Text Editing, Print and the Digital World

Citation

Jukes, E. (2010), "Text Editing, Print and the Digital World", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 44 No. 1, pp. 73-77. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330331011019726

Text Editing, Print and the Digital World is another title in the Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series, each of which comprises a critical examination of the application of advanced ICT methods in the arts and humanities and, in particular, the application of formal computationally‐based methods in discrete, but often interlinked, areas of arts and humanities research.

The essays come from presentations given at several seminars on textual editing and the new possibilities offered by digital technologies held by the ICT Methods Network at King's College London during 2006. The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) ICT Methods Network, which was based at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) at King's co‐ordinated and supported all Methods Network activities and publications, as well as developing outreach to, and collaboration with, other centres of excellence in the UK. The aim of this work is as an appraisal of the current state of digital editing, considered from a number of perspectives, as well as its benefits and drawbacks in the development of complex editions.

Editors, Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, provide a useful introduction and explain that there has been much debate in recent years about the use and value of the computer in the preparation and presentation of scholarly editions of literary works. Many now consider that traditional critical editing, as defined by the paper and print limitations of the codex format, is now inadequate for the expression and interpretation of complex, multi‐layered or multi‐text works of human imagination. Indeed, some suggest that, in future, all editions should be produced in digital and/or online form because digital tools provide scholars, critics, teachers, and non‐professional readers with better representations of such literary works.

The editors say that the essays address the issues of digital editing from a range of disciplinary perspectives and commitments to old and new media, and this work addresses questions such as how seriously in the current mixed environment do we envisage the falling away of print in respect of the electronic edition? What do we envisage the cultural status of the electronic edition to be? What new kinds of edition are made possible through the electronic medium? What constitutes an edition in the electronic medium and how is it related to the notion of an electronic archive? Has the role of the editor changed in the electronic environment and what new kinds of editing partnerships are emerging?

The book is divided into two parts – the theoretical and the practical. Editor, Kathryn Sutherland, provides the first essay. “Being critical: paper‐based editing and the digital environment”. This provides a definition of textual criticism, which is that branch of literary studies charged with establishing the status of texts – traditionally of literary works disseminated as written and printed documents, but that which we have, in the last few decades, extended “to the complex of cultural practices whose codes are not necessarily written, but nevertheless amenable to analysis or close reading, as though they were part of the written record”. This refers, of course, to visual, oral, and numeric data (film music, recorded sound, print, photographs) including buildings, clothing, dance, rituals of various kinds. Textual criticism, we are reminded, should be critical, and its assumptions have to do with identifying what text is. Sutherland is rightly concerned that we may not yet have thought hard enough about the purposes that electronic editions might serve. We need to know what assumptions about texts underlie their production and that an electronic equivalent of textual theory is urgently needed such that it will take into account the essential difference between print texts and digital texts. She observes that some texts lose an essential aspect – their “bookishness” – by translation into electronic form.

Mats Dahlström in “The compleat edition” examines scholarly editions from a Scandinavian national editing viewpoint including works of Ibsen and Almqvist, noting that the web edition turns into a large resource archive and editorial laboratory, which can affect the scope and function of the editorial material being printed. The printed version does not have to include the laboratory material, but can confine itself to a single, uniform reader's text with a minimum of editorial tools and paratexts. He considers the scholarly edition as a bibliographical tool and notes that editing is an attempt to produce a document that bibliographically constitutes other documents. He takes the view that the nature of editions is rhetorical rather than neutral, social rather than individualistic, and one of complex translation rather than simple transmission. His conclusion is that scholarly editions and other bibliographical tools need to be seen, not as neutral prolongers of the life of the works and documents, but as filtering media affecting them and our way of perceiving them.

Dino Buzzetti in “Digital editions and text processing” says that present‐day digital editions, for all their merits, are not yet fully digital, since they do not fully exploit the distinctive features of the digital form of textual representation to obtain better critical and analytical results. Buzzetti makes the important point that a digital edition is in the first place a representation, a particular form of representation of textual information. So, it could be said that the digital edition is an “image” of the text‐image being taken figuratively and not literally, which then acknowledges the semiotic nature of the text. Buzzetti's goal is to develop a semiotics of digital text rather than a sociology of text. He takes the view that XML semantics have not been entirely successful because the role of markup itself has been understood in only limited and fairly mechanical ways. He takes the view that it is necessary for users to imaginatively engage with the question of the purposes served by electronic editions.

