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?