 | Studies in bibliography |  |
THOUGHTS ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF ELECTRONIC TEXTS
by
G. Thomas Tanselle
The ease with which electronic files may be altered has caused many people
to contrast what they see as the "fixity" of printed texts with the "fluidity"
of electronic texts. One writer who has resisted this superficial—indeed,
inaccurate—pairing is Michael Hancher, whose essay entitled "Littera scripta
manet: Blackstone and Electronic Text" is founded on the recognition that
texts on tangible surfaces have always been subject to alteration. What he
hopes to show is that electronic texts are different in kind from previous forms
of visible texts with regard to the detectability of tampering, and he concludes
that in the electronic world we are at the mercy of experts in a way that was
not the case before. This conclusion is, I believe, a manifestation of the tendency,
common in these early electronic days, to imagine sharper breaks between
the new and the old than actually exist.
We must recognize, first of all, that the instability of texts results from
actions by the original authorizing agents of texts (authors, publishers, and
the like) as well as by persons not so authorized (some of whom, such as scholarly
editors, do not have fraudulent intent). Making it progressively easier
for people (authorized or not) to alter texts and produce clean copies of those
altered texts has been the effect of the major developments over the centuries
in the technologies for reproducing texts. When handwriting is the means
used, a clean copy of a changed text usually requires a considerable amount
of recopying. But a text in standing type can be changed by switching some
pieces of type and printing a new sheet (a fact that early printers, with their
continual stop-press corrections, took full advantage of); and the touching up
of a photographic negative for use in offset printing or the cutting and pasting
that may precede xerographic printing constitute still easier ways to produce
clean, but altered, texts. The computer is the latest stage in this progression,
for an electronic file can be changed by striking a few keys, and the resulting
text may show no signs of what happened. Of course, alterations can be
bungled in any of these processes, leaving obvious evidence, but in those
cases the texts could not be called clean. The point is that altered clean texts
have become more easily achievable over the years; the introduction of the
computer has not, in this respect, caused anything different from what has
resulted from previous technological innovations.
All these developments, in fact, share a distinction from handwriting in
that they involve a two-stage process: the forme of type, the negative for a
photolithographic plate, the pasted-up document, and the electronic file are
to be read are derived. Thus there are two stages where changes can be
made: on the intermediate objects and on the final objects. If the change is
made on the former, and made carefully, then the final objects give no hint
that a change has been made; if it is made on the latter, the detectability of
the change depends not only on the skill of the person making the change but
also on the particular qualities of the paper or other surface employed and on
the expertise of the person doing the investigating. In the case of electronic
texts, there are several alternative kinds of final object, such as a printout, an
activated screen (that of a desk terminal or hand-held device, for example), or
a surface (like a wall) bearing a projected image—with the intermediate objects
in these instances being the coded electronic files. The text on an activated
screen or the projected text on a wall is not realistically subject to
change by altering the surface itself, without leaving obvious damage; in this
limited sense, electronically produced documents are more difficult to alter
than texts produced by earlier methods. And when electronic texts take the
form of printouts, their susceptibility to alteration is exactly the same as that
of any other texts on a paper surface.
But people who like to emphasize the difference between electronic texts
and all previous ones often mix the two stages. When they claim that electronic
texts can be altered more easily, what they are usually comparing is the
ease of altering an electronic file with the difficulty of altering a text that has
been printed on a piece of paper. But the relevant comparison would be with
switching pieces of type in a forme, altering a photographic negative, or pasting
new words or passages over or between others for xerography, not with
the attempt to change the text inked onto a piece of paper. It does not advance
the cause of thinking about electronic texts to perpetuate this confusion.
And the root of the confusion is probably the absurd notion that electronic
texts, unlike all previous visible texts, are not physical. (Screens and
walls, no less than printouts, are physical, as are the materials employed at
the previous stage: how could they not be?)
Furthermore, the issue of authenticity requires that one distinguish textual
authenticity from documentary authenticity; and it is worth noting,
more explicitly than Hancher does, that the two parts of his title point in
these two different directions. One tradition, represented by the phrase littera
scripta manet and its many variations, holds simply that verbal statements
put into visible form, where they can be read, are more reliable in the long
run than oral renditions of them. But this enduring reliability does not depend
on the survival of specific physical objects. In this line of thought, the
words can be said to "remain" because there was believed to be a greater
chance of their being copied accurately than of their being repeated orally
without alteration. (This belief is not necessarily true, of course, but there is
a tradition of thinking it to be true.) Blackstone, on the other hand, standing
here for the legal tradition generally, focuses on the integrity of specific documents;
the text present on a given physical object is authentic in the documentary
sense if it has not been altered in an unauthorized way. Since the
to the text placed on it at that time, so long as that text has not subsequently
been altered by human action or damaged by the passage of time. Whereas
in this tradition it is the physical object that takes one back to the authorizing
agent, in the other tradition it is the words, the text abstracted from any
one particular visible representation of it, that provides the link to a past
moment.