Paul Eggert, in “The book, the e‐text and the ‘work‐site’” comments that anyone preparing a scholarly edition of a classic literary work intended for print publication does so nowadays “under the louring shades of the electronic edition” seeing the future of the book for the scholarly function as a “nearly unbackable proposition”. The book‐based edition is apparently as dead as a dodo, which is, he says, the now widely accepted (but less widely enacted) wisdom. While Eggert's piece has been positioned in the “theoretical” part of the book, he provides a refreshing practical example, and illustrations, relating to work he is undertaking on the preparation of a scholarly edition of the 52 short stories published in 1896 as While the Billy Boils by the Australian writer, Henry Lawson. These stories exist in various newspaper printings, and in heavily revised and corrected clippings of the printings mounted on the back of large publishers' brochures, which were prepared to serve much the same function as galley proofs for Lawson.

“Open source critical editions: a rationale” by Gabriel Bodard and Juan Garcés proposes a model for digital critical editions to be recognised as a deeper, richer, and potentially very different kind of publication from printed editions of texts, even if such editions are digitised and made available in open content form. The authors of this essay point out that the Open Content model is an extremely important new movement in publication and they hope that their presentation of the rationale of the OSCEs will provide a summary of the vigorous discussion of these issues, open the arguments up to a wider audience and lay foundations for future projects and discussions.

The final chapter in the first part of the book is by Edward Vanhoutte, who discusses under “Every reader his own bibliographer – an absurdity?” asks the question “who buys editions and why?” and argues that scholarly editing as a discipline is in disharmony with the importance of the scholarly edition as a cultural project. He goes on to suggest that it is time to propose the use of electronic scholarly editing as a mode for reintegrating (or integrating) the scholarly edition with the reading edition without any compromise of academic value.

I confess a feeling of pleasant anticipation – almost a rolling up of the sleeves – when I came to part 2, which is the practical part of the book.

Espen S. Ore in “… they hid their books underground” considers a number of different forms that an electronic edition may take and suggests that such editions can span a broadly‐defined field ranging from the critical scholarly edition to the large‐scale, more or less automated, digitisation of considerable amounts of data. The practical examples used are from projects from Norway. One such project was produced on a set of CDs within a proprietary delivery system, which means that, even if the CDs themselves are preserved, it is impossible to guarantee their longevity. The author poses the question as to whether this archive should be considered an edition? This essay does make the important observation that books have the advantage of being (relatively) inert, but that the electronic digital archive can be plagued by the problem of the longevity (or otherwise) of proprietary software.

Linda Bree and James McLaverty are in the fortunate position of having substantial ground support for the Jonathan Swift archive, which can produce electronic, searchable versions of the wide range of texts produced by Swift in all of the lifetime editions that survive. They argue in “The Cambridge edition of the works of Jonathan Swift and the future of the scholarly edition” that the future of the scholarly edition lies in the creation of complementary print and electronic text versions. The Cambridge edition will appear in 15 print volumes and they put forward the desirability of uniting the authority of the traditional print edition with the searchable multiple text made possible by electronic publication.

Critical editions of periodicals are extremely rare in paper form. James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor look at the problems of editing periodicals in the digital domain in “Editions and archives: textual editing and the nineteenth‐century serials edition”. The authors note that periodicals are habitually considered as books that happen to have been published serially and that the very practice of binding them into volumes emulates this latent desire, embodied in the book, for permanence and coherence. But, they believe, such an approach misrepresents the open‐ended nature of periodical publication, and the relationship that a single number has to a specific moment. They observe that serial novels have a coherence predicated by their genre and warranted by a single author, whereas a serial novel has a definite end‐point, even if unknown by the author at the time of writing, a periodical, on the whole, attempts to exist for as long as possible. So, very few periodicals are authored by a single individual and most were recognised as having a team, despite concealing their activities behind the editorial “we”. This chapter, which carries rather more illustrations than others, considers various publications, including Blackwood's Magazine, the Penny Illustrated Newspaper, the Northern Star, and others, and includes a number of website examples. The authors conclude that in editing nineteenth‐century periodicals today, they are, like their nineteenth‐century predecessors, simultaneously editors, publishers, and hawkers.

