University of Virginia Library

III

It is not surprising that a considerable body of writing in the last
years of the twentieth century was devoted to electronic editions, just as
the role and effect of computers in other areas of life have been the subject
of ubiquitous discussion. The first book that comes to mind when
one thinks of the use of computers in editing is Peter L. Shillingsburg's
Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, a third edition of which appeared
in 1996. This book, since its first appearance in 1984,[50] has become
established as a basic guide, and it deserves its success not only
because it is well-informed and sensible but also because it deals with the
complexities of electronic publication in the context of the issues that
inform all scholarly editing. As the title suggests, the book is essentially
an introduction to scholarly editing, one that takes into particular account
the advantages of electronic presentation; it recognizes that editors
who wish to make the most effective use of electronic capabilities must
be thoroughly cognizant of the various goals of scholarly editing and of
the divergent but complementary views of literature that underlie them.
Electronic publication, in other words, is only a means to the ends that
scholarly editions have always had.

For the 1996 edition of his book, Shillingsburg (besides making local
revisions throughout)[51] has added two new chapters: "Critical Editions,"

coming at the end of the first section of the book ("Theory"), and "Electronic
Editions," placed at the end of the final section ("Practicalities").
Both are excellent basic statements, concise and lucid, and constitute a
good reason for readers already familiar with this book to look at it
again. "Critical Editions" skillfully outlines the bases for authorial and
sociological editing and explains why both are necessary and why arguments
denigrating one or the other are not productive.[52] As Shillingsburg
says, we can gain more insights into authors and works "with a variety
of tools than with just one" (p. 100). His chapter on "Electronic Editions"
is important for stating emphatically that scholarly editors "bring
to electronic publishing all the concerns of textual criticism that occupied
us in the first part of this book" (p. 163). In other words, an electronic
edition is a form of presentation and, as such, does not pose a different
set of theoretical issues from the one faced by editors who present
their work in a different form. Note that Shillingsburg uses the phrase
"electronic publishing" here, just as he does in the opening of the first
sentence of this chapter, immediately below the title "Electronic Editions."
Despite the false parallelism of the two new chapter titles, reinforced
by the symmetry of their placement, the one on "Electronic Editions"
does come in the section called "Practicalities," and Shillingsburg
clearly understands that an electronic edition can also be a critical
edition.

Indeed, it will be more useful if it contains critical as well as documentary
texts. An electronic "archive"—as an electronic collection of
documentary texts, both in transcribed (searchable) form and in image
form, is often called—is likely to seem "an undigested chaos of material
in which everyone must become an editor before proceeding" (p. 165).
It should at least be "webbed or networked with cross-references connecting
variant texts, explanatory notes, contextual materials, and parallel
texts," along with introductions and variorum commentary. But
beyond that, "authorial editors . . . will, in the electronic edition as in
the print edition, provide an edited, critical, eclectic text representing
their notion of what the text should have been—the new text webbed

and cross-referenced into the archive" (p. 166). Such a text is unquestionably
an appropriate part of an electronic edition—though Shillingsburg
might have made clearer the desirability of multiple critical texts, reflecting
different stages of authorial intention as well as one or more
stages of collaborative intention (since scribal or printed texts do not
necessarily reflect their makers' intentions fully). After all, the space
available for presenting multiple texts in full is the basis for the many
advantages that electronic editions offer; and just as a wide array of documentary
texts should be made available, so should a series of critical
texts.

Although Shillingsburg's treatment of electronic matters as "practicalities"
is one of the most valuable aspects of his discussion, he does
sometimes verge on asserting the kind of excessive conceptual claims for
electronic texts that less thoughtful writers often make. For example, he
says that the electronic medium gives scholarly editors "opportunities
to extend their notions of what constitutes the work of art and how it
can be read" (p. 163). Or again: "The electronic medium has extended
the textual world; . . . it has added dimensions and ease of mobility to
our concepts of textuality" (p. 164). Ease of mobility, yes, for the most
part; but "dimensions" added to our "concepts of textuality"? Our
"notions of what constitutes the work of art" are not limited or impoverished
by the codex form; what is often hampered by that form is
the facility with which we can read variants in context and move back
and forth between corresponding passages of different texts. We could
always do these things, but often it took a great deal of effort to do so.
When Shillingsburg says that "students of a text will more readily than
was ever the case in print editions be able to confront textual cruxes for
themselves" (p. 166), he comes nearer the point, since students could
confront cruxes in printed editions also; but I would delete "be able to"
from his sentence, because one is able to study cruxes "readily" in either
case, and the real point is that in many instances one can probably study
them "more readily" in electronic texts.[53]

