposes the incorporation of actual do-it-yourself editing tools in online archives and resources, through which the reader could be able to mark and construct the text according to his needs/interests. However, as he too does not appear to be very familiar with the behind-the scene issues (the practical difficulties and limits of computer-programming), he remains vague and gives no concrete example as to what these tools should look like or how they would be implemented. My question is: do any of the major online resources we are looking at offer anything of this sort? And if not, have the Blake Archive or any of its "cousins" ever dabbled in these ideas?

Willet

Willett, Perry. Electronic Texts: Audiences and Purposes


Willet begins with a concise sketch of the history of humanities computing, from the earliest WW2-era pioneers and "prophets" (although he omits Paul Valéry's statement, quoted in the Unsworth article, which seems to me the most remarkable of all, dating back to 1930) to the development of the field in the 1990s, giving equal space to enthusiastic optimists and disgruntled skeptics. He then addresses the question "what is an electronic text?", covering the various possibilities like faithful, linear transcriptions, facsimile reproductions, hypertexts, and encoded texts, which are generally regarded as providing "the best and fullest representation of text in all its complexity". He praises the volunteer-spirit driving Project Gutenberg's success, but seems to criticize the project's refusal to work with encoding, depicting a kind of bipolar situation where the two camps (those prefering the Gutenberg-like approach and those who firmly believe in standardized encoded texts) regard one another with suspicion. Willet also mentions the practical difficulties in creating electronic texts, which some feel optical character recognition may eventually eliminate. Next, he discusses the various problems surrounding the fruition of electronic texts (their limited availability, the difficulty in finding what IS there, the divide between commercially distributed and locally created ones, often relying on incompatible interfaces, the fact that "markers traditionally used by scholars to determine the merit of any given electronic text are missing", and the consequent reluctance to accept them as scholarly sources). Nevertheless, Willet concludes by stating his firm belief that "the use of e-texts will become recognized as a standard first step in humanities research".

PS After seeing his name pop up again and again, I just had to look up this dude Roberto Busa. He is a jesuit priest from Vicenza, whose lifelong project on completely lemmatizing the work of Thomas Aquinas, began in 1946, and his success in convincing IBM to sponsor his activity, is regarded as inaugurating the age of the digital text. Father Busa, 95 years young, is apparently still active in teaching and has just undertaken a new Aquinas-related linguistics project. It is good to know that all this we're dealing with was pioneered by an Italian... I usually tell my students how after all our contributions to arts and modern thought, we invented experimental science (well not me, Galileo), then we found America and named it (not me, Colombo and Vespucci), then we stepped down and let you guys have your day in the sun (with the necessary mentions of Volta, Marconi, Fermi, etc). Now I can tell them we "invented" digital humanities as well! Jokes aside, I think it is interesting and refreshing to learn that, unlike the computer and the internet, e-texts didn't have their roots in military sciences or in the market-driven "urizenic" machine Cooper and Simpson spoke of, but in Vatican scholarship. I know some will say the Vatican is just as bad, if not worse, than Nike and Exxon, but still...

PPS In response to Kristen's post: I had not heard anything about the Obama blowjob-crack video, but now I have...

Unsworth's essay

Unsworth, John. Electronic Scholarsip; or, Scholarly Publishing and the Public.

http://sites.unc.edu/viscomi/841/Electronic%20Scholarship%20Unsworth.pdf

Unsworth observes how the reactionary defenders of traditional "bookish" academia (Cooper and Simpson come to mind...), and those all too eager to mourn the fading away of Culture (capital C) in the digital era, actually "find themselves in secret collusion [...] with the enemies of intellectualism" (234). He brings forth the example of Sven Birkerts, an "unreconstructed Platonist" who sees the digital age as the terminal illness of the millenial judeo-christian quest for knowledge, and the WWW as the harbinger of the apocalypse. Unsworth interprets his sentiments as an elitist fear that scholars and teachers will no longer be needed (or, better, revered like high priests), that a "shallower" humanity will lose sight of "vertical distinctions" due to the "lateral connectedness" of information ushered in by the internet. The author believes instead that it is precisely an attitude like Birkerts' that contributes to the "marginalization of the humanities" and "clears the field for the subjugation of these new technologies to the system of power and property relations" that dominates contemporary mass media (238). But Unsworth is optimistic, and believes that the computer has the potential to actually reverse the numbing and stupefying process--which he does acknowledge-- set in action by consumer-society mass media, with its CocaCola-driven TV programmings and its "interactive" home-shopping: while television seemed to be irreversably leading us towards "a sort of Nick at Nite future--Leave it to Beaver on demand", the web allows us to "hope for something better, and we might hope that the consumer will, at will, be able to become a producer" (239). He concludes by suggesting that it is up to us, scholars and "ordinary" consumers, to take advantage of the opportunity.

