Tag Archives: Blog Post

The Prospect and Flexibility of Electronic Publication

     The risk and stakes one takes in academia is the acknowledgement that we are containing and ultimately preserving knowledge in some form. Archives up until the digital era were facilitated mostly by academic institutions and even now are largely in part shaped through grants and funding. Yet editors are now slowly accounting for how the collection of text is relevant on all levels, even in those that are not considered scholarly. The hegemony of the editing and publishing process then becomes apparent in studies on intention in textual criticism, especially in variants and editions. 

     What I find most interesting is the now economically manageable manipulation of text using digital tools of copy and paste, superimposing, tagging (quintessential to accessibility and filtering for researchers) and more. While new problems manifest as we adapt these tools to academic pursuits, they are equally important in evolving techniques, practices and approaches to formatting preservation. In this same vein, the possibility opened by these new manipulations escape the rigors of academic editing and its downfall through selectiveness. Sources outside the scholarly offer historical and contextual assets pivotal to an editor’s collection and amassing as well of material to then publish. 

     Paraphrasing Ken Price in “Electronic Scholarly Editions”, database and narrative although enemies, are both relevant in preservation as neutrality occurs outside bias and exclusivity, something of which academia constantly struggles with. Then we are presented with the concept of collaboration and how it can facilitate a greater understanding and approach to these shortcomings. Erasure of collaboration, I find, is intrinsically tied to the difficulties in evaluating and problematizing the processes of publishing now. Of course, text and work must go through some time of peer review and credibility when being collected as to ascertain how valuable this will be to the wide audience. 

     What I see as the most crucial and continuously mentioned aspect of editing is then its flexibility. To fulfill in a sense the act of recording, we are made accountable to how this form of preservation will be accessible. Electronic scholarly endeavors have themselves been shaped by technology, but also shaped the technology. This mutual relationship lends itself to how we can revitalize the archive, exceeding its materiality and many deaths. Achille Mbembe in “The Power of Archive and Its Limits” shows the institutionalization of archives and the inability of those to be separated. What projects like Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities alternatively depict is textual criticism under the lens of many in different fields and professions, already exceeding previous limitations before going electronic. 

     While narratives constructed by archives and databases alike still exist, the recognition of their contextual relevance but also inherent lessons can only further improve and facilitate greater efforts in textual criticism and the editing process. Editing while sometimes a quiet and invisible process, has equally important stakes in the publication process and academia as a whole. So long as we utilize its ability to be understood and built upon, the foundations of knowledge will remain sustainable and accessible to an ever increasing audience despite the crossover to the digital. 

“Electronic Scholarly Editions” in the Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Study, ed. Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens (Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 434-50.

Achille Mbembe. “The Power of Archive and its Limits” (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002).

The Process and the Processor

     The digital age and technologies, while eliminating issues of the past, present their own shortcomings. When I write, it is me against the threshold of anxieties that come from the daunting blank canvas. Contrary to Barry B. Longyear, “the word processor as an extension of the mind” seems exaggerated; instead, the pressures of error and revision intrinsic in development and the creative process become somewhat invisible through the word processor (Track Changes, 109). 

     The seamless appearance of the first draft cannot account for the revisions I go through mentally, rather merely translate the end result of my inner turmoils. Error and mistakes (messy markings and imperfections) then that exemplified labor and parts of the composition process became less prevalent as a place to work from. So much as the personal computer now offers convenience and infinite possibility to type (a translation of writing), so too does it merit apprehension and conformity. It is when I compose that I find myself becoming a self-editor: my process as a reflection of the logistic and modulated ways that I type. A similar question is raised by Tony Bennett’s The Exhibitionary Complex through his theory on the museum as a space for visions of dominant power: a site, where you are seeing while being seen which perpetuates self-regulation. It is then that I find myself daunted equally by institutions and the space their works inhabit, the place where I publish encasing all of this anxiety as well. 

     But is this purely negative? My writing and composition process has undergone processes itself. The rapid transitions in technology for the past two decades have challenged my ability to adapt and integrate a vast multitude of methods in my writing. Though I wage battles with what I find true to my interests, idealization can pervade my organization of thoughts on paper and prevents me from tackling them head on– erasing rather than improving. In the same way, disciplines and institutions can immobilize us through restriction and specificity in its formatting and expectations. Whether I and others choose to adhere to them then is an entirely different matter and veers into the territory of responsibility.   

