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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,"
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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.
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
This advice is of course equally valid for editors of electronic and of codex editions. Indeed, writings about electronic editing are generally
This idea, that we require no form of help with original documents, is not really very different from the idea that literary criticism is unnecessary because our untutored reactions to literary works are more authentic, and those reactions are likely to be repressed or distorted if we hear any discussion of what the texts mean. To refrain from editing is an easy way to alleviate our nagging professional worries about being wrong; but it also means that we lose the opportunity to be right about anything, and to give other readers the benefit of our perceptions.
(p. 120)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,"
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