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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
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
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
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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