Shillingsburg thinks that the electronic edition is "a tool for students
of a work" and "not primarily . . . a place to sit [sic] and read through a
novel or poem for a first-time experience of the work or for the pleasure
of a good read" (p. 165). The same could be said for scholarly editions in
printed form, which are often read in nonlinear fashion. But of course
the main text in a printed edition, especially if it is free of symbols, can
be read for pleasure, simply because it is in the familiar codex form.
And we may confidently say that ebooks, which are improving rapidly,

will eventually be accepted as a pleasant form in which to read the texts
of an electronic edition. They may even help to break down the distinction
between "a tool for students" and a vehicle for "a good read," bringing
to more people the pleasures of textual awareness. Even though
Shillingsburg's chapter would have benefited from greater attention to
such points, it remains a fine introduction, manifesting a sensible outlook
and offering in concise and readable form a considerable amount
of advice on technical matters.

Shillingsburg has written about electronic editions in other places
as well, such as his short article entitled "Principles for Electronic Archives,
Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials" (on pages 23-35 of the Finneran
anthology to be discussed below). Although he gives far more attention
to the "archives" of his title than to the "editions," his phrase
"archive of editions" (p. 24) shows that his concept of the archive is
broad enough to encompass critical editions. (Critical editions, after all,
even those newly produced, are documents in the history of a work.)
Shillingburg's piece is essentially an outline of desirable "industry standards"
for editions (capability of handling multimedia and accessibility
on different hardware platforms) and of "ideal goals" (including searchable
texts along with images, linkages among texts, and appropriate encoding);
it ends with a list of "general principles" regarding usability,
transportability, archive specifications, security, integrity, expandability,
printability, and convenience (largely reprinted from a document of his
that was distributed at the 1993 meeting of the Modern Language Association
of America, one that became part of the background for the draft
guidelines issued in 1997 by the MLA's Committee on Scholarly Editions).
He is concerned here with technical, not editorial, considerations;
and although the points he makes are elementary, there is clearly a value
in having a concise statement of basic points from a person with Shillingsburg's
extensive experience with electronic editions.

After Shillingsburg, the most prominent writer on electronic editing
is Jerome McGann, whose "The Rationale of HyperText" has been
made available in several places.[54] That title, with its definite article, is

an obvious allusion to Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text," and McGann
explicitly states that he wrote the piece "in a conscious revisionary
relation to W. W. Greg's great essay" (p. 32). McGann's reputation and
the portentousness of his title arouse great expectations, which the piece
itself unfortunately does not fulfill. Although he is well aware of the
plethora of "Lofty reflections on the cultural significance of information
technology" (p. 11), he comes close to supplying another one, for he tries
to endow a simple practical point with unwarranted philosophical significance.[55]
The simple point is this: electronic texts and hypermedia
archives often allow one to do many desirable things more easily than
one could accomplish them using the codex form. Linkages between
texts are obviously facilitated by the electronic medium, and it is clearly
better to have oral texts (when they are relevant) embedded in the same
framework as visible texts, rather than furnished in the form of recordings
slipped into a pocket at the back of a book. No one needs a "rationale"
to understand why a more efficient tool should replace a less efficient
one.

When he concentrates on practical advice, which is what the essay is
really about, he makes good sense. For example, he wisely distinguishes
between a word-processed text and a hyperedited one, for the former is
not greatly different from what is encountered in a printed book, whereas
hyperediting uses "computerization as a means to secure freedom from
the analytic limits of hard copy text" (p. 15). And his advice to use a
hypermedia program in a hyperediting project, in order to accommodate
auditory and visible documents, is obviously sound, since doing so takes
fullest advantage of what the electronic medium offers. As he repeatedly
asks, in one form or another, "Why would anyone wish to do without it?"
Two other pieces of advice are to design a project in terms of its "largest
and most ambitious goals," not in terms of "immediate hardware or
software options," and to structure the program in the "most modular
and flexible way," so that technical advances can be imported into it with
as little disruption as possible (p. 16). This is just common sense, and
not part of a "rationale," but I would not wish to object to the uttering
of common sense.

