Electronic Texts: Proposed Course
 

READINGS

Analyzing Electronic Texts:

Transparent technology/Omnipotent technology
Are technologies for reading and writing a distortionless window? How do electronic text technologies change how we think, read, and write?

Technology: How much is enough?
Will a technology tool built to satisfy the needs of a statistician or astronomer also fulfill the goals of a writer or historian?  How much does a humanities scholar need to know about the tools (or the toolmakers) to decide what is probable or possible with digital tools? E-Texts: The Joy is in the Journey


What's in it for me? Humanities Scholars Creating Electronic Texts

"The computer is first of all a tool, requiring the acquisition of skills and greatly favouring the direct involvement of the person with the problem to be solved — or, in our case, the ideas to be communicated. Thus the salutory pressure on the individual scholar him- or herself to master the computational mechanics of scholarly expression. Augustine's statement that, egoque ipse multa quae nesciebam scribendo me didicisse confitear, "I would confess that there are many things I did not know that I learned by writing" (de trinitate 3.1), extends very much to hands-on publishing because we learn and understand by making as well as by thinking abstractly. Electronic publishing considerably increases the range of rhetorical mechanisms, visual as well as verbal, that a working scholar might reasonably have at his or her command."
McCarty, Willard.  "The shape of things to come is continuous change: fundamental problems in electronic publishing", Centre for English Studies and the Office for Humanities Communication, London, January 1997. Available online at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/ohc/shape.html
The Mechanical hypertext or the consuming lone scholar
Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostina Ramelli ["The Various and Ingenious Machines of Agostino Ramelli"] (Paris, 1588) See: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/crrs/Databases/WWW/Bookmarks.html
Bush, Vannevar. "As We May Think." The Atlantic Monthly. July 1945. Available online at: http://www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/atlweb/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm


Paradise or Inferno: The apocalyptic e-text

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading. Faber, 1994.
(and Kirschenbaum, Matthew. review of above in Postmodern Culture vol 6 available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v006/6.1r_kirschenbaum.html)

Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. U of Chicago P, 1993.

Unsworth, John, "Electronic Scholarship; or, Scholarly Publishing and the Public." In The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran, 233-248. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. (responds to Birkerts)


Writing Spaces/Writing Contexts in the Late Age of Print

Bolter, J. David.  Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991.

Landow, George. "Twenty Minutes into the Future, or How Are We Getting Beyond the Book?" The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 209-38.

Landow, George. "We Are Already Beyond the Book." Beyond the Book. Ed. Marilyn Deegan. Oxford University Humanities Computing Centre, 1996.

Landow, George. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Chap. 1 available at: http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/ht/contents.html


Creating Electronic Texts:

A brief overview:

Scholarly Machine-readable Texts. available at http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/infoday.html

Hockey, Susan. "Creating and Using Electronic Editions." In In The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. Richard J. Finneran, 1-21. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Encoding scholarly texts: why?
The purpose of text encoding is not to make electronic texts findable or readable by people (although that is an important by-product). The purpose is to make them readable by (stupid) computers. Printing makes documents eminently readable by humans. Web pages makes them widely accessible. Both fail the "computer can read it" test. Encoding provides a way for the computer to be trained to read and manipulate text so that it can be searched, reconfigured, analyzed, and manipulated in a variety of ways.
Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. "Textual Criticism and the Text Encoding Initiative." In The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed.Richard J. Finneran, 37-61. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.


SGML/XML
It's a cross-platform standard (which means it has some chance of longevity or portability). It describes a document's structure, not its layout, so the text can be multi-purposed: smart searching, printing, CDs, reused by other scholars, etc. For example, try this with a print version or even a web version: search and display in context all speeches by female characters in Shakespeare's plays, then generate a word list based on frequency. It can be done, painstakingly, but the print and web technologies are not designed to make this kind of task easy.

 


TEI
Designed by a committee of humanists, the Text Encoding Initiative is a flexible encoding scheme meant specifically for humanities texts. (Because SGML can be used for everything from airplane parts catalogs to patient records.) The MLA has recommended this DTD for the creation of scholarly electronic editions.

(An older bibliography is available that may also provide some good material.)


Etext Course Home Page --/-- Rationale&Goals --/-- Assignments --/-- Resources

Hope.Greenberg@uvm.edu, 15 April 1999