     What enables and disables me then is my connection to process and the product and what that entails. Just as Kathleen Fitzpatrick previously alluded to in her chapter Authorship, perfectionism is an illusion that can have individuals lose focus on development and the way identity intervenes in the creative process in all its iterations. As Track Changes also posits, I sometimes separate from my labor so much that I struggle to find my identity and presence in the spaces I occupy academically, mainly by working off products of writing rather than their more informative processes. But through this awareness, I can begin to work at self-improvement by seeing how error is intrinsic tied to process; how the word processor may mask these and appear complete, but is also only a step in the multitude of processes that writing must undergo.

Value, Reading and the Book: From Society to Print and Back

     Concluding with the documentary The Machine that Made Us, I found Stephen Fry’s final thoughts on print and the modern age quite perplexing; it was how he could not perceive modern society without the printed word. I find that I agree with this notion, but in a different manner: I instead see that the book and society have and still continuously shape each other. While an idea as text can die as pure intention in the mind of the author, the book must take on the weight of society in order to navigate the processes of transmission. At the other end of the spectrum, society can foster books as “building blocks of civilization” in order to construct itself and its collective consciousness.

     But while Gutenberg’s printing press universalized text and its ideas, the book in its respect to society can also be at its mercy. What I found especially interesting was just how much the process of textual transmission is social and the extent to which it is affected economically, politically and culturally (which Sarah Werner reflects upon in her final remarks). While I see that the book and reading have made bounds in terms of accessibility, the fact remains that the book’s physicality limits the terms of its distribution and development. As Abbott & Williams ascertain, the text is inherently tied to history, its makers and its circumstances.

     Similarly, the ascription of value by society is reflected in the analysis of the process of print. Just as printing was and is a process of transmission, so is reading within and out of the context of printing. As I and others read, we unconsciously enact our values on books and the way we funnel their information. Alterations and versions of a book through active participants in the publication process showcase this and perpetuate how the distinction between author and reader can blur (reference Abbott & Williams intricate “text to” web diagrams).

     I find then that the most we can draw from the history of print is has and still provides a network of interpretation, showcasing that text in its transmission to the format of books will always be subject to change. What has newly developed however is a breakdown of what dictates value as it becomes more decentralized in the advent of the digital age. It is the unanticipated extent of radicalization to tradition then that I believe print and later processes of distribution invited to society’s relationship to books, especially reading and the context with which we now view history. How this has and will affect us though will continue to evolve over time, remaining as fluid and subject to change as society is.

How Does the History of Print Shape the Way We Read Today: How Things Have or Have Not Changed Since the Early Days of Print

Stephen Fry’s BBC documentary, “The Machine That Made Us,”about Johannes Gutenberg, is an homage to the German engineer and printer who designed the Gutenberg Press, (58 minutes)  was a fascinating look at what it is like to make a replica of the hand press and the type. Since there is no actual reference, he has workmen improvise what they believe is similar based on their knowledge of the wine-press [hypothesis]. Gutenberg’s inspiration was the challenge of thinking out solutions to problems he encountered and a saleable, efficient method to produce books uniformly, and he was successful. Books could be used to teach, spreading Christian doctrine and ideas. Like all good artisans he saw the beneficence of the Catholic Church, more printing commissions, as an economic means, though his concern was the hand press and moveable type, or perfection of his work. 2/3 of these followed us into this century: the book and the type, even if the press is obsolete. It seems to me very much like the craft of making bullets, or other cast items. He was dependent on trained dedicated craftsmen. Into this endeavor he pours his knowledge, time, ingenuity, and money; focused on how much the means, he wills the machine into existence, oblivious perhaps as to how popular it was to become, or debt, like many inventors. He doesn’t make any money off it. Like Rembrandt and other idealists, he went bankrupt. Fry takes us through a look at history, which is very insightful and shows us how this was accomplished by action. It is a fascinating look at a time, just before the Renaissance, when the spread of knowledge was dependent on reaching more people with information at once, allowing the exchange of ideas, people to own a copy of a book of ideas, an artwork, or to receive information from different sources, and this caused irretrievably, a move away from the Church, more modern thinking, and the spread of alternative ideas, as well as the dissemination of information to the masses, including missiles, plays, and newspapers as well as books and prints. Continue reading →