What I do find objectionable, and indeed unnecessary, is the philosophical
framework into which his sensible advice is set. He begins by
distinguishing between works of the literary imagination and "textual
works that are instruments of scientific knowledge" (p. 12). It is surprising
that anyone would still take this notion seriously. The construction
of every work made of words (as of other media) involves rhetorical

choices, and thus artistry; and the presentation of every such work,
whether in oral or tangible form, affects its meaning as taken in by
listeners or readers. To draw a fixed line between works of the imagination
and works of scientific knowledge is impossible because all works
are combinations of both kinds of understanding (if indeed they really
are two kinds). Yet McGann is willing to say flatly, "To the imagination
the materialities of text (oral, written, printed, electronic) are incarnational
not vehicular forms. But for the scientist and scholar, the media
of expression are primarily conceptual utilities, means rather than ends"
(p. 12). Literary critics, however, as McGann well knows, do not exclude
from their investigative domain works of expository prose, even when
the authors are scholars and scientists. In any case, debating the point
(which has itself been the subject of a considerable literature) is irrelevant
to a discussion of scholarly editing, for all verbal works, regardless
of how one classifies them, are equally in need of the application of
textual scholarship.[56]

It is nevertheless easy to see why McGann felt it necessary to go into
this matter. Since the position for which he is well known holds that the
texts of literary works include their visible (and oral) presentations, he
has to regard scholarly editions as being treatises about the texts of literary
works, not presentations of those texts, in order to justify the use,
in an edition, of a different physical medium (such as the electronic,
which it is the purpose of the essay to advocate) from the one in which
the work first appeared. Therefore he says at the outset, "My remarks
here apply only to textual works that are instruments of scientific knowledge"
(p. 12). (This caveat would logically have been required, of course,
even if he were writing about scholarly printed editions, since those
editions cannot ever be the equivalent of the original printings of the
works concerned.) The price he pays for trying to maintain his position
in this fashion is an illogical wavering between a focus on authorial intention
and a focus on collaborative social results. For if material media
are "incarnational" (in the sense of being the opposite of "vehicular")
to creators of literary works, then the claim that scholarly editions, with
their different physical incarnation, are scientific works (no longer the
original imaginative works) reflects an emphasis on authorial intention.
Yet McGann's interest in the visible (or oral) product is in other respects

an attempt to place intention within a social context, where nonauthorial
intentions in particular areas often outweigh the authorial ones.
And in that case, later editions (including scholarly ones) ought also to
be renditions of the work as it emerges from different social settings.

This tangle could have been avoided if McGann had been willing to
accept one simple point: that authors of verbal works do not always
consider the physical presentation of their words (or some aspects of it)
to be a part of the works themselves, even though it always (1) reflects
to some extent the intentions of those responsible for the presentation
and (2) affects the responses of those who experience the presentation.
From the point of view of authorial intention, therefore, the physical
forms of some verbal works are indeed only "vehicular," and scholarly
editions using different vehicles (whether different typefaces and paper,
or a computer terminal instead of paper) can in those cases reproduce
the texts of the works. This point in no way lessens the importance of
studying the social forms of texts, which necessarily include physical
components; but it eliminates the necessity for claiming that scholarly
editions cannot transmit the texts of works but only information about
those texts.