P.S. In the table of contents of the journal this article was taken from, I noticed an essay ominously titled "The Electronic Text and the Death of the Critical Edition". Wonder what hat's about....

Editors' Introduction

Burnard; O' Brien O' Keefe; Unsworth. Electronic Textual Editing: Editors' introduction

http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/intro.xml

Firstly, the editors emphasize the practical and economic constraints on the production and publishing of codex form scholarly editions, which appear to be circumnavigable in the digital medium. Next, they muse on how much the field of digital-form scholarship has grown (they are writing in 2006) since the footnote-like paragraph on electronic editing in the 1992 CSE guidelines, and note how even successive emendations/additions did little more than reify " the split that the 1992 Guidelines took for granted: there were ‘Scholarly Editions’ and ‘Electronic Scholarly Editions’. In presenting the pivotal establishment of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), they praise the compilation of its guidelines, which involved hundreds of scholars from different fields and geographical areas, as "an extraordinary example of international interdisciplinarity". Finally, the editors make a kind of passionate plea to universities and academic institutions to recognize the importance of converting the bulk of "our cultural heritage from print to electronic media", and giving professional credit to those who will take on this massive endeavor. The concluding paragraphs are dedicated to presenting in some detail the contents of the volume. The introduction ends with a preventive admittion/warning that the field of electronic textual editing still has a lot to learn., as might be expected when we consider that "it took five hundred years to naturalize the book, and a hundred and fifty years to develop the conventions of the scholarly edition in print".

Post Scriptum: There is a typo in the title section atop the page: the parenthesis after one of the editors' institute of affiliation never closes. A trivial matter, I know. But is it just amusingly ironic (that such would be the case in the editors' introduction to their digital edition of "Electronic Textual Editing") or does it actually in fact say something about electronic editions?....

Tanselle's Foreword to Electronic Textual Editing

http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/ETE/Preview/tanselle.xml

"Procedures and routines will be different; concepts and issues will not"

In his foreword, Tanselle depicts a historical shift by which, soon, the idea of "book" will no longer be tied to the solid codex form which every generation until ours has been accostumed to. He then mentions the importance of "presentation" and (as we might expect...) the need for reader awareness of any work's textual history. He suggests that the computer can act as facilitator of any sort of reading experience, but that it does not "alter[s] the ontology of texts and make[s] possible new kinds of reading and analysis". His primary concern involves the reliability of the text, and he believes the digital age cannot operate a break in the fundamental operations involved in reading, for an electronic text or a paper-based one are but "appearances" of a work. As a "tool", the computer can facilitate approaches to a text (especially thorough scholarly ones), but everything that is possible with the assistance of the digital medium was, at least technically, already possible before. Would the editor, say, of the Rossetti Archive agree with this stance?

The Blake Archive

As far as the attack on the Blake Archive, I will refrain from delving too deeply into it. It seems like the Archive's editors have thoroughly rebutted Cooper and Simpson's insinuations with a grace and a tactfultness that might have eluded some of my fellow bloggers. I shall just say that certainly the same "tyrannical" or "Urizenic" quality, which C & S detect in the WBA, can be easily ascribed, by the authors' same parameters, to the institutions cutting their checks or publishing their essays. I too cannot help but find Simpson and Cooper's claims grounded in a counter-productive utopia, and to be misguidedly nebulous and unjustifyably mean-spirited.