Charlotte Roueché, as a scholar in the humanities, found it intimidating to embark on a project with a substantial technical component and then to formulate the experience in writing. Her expertise is in Roman and late Roman epigraphy, the study of inscribed stones, and she says that she is a “relative newcomer” to humanities computing. Her experience of the humanist's use for electronic resources was largely confined to experience on one project and the issues that it raised and the chapter is a narrative account of the project of “Digitising inscribed texts”, setting out the practical issues, while trying to draw attention to the generic and methodological issues. The Graeco‐Roman City of Aphrodisias in South‐western Turkey flourished from the late Hellenistic period (second century BC) to the end of antiquity (sixth century AD). The city was outstandingly rich in an excellent local marble, as well as a large quantity of sculpture, the consequences were the production of inscribed texts and even simple public notices are inscribed rather than painted. Western visitors began to record these inscribed texts at the site in the early eighteenth century and many were published by various authors on to all sorts of materials as well as drawn and copied paper. There were also “squeezes”, which are made by wetting blotting paper and placing it over the face of an inscription, which is then rubbed with a brush, giving an excellent impression of the texture of the stone and letters of the inscription (I remember a session on the problems of digitising “squeezes” at a seminar I attended some years ago – fascinating!) Late in the century, photography started to be used, but squeezes and drawings continued their importance. The author suggests that it could be argued that epigraphers “invented” markup and established the conventions by which texts are presented electronically. She suggests that epigraphers know that everything they do is a compromise because they have to “squeeze stones on to paper”. She suggests that any electronic project must grow out of an identified need and a full assessment of the purposes and audience such a project would serve.

The volume ends with an intriguing chapter heading “Digital genetic editions: the encoding of time in manuscript transcription”, in which author, Elena Pierazzo, points out that writing, which includes correcting and rewriting, is a process that occurs in time as well as space, and that this simple and obvious statement involves many complex issues, both theoretical and practical, for the transcription and encoding of manuscript texts. Technical improvements in digital photography have enabled easy access to scholars to high‐quality reproductions of primary sources in libraries all over the world. The wide availability and relatively low cost of the representation of sources in a digital environment is dramatically influencing editorial practice, and offering the possibility of reproducing and verifying the scholarly work carried out on the text, and it is even more true for modern manuscript editions, where access to autographic source material had made genetic criticism more easily exploitable by a large community of scholars. Many digital editions of (autographic) manuscripts are available on the web but, according to Pierazzo, they avoid the crucial task of representing the different layers of authorial correction that occurred at different points in the authorial workflow. Pierazzo contends that a scholarly evaluation of timing is crucial in the case of modern autograph draft and working manuscripts because the stratification of corrections, deletions, and additions can give insights into the author's way of working, and into the work itself, into the evolution of the author's meaning/interpretation of the text, and “because (mostly because, according to genetic critical theorists) working on draft manuscripts, as well as final versions, are texts worth exploring in themselves.” Genetic criticism, says Pierazzo, can discover great advantages in new information technologies, not only because of the multiple lay‐out of the transcribed text and the possibility of connecting it to facsimile representations of the source manuscript can cater for diversified user needs, but because the temporal dimension can be better represented in digital than in print format.

The book includes a sizable bibliography and (thankfully) a list of acronyms and abbreviations. The lay‐out is excellent with a clear font and plenty of white space. The illustrations that are included are relevant to their essay.

The editors, who are experts in their field, have carried out an excellent job in ensuring an even style of reading, and have selected the essays well in order to provide an authoritative and challenging work. The work offers a re‐evaluation of print‐based editing and how the methodology is changing in order to reflect an increasing significance of digital tools and methodologies.

Text Editing, Print and the Digital World is recommended as an important resource for those who wish to have a deeper understanding of this field, and who seek challenging questions in a balanced work. The book is not one for a novice in the field ‐ it is definitely one for the cognoscenti ‐ and will be highly appreciated by its community. It will prove invaluable to students and researchers in the field, and also to the wider editorial community, for much that is written about in these essays is of interest to those working on contemporary publications.