After this unfortunate beginning, McGann weakens his essay further
with another fallacious piece of theorizing. As a reason for preferring
hyperediting to the editing that was presented in codex form, he asserts
that there is something problematical about using "books to study books,
or hard copy texts to analyze other hard copy texts" (p. 12). At first one
may think he is saying something analogous to the often-made point that
we end up analyzing works of all media in the medium of language; but
that point never carried the implication that there was an inherent problem
in analyzing like with like—that, for instance, an effective criticism
of a piece of music could not be a musical parody. McGann, however,
believes that when one uses "books to analyze and study other books,"
"the scale of the tools seriously limits the possible results" (p. 12). He
goes so far as to say that the problems with codex editions "arise because
they deploy a book form to study another book form" (p. 13). Because?
How does the similarity in form cause the problems? (One might even
think it an advantage, to the extent that the codex edition can reproduce
more of the physical features of the original codex publication.) His
point is pretentious because it seems to adduce a theoretical principle,[57]
when in fact no principle is required, other than the self-evident desirability

of increased efficiency—and certainly not a principle, like this
one, without substance. The limitations of the codex form are limitations
regardless of whether one is dealing with another codex. And that
is all McGann is talking about: the increased maneuverability afforded
by electronic presentation.[58] Whether electronic conveniences can be
said to "lift one's general level of attention to a higher order" (p. 12)
is really a matter of how inflated one is willing to let one's rhetoric become
in order to register one's enthusiasm for hypertext. The "level of
attention" displayed by the best scholars of the past is not likely to be
surpassed, but hypertext unquestionably reduces the drudgery involved
in carrying out some kinds of investigation.[59]

If McGann's efforts to provide a theoretical depth to his advocacy of
hypertext are unsuccessful, the five brief case studies that constitute the
heart of his essay are informative,[60] and he ends with an important point
about the "decentered text." This term does not mean what one might
expect: it simply refers to the idea that in hypertext there is no need for
one central text as an organizing focus. McGann suggests that this point
has aroused debate, but I do not see how anyone could maintain the
contrary position. Hypertext, as McGann says, does have a structure
"organized for directed searches and analytic operations" (p. 29), but
because one is free to browse among numerous full texts, assisted by links,

no one text is required to serve as a base, as is generally the situation in
codex editions, where lack of space usually necessitates representing
some texts in apparatus form. McGann's comparison of the organization
of hypertext with that of a library is essentially right in that "every documentary
moment" in both cases "is absolute with respect to the archive
as a whole" (p. 31).[61] But because his focus is primarily on the archival
function of hypertext, he says little about the various helps that one
might reasonably expect a hyperedition to provide. These helps, resulting
from the editor's research, would provide much more information
about the relationships among the texts than a library does; but—and
this is the crucial point here—such guidance, however extensive, would
not affect the independence of the texts and would leave readers free
to choose whatever points of entry and subsequent paths they wished.

Another consequence of his concentration on archives is that he does
not distinguish two kinds of decentering that are worth differentiating.
The decentering he deals with is on the mechanical level: the mechanics
of the electronic medium, in contrast to that of the codex, does not lead
to an apparent emphasis by default on one text over another. A second
kind of decentering applies to the construction of critical texts. In my
essay on "Editing without a Copy-Text" (commented on at the end of
part V below), I recommend a procedure for critical editing in which
one does not give any text the centrality of a copy-text. Instead of thinking
of a critical text as an emended form of a copy-text, one conceives it
as a new text in which each word or punctuation mark derives from
whatever source (including the editor's mind) is judged to give the best
reading in terms of the goal chosen (author's first—or last, or some other—
intention, publisher's intention, and so on). If this approach were used
for an edition published as a codex, the newly constructed critical text
would still (in most cases) be a centered text in the mechanical sense,
with the other relevant texts provided as an apparatus keyed to it; but
it would have been formed by an editorial process that did not center
any one text. The process can obviously be used for an edition in electronic
form as well, with the result that one or more critical texts produced
by this decentered method would be a part of the mechanically
decentered collection of texts forming a portion of a hyperedition.

One of the places where McGann's essay has been reprinted is
Kathryn Sutherland's anthology Electronic Text: Investigations in

Method and Theory (1997), which is based in part on a 1993 Oxford
conference and which contains some other essays worth noting. Sutherland's
introduction aims, as she says (in characteristic prose) at the end
of it, to link "technological fashioning and change to the cultural developments
that technology models and, in modelling, further validates
as culturally significant" (p. 17). The case for such linkage, in her hands,
is highly dubious, as one or two of her points may serve to suggest. She
claims, for example, that electronic technology reinforces the ideas of
Barthes and Kristeva and that editors are therefore in an environment
of "permeable boundaries, of fluid text" where the "traditional assumptions"
of scholarly editing "no longer appear to hold true." (One may
pause to reflect that textual instability is what editors have always confronted,
and recognized they were confronting; textual fluidity does not
depend on the computer for its existence.)