For my part, after spending a few hours exploring the Archive, I am positively blown away by its depth, thoroughness, and manageability. I found no problem in locating anything Blakeian I could think of, and was impressed in a very positive way by finally experiencing in practice that comunion of documentary and critical editions we've discussed so much in theory. I also thought that the search engine for the images was extraordinary--again, I am no authority, and Google might be working on something even more intuitive/sophisticated, but I personally had never seen anything like it, and found Cooper and Simpson's complaints incomprehensible if not downright ridiculous (I believe they revealed not only, as Will noted, a complete extraneity to the nuances of the digital medium, but a poor grasp of Kant as well) . On the negative side, I was a bit disappointed by finding that the image search does not cover the Divine Comedy illustrations. Regarding these, I enjoyed viewing them in the dazzlingly high definition advertised in class, but am having problems visualizing the reproduction to scale. On my laptop, when the image is allegedly at 100% scale, it in fact measures (on my screen) no more than 7 x 5 inches (whereas the originals are about 52 x 37 cm). Aside from the Archive's general introduction to the whole series, I also could not find any external scholarly commentary to the Comedy illustrations (either in its entirety or focusing on single pieces), but this seems to reflect the overall paucity of existing material to this effect (and that's where I come in, right? ).

In sum --although, would I really say anything different within this particular seminar?-- I found the Blake Archive far superior to its Rossettian "cousin", both in terms of its scholarly thoroughness and of its organization/user-friendliness. The only area where perhaps the Rossetti Archive has an edge, from what I could assess, is its exterior graphic/visual layout (its bigger fonts are a little easier to read, and the overall appearance of the page, including that mysterious window/fresco, is a little easier on the eye). I understand that this is a completely secondary concern; in fact, a more "hip" appearance might even be viewed as undermining the project's serious, academia-driven ambitions. However, I agree with Kroeber when he argues that tools like the WBA can play a significant role in fostering a fascination (naive, perhaps) with a particular artist or subject in highschool students, for whom a crisper, more appealing layout might be a stimulus to read on rather than a turn-off. Some of these teenagers may become Blake scholars, and may even one day contribute to the Archive's improvement/survival. Again, I am echoing Kroeber when I say that the success of similar projects is largely contingent upon 1) the "saintly" nature of a few good men and 2) the availability of necessary funds. I cannot imagine a more soothing appearance to be anything but beneficial in creating both of these required pre-conditions. And I seriously doubt that a touch of glamour-factor could really scare away the boring, bearded academics; afterall, if the British Encyclopedia came in a fluorescent tie-die box, it would still be the British Encyclopaedia (and would it sell more copies or less?). Besides, wasn't visual presentation such a key element in Blake's poetics, to the point that it ceased to be "presentation"?

Futurism...

Here it is! Since I am sure you've all been waiting for it, I give you my random Italian-related observation for the week:

I thought I'd throw onto the table the case of the Futurist movement, something McGann might have succesfully used in his "rationale" to corroborate his case for the necessity of electronic approaches to texts. Officially established in 1909 with the publication (first on Le Figaro, then in Italy) of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, Futurism stemmed out the remnants of French decadentism and symbolism, and was densely infused with Nietzschian and Bergsonian ideas. With its myriad of manifestos (on painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and even gastronomy --which in my view are often far more interesting than the art works themselves) the movement laid the ground for the manifesto as a legitimate literary genre, and is today considered the founding father of all 20th century avant-gardes. During the second half of the 20th century, all around the world, but especially in Italy, Futurism was largely ignored, even stigmatized, in academic circles, mainly beacuse of its eventual artistic and political confluence into the Italian Fascist Party (before that, the Futurist Party had a brief political existence of its own). Only recently has the movement become object of serious scholarly inquiry, and its impact on all 20th century art (which cannot be overestimated) highlighted. While it would be impossible to recapitulate here the characteristics of this very complex movement, let it suffice to say that its premise was a complete re-thinking of the conditions of both production and fruition of works of art. The old "pastist" conception of art (in Marinetti's words, "dusty and nauseating"), which involved museums full of classicist statues, sentimental stories of love and loss, beautifully composed paintings and perfectly structured, tear-inducing plays--in short, all that appealed to the sensibility of the insufferable (at least for Marinetti) fin-de-siecle burgeousie--was completely rejected.