Neither of these kinds of authenticity, however, guarantees correctness,
in the sense of fidelity to what was intended. Obviously texts that are copied
or reproduced in any way may contain differences from their source-texts as
a result both of inadvertent errors and of deliberate changes. But even the
unaltered texts of documents that were produced or supervised by their authors
do not necessarily contain at every point what those authors intended.
Among the causes are slips of the pen and overlooked typographical errors;
and legal documents are not (and could not possibly be) immune from such
problems. So a signed contract or will, despite its authenticity, may not be
accurate, in the sense of carrying a fully intended text. These points would
be the same regardless of whether the intention one is interested in is the
author's, or the publisher's, or someone else's. The only way to try to locate
an intended text is to pursue it by means of a critical evaluation of the documentary
texts and other relevant evidence. And when a scholarly editor publishes
a reconstruction of an intended text, that edition becomes another
document in the reader's search.
Legal definitions of authenticity, whether the traditional ones designed
for pre-electronic documents or the new ones now being devised for electronic
documents, are irrelevant to the search for intended texts: textual instability
cannot be controlled by fiat. Electronic texts are texts; and therefore
we must be careful, when talking about the authenticity of electronic texts,
not to confuse documentary authenticity with intention. But documentary
authenticity is of course of vital importance, and we are properly concerned
with how we can learn whether a given electronic text possesses it. Computer
printouts, being one class of paper documents, pose no different problems
from other kinds of handwritten or printed texts on paper. The physical analysis
of manuscripts and printed sheets and books is a technical specialty, and
most people have to rely on the verdict of experts in this regard, although if
they had sufficient time and incentive they could learn to do the work themselves.
The situation is the same regardless of whether the text was produced
by pen and ink, inked type or plates, or ink affixed to paper by electrostatic
or laser means—though of course some understanding of the underlying
process in each case is relevant to the detection of what may have happened
to the document after the inking was completed.
If, instead of focusing on the authenticity of the inked text (the text of
the document), one is concerned with the authenticity of the intermediate
object from which that text derived, one may frequently discover that the
object no longer exists. Stereotype plates or formes of type, for example, may
very well not survive for direct examination; but bibliographers are nevertheless
changes that those plates or formes underwent. As for electronic files, if the
objects containing them exist, computer specialists may be able to uncover
coded instructions that are relevant to assessing authenticity. Most readers are
glad to leave the task to those specialists, as they leave the investigation of
printing plates and formes to bibliographers, but they could learn to undertake
their own investigation in either case if they wished. Some people have
the idea that acquiring the requisite knowledge of computer processes is in
an entirely different realm of difficulty from learning the techniques of bibliographical
analysis; but that notion, being dependent on individual aptitudes
and temperaments, is not true for everyone. Even if it were, the difference
between the two situations would be only a matter of degree, of relative difficulty,
and not a difference in kind.
Although anyone with sufficient aptitude and incentive can become an
expert in anything, no one can be an expert in everything. Therefore everyone
is often in the position of relying on others for expertise, and the question
of how to evaluate expertise is a basic one for the conduct of life. The
argument has been made that there is a fundamental difference between assessing
experts' experience and evaluating their credentials and that most
people have no choice but to do the latter when they need to judge electronic
experts (whereas they are not so limited in relation to seemingly less complex
fields). This point is ultimately meaningless. The mere fact that everyone is
familiar with paper and ink, for example, or that many people imagine letterpress
printing to be easy to understand, does not enable those people to
judge a paleographer's or bibliographer's work on the basis of personal experience.
If one shares an expert's experience, one is also an expert; otherwise
one must inevitably evaluate credentials, whether the materials being dealt
with are ordinary or esoteric. That the legal community has raised some
doubts about the value of handwriting specialists but not about the necessity
for computer experts reflects a failure of perception, not an essential distinction
between the tasks undertaken by each.
The implication that one can do without specialists when the material
seems commonplace is anti-intellectual and anti-scholarly. All of us, not
simply as scholars but as human beings, make decisions all the time about
when to accept specialists' judgments and when not to. But questioning their
conclusions does not mean that we can do without them. Knowledge advances
through the work of specialists and through the process by which we
decide in each case whether to build on their contributions or to reconsider
and investigate them. Objects containing electronic texts are no different
from other objects (artifactual or natural) as subjects for our evaluation. We
need specialists to help us determine the status of all texts, however they were
produced, just as we need them in other areas of life. There is nothing alarming
in our reliance on experts, as long as it occurs in this critical spirit. Rather
it is a sign of how we come to terms intelligently with the complexities that
we face in every aspect of life.
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