Of those "traditional assumptions," the "first to go is the work/text
distinction," for "if the work is not confined to the historically contingent
and the particular, it is nevertheless only in its expressive textual form
that we encounter it, and material conditions determine meanings" (p.
5). But the "if" clause (followed by "nevertheless") concedes the necessity
of recognizing that texts of works can be abstractions (sequences of
words) as well as physical renderings; and her discussion of Barthes
points out that he, too, made such a distinction.[62] She does not really
mean that the distinction itself has been eliminated, and there is no
necessity for eliminating it in order to make the point that "material
conditions determine meanings." All she is trying to say is that many
people (she among them, presumably) now prefer to read documentary
texts rather than critically emended texts (though she does not confront
the fact that every text put into physical form by an editor is also a
"situated act or event" [p. 6]). Perhaps that is why she says that an edition
is "more properly described in its electronic assemblage" as an "archive,"
which contains "the disassembled `texts' but not the reassembled `work' "
(p. 9). To imply that editorially emended texts (the products of specialists'
reading) are not valuable is simply not to believe in scholarship.
Her tendency to accept unthinkingly the exaggerated claims made for
electronic editions is perfectly illustrated by her comment that "in making
certain things easier" electronic presentation "makes the outcome

different" (p. 9). We all welcome greater ease, but serious scholars have
never allowed the labor involved in a task to prevent their carrying it
out.

Sutherland's introduction does not lead one to look forward to the
essays that follow, and they do often display the same love of jargon and
exaggeration (and sometimes even the same fuzziness of argument).
Allen Renear, for instance, outlines three theories of textuality that
have emerged from the text-encoding community without recognizing
that their philosophical coherence is affected by the fact that they all developed
in subordination to a program requiring belief that texts can be
reproduced. And Julia Flanders's piece is weakened throughout by its
initial assumption of the "electronic text's lack of, or freedom from, a
body." But some useful points do get made. Peter M. W. Robinson (who
claims to be talking about "new directions" in editing, when he is of
course referring to new methods for helping us move in the directions
we have always followed) explains, with examples, the importance of
supplementing archival collections of texts with editorial aids, as do
Patrick W. Conner and Peter S. Donaldson—the latter concluding with
the valuable (if rarely expressed) observation that the "digital research
environment" might be designed "so that the passage from text to document
extends from the computer screen to the library"—to the original
physical documents (p. 195). Possibly the best essay is Claire Lamont's
discussion of annotation, which ably shows the interrelations of editing
and annotation and which recognizes that the theoretical questions
raised by annotation "are not removed in hypertext" (p. 61)—indeed,
hypertext has simply "produced another arena in which the debate may
continue" (p. 63).[63]

The year before the Sutherland anthology, a more substantial and
worthwhile anthology had appeared in the University of Michigan Press
series on editorial theory—The Literary Text in the Digital Age (1996),
edited by Richard J. Finneran. It begins with useful essays by Susan
Hockey and Peter Shillingsburg. Hockey's surveys the history of using
the computer for editing and summarizes basic information about text
encoding and the delivery of electronic editions; Shillingsburg's is the
piece on goals of scholarly editing that I have already commented on.

The volume ends with an essay by John Unsworth that places "electronic
scholarship in its larger cultural context" (p. 233), offering an intelligent
criticism of those who are resistant to change (here epitomized by Sven
Birkerts). Although the essay is not primarily about scholarly editing, it
does suggest that the existence of electronic editions will increase the
broader scholarly interest in editing and bibliographical scholarship because
"the new technology opens up the possibility of re-creating the
basic resources of all our activities and providing us with revolutionary
tools for working with those resources" (p. 240). If he proves to be right,
it will be because the tools are indeed revolutionary, not because technology
has created a new "possibility," since the old tools also allowed
for the recreation of basic resources (in the form of facsimiles and new
editions).[64] Although he does not always manage to eschew hyperbole in
speaking of new technology, his essay is ultimately balanced and sensible,
concluding that the issues we have to deal with will not change.[65]