The bottom line--something I've become acutely aware of in these weeks, studying Marinetti's "literature" while tackling for the first time textual criticism and hyperediting-- is how completely inadequate the book form (a critical edition no less than a paperback with no notes) is in presenting any Futurist text. In fact, the book itself, with its static and linear quality, was seen as one the emblems of what had to be swept away from the planet (one Futurist even designed the "mechanical book"). Futurism existed in an ebullient, vibrant environment which involved every facet of life. Not only the different genres of literature, sculpture, painting, music, architecture, music, etc. Even what to eat (Marinetti despised pasta, the nauseatingly "pastist" backbone of Italian cuisine -- and the bad pun might not only be mine), what to wear, how to walk, how to talk and make love to women were critical aspects of every person's life that the Futurists wished to reconfigure. Marinetti (and others to lesser extents) made a point of "artisticizing", or "theatralizing" his own life, exploiting his extraordinary fame, and hoped to be making an artistic, poetic statement everytime he walked into a store, or drove through the streets of Milan. Never before had a single, unitary movement (not even the French revolution!) made such a radical attempt to redefine and revolutionize every facet of society (at least in theory). Needless to say, not even the best imaginable interactive, hypermedial, online resource site would be able to recapture the atmosphere that could be felt in Futurist circles or wherever Marinetti (known as "Europe's caffeine") stepped foot. But it could certainly help. At least we may be able to hear the unique style in which Marinetti and other futurist poets recited their works. We could view the performances of Futurist plays (either in the little original footage that survives or in the several "faithful" reenactments that have recently been staged). We would be able to quickly access the infinity of prints, the posters, the manuscripts that this movement produced. We could listen to futurist music and view the way it appeared on sheet (the traditional musical notation was also rejected, replaced by a new, futurist one). We could look at the plans for Russolo's "noise-makers" and the sketches for Futurist buildings that were never actually built. Ideally, we'd be able to also view all every product of Futurist painting and sculpture (although much of these are very famous, and the hypothetical archive might face copyright issues similar to those encountered by McGann). And more importantly, we would be able to move quickly (may I say instantaneously?) through all this material, thus at least partially glimpsing the sybiosis between the arts (and between art and life) that Futurism postulated.

2009 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Futurist movement, and a multitude of conferences, events, and reenactments of Furturist "happenings" are in the making. However, as of now, no site even vaguely similar to what I described exists. The best I could find is a page with links to 15-20 of the Manifestos (out of 100s and 100s...). I am including it below, together with other links (misleading and simplistic as they may be) that may provide you with a basic idea of what Futurism was.

the wikipedia page (as usual, questionable): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism

the "best" Futurism page I could find: http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/

futurist art (some of the main names are Boccioni, Balla, Depero, Carra`): http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/f/futurism.html

a great video, with Marinetti speaking, if you understand Italian... (his style was the main influence behind Mussolini's oratory, which in turned was the inspiration for Hitler's):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X402kBJv7mc

McGann's tech-talk and the Rossetti Archive

In "Imagining what you don't know", McGann returns once again on the recent Cornell edition of Wordsworth, which exemplifies the limits of a present-day critical edition. The better and more thorough a critical edition is--seems to be the bottom line-- the more complicated to use and uninviting it will be. Obviously, his claim is that it would be better suited for a "hypermedia archive with a relational and object-oriented database [organized] as a fully searchable set of hyperrelated archival materials; as a reflexive system capable of self-study at various scales of attention."

McGann also elaborates on the greater potential of critical abstraction implicit in the electronic, computer-based approach:
"Translating paper-based texts into electronic forms entirely alters one's view of the original materials. So in the first two years of the Archive's development I was forced to study a fundamental limit of the scholarly edition in codex form that I had not been aware of. Using books to study books constrains the analysis to the same conceptual level as the materials to be studied. Electronic tools raise the level of critical abstraction in the same way that a mathematical approach to the study of natural phenomena shifts the theoretical view to a higher (or at any rate to a different) level."

