Friday, October 25, 2013

Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms

"Textual studies should be recognized as among the most sophisticated branches of media studies we have evolved" (16), provocatively argues Kirschenbaum at the beginning of the book, a book whose "forensics"is a "theoretically and technically rigorous account of electronic texts as artifacts - mechanisms- subject to material and historical forms of understanding" (17). What a fascinating and complex topic! The encounter of 'traditional' philological and textual studies with electronic editing and digital storage and preservation is undoubtedly one of the most exciting challenges for digital humanists.

Kirschenbaum makes us rediscover the materiality of texts in their digital realm, and makes us ask questions about versioning, variations, volatility that are central not only for digital born literature. His argument that "forensics is a signature discourse network of modernity at the juncture of instrumentation, inscription, and identification"(250) invites me to ponder about the work of the Walt Whitman Archive, with which I have been collaborating for a couple of years. The epochal watershed for Whitman Studies was represented, by the appearance on the site, by April 2005, of all six, full length American editions of Leaves of Grass as XML files but also in facsimiles images, freely accessible to general readers: something that had never happened before in the same printed volume collecting Whitmans' work. The internationally widespread tendency to read, study, write about and translate Whitman's writings almost exclusively by using the first (1855) or last edition (1891-1892) of Leaves, which are also the editions usually published – a tendency that heavily overshadowed the extremely evolving nature of Whitman's creative work – was in this way seriously, and finally, undermined. As argued by Prof. Price, the constantly expandable nature of the electronic Archive seems to be particularly suited to Whitman's work, since this latter  “defies the constraints of the book. Whitman's work was always being revised, was always in flux, and fixed forms of print do not adequately capture his incessant revisions.” (“About the Archive”) The opportunity to collect the editions in the same, digital space is also paralleled by that of offering high-resolution images and the corresponding transcriptions of Whitman’s manuscripts (not only of poetry, but also correspondence, annotation and notebooks materials) otherwise scattered at over 100 different repositories across the world. 

Are we doing it in the 'right' way? What is the 'right' way, anyway? Is one of the keys to do it 'right' that of profoundly understanding the tools we use for our digital representation and preservation of what we call 'texts'? In these days, I am in the process of starting to work on an electronic bibliography of Cather's works: the aim is to reproduce a bibliography printed on paper and to trans-port it and trans-form within the digital Cather Archive. How do I do it? How can I use the different resources I have, in comparison to what the author of the printed bibliography had? How can I do an old job in a new, more thorough scholarly way? How can I engage, acknowledge, and favorably apply the renewed materiality of my philological act of textual preservation?
 

2 comments:

  1. I thought that all of your questions about digital editions were really interesting. I find myself asking these same questions all the time! I'm not sure if there is a "right" answer to these questions, but I do think that having a solid understanding of the limitations and boundaries of the medium we are working in is important. If we don't understand the tools we are using, how can we hope to envision what is possible? I worked in the text support section of a campus library for a year and one of our jobs was to consult with humanities professors who wanted to start digital projects. The job was really about helping the faculty to understand what they could reasonably expect to accomplish with computers, what the limitations were, how these limitations were different from print. At the same time though, this begs the question of exactly how knowledgeable to we need to be about our tools? It would be unreasonable to expect anyone who wanted to write a book to have extensive technical knowledge about printing. Leaning about technical tools often feels like learning languages. I'm not going to learn all the languages in the world. I couldn't do it. So which one's do I learn? Which ones are most important? How do I prioritize?

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  2. This is something that I was thinking about when Kirschenbaum was discussing markup languages that disclose otherwise lost traces.

    But how do we think about digital editions that really are different depending on the mechanism used to view them. Not getting lost in the display, but how our experience changes depending on the so-called hardware and software that we use and that the digital edition uses. How do we indicate that our experience was different from others in a digital format that is different still for someone else?

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