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...
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
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....
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?....
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?
"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?
Monday, February 11, 2008
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"?
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"?
Monday, February 4, 2008
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
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?
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?
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