The most interesting aspect of this paper was, in my view, the section in which McGann illustrates his discovery, through image-distorting programs, of chromatic patterns and compositional schemes in Rossetti's paintings that even an expert like himself had never previously noticed. His recollection of that experience highlisghts a feature of digital editing I had not yet thought about. He is suggesting that, at least as far as visual arts are concerned, the filtering of material through sophisticated computer-graphics programs can yield precious information about the work that would otherwise be lost. In this sense, digital editing truly takes on a life of its own, and is no longer limited to concentrate, interlink, accelerate, and facilitate access to the same information that on a purely theoretical level could still be presented in book-form (although the book might be 100.000 of pages long, and it would still possess that obsolete, linear, first-page-to-the-last quality). A "philosophical" question arises, however. In the closing remarks, Mc Gann claims that an image-filtering program such as the one he used could serve as "a critical and interpretive tool". If McGann is saying that those patterns could not have possibly been noticed outside of a digital environment, can we assume they were even deliberately intended by the artist himself? Was Rossetti counting on his paintings being analyzed with the help of 21st century computer software? And by distorting an image (a work...), are we not producing--perhaps to liberally-- another image, a new work? My opinion is that, if indeed those elements were consciously incorporated into the work by the artist, even if subtly concealed, then it must be possible for a receptor/critic to detect them using the instruments the artist assumed would be at the receptor/critic's disposal.

However, being the computer science ignoramus that I am, I was completely at a loss reading through the more technical paragraphs, detailing the evolution of the Rossetti archive. All I could take away from those sections are a few elementary questions, which will hopefully be answered during tomorrow discussion (although I think I might survive if for the rest of my life I never hear a word about SGML again):

what's the difference between HTML and SGML?

Is McGann saying that, because of the copyright issues, the reproductions of Rossetti's paintings in the Rossetti Archive are actually reproductions of photographs?

The Rationale of HyperText

McGann, Jerome. "The Rationale of Hypertext." (1995) ADHO

McGann's article, which from beginning from the title (clearly allusive to Greg's famous essay) discloses its ambition of establishing itself as a seminal work in a brand-new field, tackles the unavoidable notion that in today's increasingly computerized academia, scholars must "learn to use a new set of scholarly tools".

Why does the electronic medium offer boundless possibility to the critical editing of texts? Firstly, because to "deploy a book form to study another book form" presents a myriad of problems, including the necessity of apparati, notes, shorthand reference forms, bibliographies, and so forth. In short, "no single book or manageable set of books can incorporate for analysis all of the relevant documents". Furthermore, computerization allows for easy access to material not reproduceable in book form: the declamation of a poem, the performance of a play, In a virtual space, a book's "semantic and visual features", together with any amount of secondary literature, "can be made simultaneously present to each other". Many of the advantages, like not having to travel thousands of miles, or even to the nearest well-equipped library or video-store, are self-evident.

In the following section, McGann defines the concepts of hyperediting and hypermedia programs, which do not necesseraly entail the use of hypertext (nevertheless preferable, since it enables to quickly move through large masses of documents in complex ways), but require that "they have the power to include audial and/or visual documents in the system".

Next, the author argues for the "necessity of hypermedia" through a series of examples.

a)Robert Burns' ballads such as "Tam Glen" were written to existing popular melodies and composed with a focus on orality rather than textuality: they were intended to be sung and heard more than to be read. Why, therefore, would anyone prefer a book-form critical edition of Burns's complete works "to an equivalent edition based primarily on audial texts?"

b) The second example involves Blake, whose use of visual materials is so crucial to the whole of his literary corpus that no book form could possibly provide an adequate edition of his work. But something tells me we will have the chance to examine Blake's case more thoroughly in weeks to come.

c) McGann also mention the handycraft character of many Emily Dickinson's poems, who, for example, by attaching a postage stamp to the sheet of paper she would then write on, was creating "a kind of gravitational field for her writing".

d) Here the author mentions the case of pictury-poetry, a meteor-like genre that rose to prominence in the early 19th century, and the example of Laetitia Landon's work, impossible to properly approach without the incorporation of much visual material.

e) McGann mentions the latest critical edition of Wordsworth's Prelude, and the fact that this massive scholarly endeavor nevertheless failed, mostly for practical reasons, to include a critical edition of the "five book" version of the work. Similar problems could be easily avoiding with a hypermedia-based approach.

Next, the author discusses the implementation of his ideas in his own Rossetti Archive, together with the ulterior benefits that were revealed in the process of creating it (like the beauty of being able to change, revise, add and expand without the need for publishing a new book) and the arisal of new problems that traditional book-form editing did not present (like "how to incorporate digitized images into the computational field").

In the coda, McGann argues that HyperEditing requires a well-planned structure and must be organized according to logical principles, but like a library (the structure it most resembles), it is intended for "indefinite expansion". Therefore, in the author's view there is no need for a "central text" around which to organize the system, contrary to what many other theorists advocated at the time (and perhaps still now).

