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.