In between these opening and closing essays, there are several technical
articles and accounts of specific projects, along with some additional
general pieces. The diversity of content can be illustrated by the essays
of Charles L. Ross and Phillip E. Doss.[66] For Ross, "Recent trends in
editing have signaled the demise of the Anglo-American critical edition
and the imminent birth of electronic editing" (p. 227). Because this
sentence confuses technical and theoretical matters, it is hard to know
how to read it. Ross includes "codex book" (p. 225) in his definition of
a critical edition, and one might think at first that he is simply predicting

the triumph of one technology (electronic) over another (the codex).
But "Anglo-American" brings in the idea of an emended text supplemented
with an apparatus, a concept that is not tied to any one technology.
The "birth of electronic editing," in other words, does not spell
the death of critical editing, whether or not one feels that it dooms the
codex form of presentation. No one would argue with his belief that
readers should be able to "choose among variants, and thus create a
(never the) text" (p. 230), but he does not acknowledge that most editors
of critical codex editions have held the same belief or that codex editions
offer the same options for readers. It is certainly wrong to claim that the
functions of editor and reader were "hitherto distinct": critical editions
have always made clear that the act of reading involves making textual
decisions. The Doss article, in contrast, despite its occasional repetition
of standard exaggerations,[67] makes some valuable points, and makes
them well. Doss is concerned, for example, that in the electronic environment
"we remain aware of continuities, not only in regard to the telos of
intellectual endeavor generally, but specifically in regard to the way in
which the textual editor might employ electronic media in the tasks before
him or her" (p. 215). He also urges that "editorial invisibility" be
recognized as a pretense and that electronic editors should be "straightforward"
in declaring the assumptions embedded in the linking structures
they have created (p. 218).[68]

This advice is of course equally valid for editors of electronic and of
codex editions. Indeed, writings about electronic editing are generally

successful to the extent that they recognize continuities (to use Doss's
word): the computer, though it creates strong breaks with the past in
our methods for doing things, does not alter the things that need to be
done, or the concerns that cause us to want to do them. This point is well
understood by John Lavagnino, who on more than one occasion has explained
why such traditional activities of scholarly editors as annotation
and emendation are just as important in electronic editions as they were
before.[69] He calls it a professional "provinciality" to believe that "if we
could only remove the editorial presence from the transmission of texts,
readers would then have a true and complete perception of texts" (p.
121).[70] The fallacy of this view is forcefully set out:

The more basic problem, he rightly believes, is that many literary scholars
and other readers are not interested in textual history and therefore
do not use the information provided in editions. For those who do,
scholarly codex editions have not seemed officious or unusable (though
many such readers will no doubt find electronic editions easier to use for
some purposes); but the majority of readers still need to learn that the
most rewarding reading requires (in Lavagnino's words) "a knowledge of
textual matters, not just unmediated access to the originals (or rather to
facsimiles of them)" (p. 122).

It is encouraging to note that a recent special number of Literary &
Linguistic Computing (15.1, 2000), on "Making Texts for the Next Century,"

opens with an essay in which Peter Robinson (its co-editor with
Hans Walter Gabler) affirms that "a single, reconstructed, and eclectic
text" may be the best "route" for the reader to take into the documents:
"Through the one text," he says, "we can best understand the many."[71]
Kelvin Everest, in another essay of 2000, has made a particularly eloquent
and critically sophisticated statement of this position. Electronic
archiving of a work's various documentary texts overlooks the need of
readers to have guidance into the "constant core identity" of the work.
This task requires the "editorial function," which is "an effort of scholarship"
that "brings the history of a textual transmission to a specific
textual focus for its period, and of its period." It "cannot abnegate the
responsibility to shape an image of a body of texts. This editorial image
is, indeed, at the heart of a living contemporary literary culture, because
it is the coherent form in which a literary culture renews its understanding
of the past."[72] A similar recognition of the need for critical texts was
expressed the same year by Michael F. Suarez in one of the most balanced
and effective essays[73] written in resistance to the "hype about hypertext"
(p. 170). In pointing out the limitations of text-encoding as well as
archiving, he brings us back—as good writing about electronic editions
ought to bring us back—to the problems we have always had.