Final Intention?

Regarding authorial intention, I cannot accept the claim that final intention should be the primary basis of a copy-text. Without delving into Gadamer's hermeneutics or Derridian deconstruction (in doing so I would run the risk of corrupting, rather than corroborating, McGann's arguments), I will attempt to substantiate my view with simplistic historical data. Countless of the world's greatest authors have burned or otherwise destroyed their work, some soon after its composition and others many decades afterwards, towards the end of their life. I have mentioned in class the example of Tasso, who for the last decades of his life disowned the Gerusalemme Liberata-- now, and for the past 4 centuries, unanimously regarded as one the great masterpieces of all time-- and made every effort to halt its circulation and destroy every existing copy of it. There are many more examples, from Boccaccio being dissuaded by Petrarch from distroying all his manuscripts (his shabby house WAS very cold...) to Botticelli burning his paintings in Savonarola's bonfire, to Gogol doing the same with all his opus (we will never know if volume two of The Dead Souls was even greater than the first part, and we only have the first part through the deceit of his friend). All the cases listed above were triggered by the onset of religious conversion/breakthrough, an ardent spiritual fanatism that today's scholars and psychologists link to mental illness. Would advocates of "final intention" say that it doesn't count if the authors discover God or if they're diagnosed with schizophrenia? Does not all art involve a deeply spiritual process? And do not all great artists possess minds that are everything but "normal"? The "New Critics" (I forget which) state that "the work is not the property of the author", and Maurice Blanchot, in The Space of Literature, argues that a poet (quite Orphically...) "loses" the work in the moment he sets it on paper: "from the moment he writes it, it becomes unreadable to him". To conclude, I would like to touch upon an artist that has made the issues we will tackle in this week's class the very center of his own art: the 20th century (meta)sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who operated in Paris from th 30s to the 50s, classified alternatively as existentialist, surrealist, or formalist, but always eluding easy categorization. His elongated, fleshless, and ultra-emaciated figures usually began as more voluminous pieces (often almost realistic), but he picked away at them until they assumed their characteristic aspect. In fact, he would show them at exhibitions, then go back to them and thin them out further. Sometimes, a same piece (but not the same work, right?) would appear in a show 10 years later weighing half the size. However Giacometti, would keep returning even to his most accoladed sculptures, often working until they crumbled to the ground and were swept away by the maid that tended to his studio. "The work," he stated, "is not finished until there it is completely destroyed, until there is absolutely nothing".

http://www.electroasylum.com/giacometti/

http://mediaplayer.archives.tsr.ch/personnalite-giacometti/3.wmv
(a video of the artist talking about his "poetics", in French, with images of his sculptures)

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/giacometti.html
(a decent article in English, with links to some images)

Tanselle's Rationale

Tanselle, Thomas. A Rationale of Textual Criticism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989; second edition, 1992.

MAIN POINTS:

Chapter 1

The first chapter/lecture is yet another overview of what textual criticism is/does, etc:
- the uniqueness of literature compared to static forms of art. in painting and sculpture, art and artifact mostly coincide: do we not need to consider the "corporeal reality of literary works"?
-distinction between text and work. The work is unattainable (let us think of a platonic idea); any text, even the original manuscript, is a reproduction of the work.
-as editors, the key issue is "whether historical reconstruction or current effectiveness should take precedence, when the two don't seem to coincide".

Chapter 2

No text is ever definitive: "the world of documents is a world of imperfection."
-there are infinite potential versions in the author's mind even before he starts writing.
-"every artifact displays the residue of an unequal cotest: the effort of a human being to transcend the human" (64)
-There is an "inherent uncertainty" about all works using words as medium, since any document is the result of countless contingencies, and its preservation the result of countless more.
-stress on the necessity of "creative and informed judgement" on the part of the editor/critic.
-Textual criticism must aim to bring to the surface, rather than to conceal, the fluctuating dynamics (the history of its transmission and transcription)which lye beneath the staticity of any document:
"even though a document [...] possesses this claming and nourishing stasis, we must also recognize [...] that it reflects the pulsing and tortuous underside of stasis. [...] the text of documents preserve a partial record of that struggle, and the effort to make this record [..] known is a noble service."

