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?