Chapter 3

-textual criticism involves "the search for past intentions in all their rich complexity"
- the impossibility to escape authorial intention (T. antagonizes the concept of "shared" authorship)
-" there is still a single mind that provided the impetus for each work"
-authorial intention (the work that took shape in his mind) vs. authorial action (what he actually wrote)
-accept some revisions but not others?
-initial intention vs. final intention, and all the points in between (but there is also the last document they left, without regarding it as finished. i. e Wolfe or Hemingway)
- list of factors that influence an editor's decisions



I have found a paper which briefly sketches the recent developments in bibliographical studies, and includes a comparative evaluation of Tanselle's and McGann's work:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1387/is_3_52/ai_n6080405/pg_1



Observation: At pages 22-24, the author likens textual reproductions of literary works to musical scores (which like any text may be faulty or subject to textual criticism), and compares a reader to an orchestra conductor, since while reading (whether silently or aloud) he/she is "performing" the work according to his/her own understanding of it, sensibility, voice pitch, etc. This raised another question in my mind: since practically all works of literature are transcribed without any sort of guidelines as to how they should be read/performed, what "version" of the text does the work actually resemble? This is most problematic regarding prose: for example, in a 10-line period of Goethe's Werther, which secondary clause should be read with more emphasis and which with less, which should be read faster and which slower, etc. In poetry, at least for as long as it adhered to conventional forms, we do have a set of practical guidelines: metrics, rhythm, rhyme, line breaks, enjambements, divisions in stanzas, allitterations--nearly every figure of speach can be taken as an instruction for the phonic performance of the text. Yet there must be a difference between the way "shall I compare thee" sounds when read by me and when Shakespeare recited it for his friends. And was there not a difference between the way it must have sounded in WIllie's mind when he penned it and how it sounded, to his audience and even to him, when he spoke it aloud? (I know that is certainly the case for my own poems, which every now and then, to my utter disgust, I dare to read aloud... to myself). We may hear an audio recording of Robert Frost reading "Mending Wall", so must we assume THAT is the closest approximation to the actual, ineffable WORK? Would it not sound different even if Frost himself had recorded it 20 years later? Is, therefore, every act of "performing" a text a process of emendation? I don't know if these observations are cogent or interesting. But I do know that they have helped me understand, beyond the elusive and intuitive level, that whenever we read, we truly do engage in an act of textual criticism. thoughts/comments?

WORKS IN TRANSLATION

Again I'd like to bring in a couple of examples from my own field of specialization, and pose this question: is there a generally accepted approach for compiling a critical edition of a work in translation?

for major and universally studied authors, like Dante and Boccaccio, this would seem to be an important matter. Yet, from my own experience, there seems to be a great deal of indefiniteness regarding how to go about this. For example:

Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia is considered the first Italian work of linguistics, and the first such work ever to be written by a poet. It is an unfinished Latin treatise in defense of the "vulgar" language (which would eventually come to be known as "Italian"), and while it is written in (Dante's medieval) Latin, it is widely regarded (presumably because of its author) as part of the Italian literary canon. The commonly recognized critical edition of this work is the one published in 1968 by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo. For the English-speaking public, the work of reference is Steven Botterill's 1996 edition, which draws exclusively on Mengaldo's edition. But while Mengaldo draws from several manuscripts after a decades-long process of researching and studying the DVE's manuscript tradition, Botterill only considers the Latin text established by Mengaldo (and, from what I can tell, his Italian translation!). Is this acceptable?

Another interesting case is that of Dante's Rime, the posthumous collection of lyrics which were never included in an "official" work (like the Convivio, the Fiore, or the Vita Nuova), and never divulged together, as one work, by the author (unlike, for example, Petrarch's Canzoniere). For most of the 20th century, the Rime circulated in several editions, which differed from one another but only marginally (most accepted the ordering of the poems which had established itself throughout the centuries, and included as an appendix the "rime dubbie", those of uncertain attribution). A couple of years ago, leading dantist Domenico De Robertis published the crowning work of his long career, a new critical edition of the Rime which radically subverts the previously established order of the poems, definitively attributes to Dante several of the "rime dubbie" while ousting others which had long been attributed to him, and operates many changes in the accepted spelling. De Robertis' latest edition almost instantly established itself as the work of reference among Dante scholars. However, a non-Italian-speaking reader, as of now, has no access to it, as neither the whole work nor the 300-page introduction have been translated into English (nor, as far as I know, in any other language).... Furthermore, is it possible to simply "translate" a critical edition of a work? Wouldn't anyone embarking in such a task (you'd assume he/she would also be an authority in the field) inevitably come across certain things he/she wouldn't agree with? Can you have a critical edition of a critical edition? (perhaps it would be useful, but poetry itself is so unappealing to publishers, because of its extremely low mass appeal and profitability...)

Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text" (1951)

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/bsuva/sb/ (vol. 3, pgg 19-36)

As I understand, this is one of the seminal essays in all 20th century textual criticism, as is demonstrated by the introduction of so many ideas and terms that would establish themselves as mainstays in the scholarly debates and in the technical jargon.

ACCIDENTALS AND SUBSTANTIVES: "we need to draw a distinction between the significant, or as I shall call them 'substantive', readings of the text, those namely that affect the author's meaning or the essence of his expression, and others, such in general as spelling, punctuation, word-division, and the like, affecting mainly its formal presentation, which may be regarded as the accidents, or as I shall call them 'accidentals', of the text" (21).

[I disagree with Greg's statement that substantives constitute "the significant . . . readings of the text, those namely that affect the author's meaning or the essence of his expression" (21). This might be true in many cases of prose writing, but in a modern poem, a comma or a line-break can have a radical role in shaping "the essence" of the author's expression.]

BASIC POINT: "The true theory is, I contend, that the copy-text should govern (generally) in the matter of accidentals, but that the choice between substantive readings belongs to the general theory of textual criticism and lies altogether beyond the narrow principle of the copy-text. Thus it may happen that in a critical edition the text rightly chosen as copy may not by any means be the one that supplies most substantive readings in cases of variation" (26).

THE PROBLEM OF REVISIONS (and the necessity of good personal judgement!): "The fact is that cases of revision differ so greatly in circumstances and character that it seems impossible to lay down any hard and fast rule as to when an editor should take the original edition as his copy-text and when the revised reprint. All that can be said is that if the original be selected, then the author's corrections must be incorporated; and that if the reprint be selected, then the original reading must be restored when that of the reprint is due to unauthorized variation. Thus the editor cannot escape the responsibility of distinguishing to the best of his ability between the two categories. No juggling with copy-text will relieve him of the duty and necessity of exercizing his own judgement."

MLA guidelines

http://www.mla.org/cse_guidelines

The official Modern Language Association "guidelines for editors of scholarly editions" provide an excellent starting point for anyone venturing for the first time, as myself, into the world of textual criticism. They offer a thorugh checklist for editors, aimed at the redaction of a "reliable" text. They also include a useful glossary of relevant terms (like "collation", "emendation", "base text", "copy text", "accidentals" vs. "substantives", "textual notes" vs. "explanatory notes", "stemma", etc.) and an annotated bibliography of the key works in the theory of textual editing.

Textual Scholarship in the United States

http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/cse.htm

The mission page of the Committee for Scholarly Editions (CSE) alleges a great deal of activity and advancement in the area of textual scholarship. While I am certainly no authority in this regard, I have been led to believe (by my Italian professors and by my readings) that the field of textual criticism versed in a sorry state around here, and that the quality of critical editions remains quite poor in the United States as compared to overseas. In Italy (my country of origin), in particular, textual criticism is thriving and very advanced. This seems quite natural, as the primary works of the national canon are mostly from the medieval and Renaissance periods, and establishing acceptable texts is still problematic, even for the major authors. New critical editions of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, etc.. spurt out with extraordinary frequency, like mushrooms in rain, and armies of philologists still come to blows over every page of the Convivio, the Vita Nuova, The Gerusalemme, and so forth. The extremly recent inception of the CSE (in 1976) appears to confirm that in the US, at least until recently, the field of textual scholarship has been largely neglected. Is that in fact the case? And if so, why? and what does that mean? Thoughts/comments?

CAVE CANEM!

I am new to this, but I'm pretty sure I came up with a wicked title for my blog...

Jokes aside, on this page I will post comments, thoughts, and other material related to Prof. Viscomi's ENGL 841 seminar. I am new to the worlds of textual editing and hypermedia, so bear with me if my entries are irrelevant, banal, or misguided...

a presto,

David Cane