For the next couple of weeks we’ll be discussing digital textuality. This week’s readings are pretty general, focusing on some key projects of public interest involving the Google Print Project, online encyclopedias like Wikipedia and the newer Scholarpedia and Citizendium, and the digitalization of the OED. Next week we’ll be focusing more specifically on the impact of digital textuality on academic writing and publishing, exploring the future of the book and of the academic journal. I’ve added a bundle of links to key sites we’ll be discussing (see “Digital Textuality” in the right-hand menu). I’m trying to get a guest to join us for part of the evening, a good friend who is the editor of a major academic journal who can share with us some of her concerns about their digitalization.
Tomorrow night I’d like us to think about the future of online research in light of the developments discussed in the articles we’ve read. What does the Google Print project as discussed by Kevin Kelly suggest about the future of reading, research, and studies in the humanities? What are the possibilities—and the drawbacks—you see in the world of scanned and connected texts he conjures up? Let’s assume those guys in China succeed in scanning every printed text. Can literary studies then proceed without books? Will the “democratic” accessibility of every text outweigh the loss of the printed book? What are the practical, legal, and economic issues that have to be dealt with here? And what about what Kelly calls “the real magic” that will occur when “each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before” (pp. 3-4)? In what ways can you imagine this will transform the kind of research we do? How will that research adjust to the world of links and tags Kelly discusses (4-5)? If he’s right that someday books, and the words in them, will be deeply linked, so you can click on titles in bibliographies or footnotes to access the actual book or article that’s cited, where will the primary text leave off and the secondary text begin? Are we looking at another form of convergence in which the text and its criticism become a single, fluid, ever expanding entity? If books become “liquid” (p.5) in the way Kelly envisions what are the various academic applications you can imagine? And finally, what are the implications for academic work of the shift from the “hegemony of the copy” (p.6) which we might link to Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction, to the “value” of recall, annotation, personalization, editing, authenticating, display, marking, transferring, etc. Kelly associates with the post-copy age of links and tags (p.11, bottom)? Will search “change everything,” as he suggests in the final section, and if so, how?
Perhaps the scanning and linking of all books will create a virtual world that replaces the library, but for now we also need to think about the impact of wikis on research, so we’ll want to discuss a range of issues that come up in the articles on Wikipedia, Scholarpedia, and Citizendium (again, see the links to these sites on the blog). As teachers and researchers, how do we deal with Wikipedia? Are the more “scholarly,” “refereed” sites like Scholarpedia and Citizendium promising, or do you agree with the argument that they buy into elitism and spoil the “democratic” open-source nature of wikis? How can sites like Wikipedia sustain their open-source orientation and still be “reliable,” or is reliability here freighted with assumptions we ought to interrogate? You might check out this blog entry by Danah Boyd about Wikipedia. She’s always provocative. And finally, what’s to stop groups of scholars from creating their own, specialized wikis run by sets of scholar-constables?
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I wonder what will become of the aura of the book in a digitalized world. If the book is not simply the sum of it's parts, can we argue that travel and culture could be lost in a digitized library... no longer a need for grants to research at the Folger's library for Shakespeare scholars... no need for the experience of being in a particular country-- of face to face interaction with librarian experts... no more of the footwork or the drive on which so much scholarship depends. Doesn't a global library seem to indicate that it is no longer necessary to leave the house in much the same way as the online grocery store? I'm wary. If everyone has access to every book all of the time then what's the use of producing stellar work? The kind of work that gives us research grants and fellowships?
I wonder what will happen when everything is cross-linked and hyperlinked. While this may be helpful in the bibliographies, it seems it would be awfully distracting in the text. Even when I was reading the digital video articles from the times, I found myself clicking on links and realizing after playing around in a site that I was supposed to be reading something else. Apparently I am not well adjusted to reading hyperlinked texts. If this is not a case unique to me, and others experience, and I expect they do, then what does that do to our scholarship? While we are all guilty of skimming articles and books to find just the sections we are looking for, if we follow a link to another text, how likely are we to return to the original and finish reading (or skimming) that argument? It seems that the placement and the choice of these links are problematic. Does the author of any given article decide who he or she wants to be in dialogue with? Or do the readers? If anyone other than the author generates the in-text links, it would seem to me that he or she is losing a part of the authorship.
I don't wonder what will happen to anything at all, thanks to my amazing psychic powers. (NOTE: If this link doesn't work, I'm sorry. I'm not good at HTML. Boo, computers!) But since I can't reveal the future to anyone for Reasons Known Only To Me, I'll play along and speculate.
Regarding the article-hopping that hyperlinking seems to engender, good point. To use what is hopefully only a mildly tangential anecdote, I realized not ten minutes ago that when I load up sites like Slate or the Onion or others that I check only periodically, and am thus presented with dozens of shiny new articles, I tend to load up like ten different ones at a time and switch between them, sometimes mid-paragraph. When there are hyperlinks, as there frequently are in Slate, it's even worse; I tend to end up in the same boat as Joanna. I try to finish everything, but don't always. This seems to raise the specter of the Short Attention Span of Today's Youth, which when I think about it is relevant in a way that I think I could articulate if I had the energy but I don't, so I'm going to completely abandon this line of thought and glom onto something else.
As Joanna noted, the imposition of hyperlinks onto someone else's writing is, in a way, a co-opting of authorship, in the same way that adding your own footnotes to someone else's paper would be. But hell, virtually everything about online writing and publishing makes the whole concept of clearly definable authorship a little bit wobbly. Post something in plaintext and someone can copy/paste it into a Word document, mess around with it however they see fit, and pass it on to other people under your name. Post something as an image or .pdf document, and they can Photoshop it and do the same. It's ridiculously easy to censor or edit things (during my first semester of teaching I was worried about sharing an article with my students that contained a few, shall we say, inventive profanities, so I copy/pasted, substituted symbols for the curse words Beetle Bailey-style, and gave them the PG-13 version), and one can do whatever one damn well pleases with things in the public domain (see as an example this online text of the first few paragraphs of The Great Gatsby). One of the primary beefs with Wikipedia is fact that not everyone editing its articles is always going to be entirely honest and/or accurate, and there's really no way to implement safeguards against this, short of revoking its open-source nature, which kind of defeats the purpose. And even legitimate websites can be temporarily corrupted by skilled hackers. I don't mean to imply that we shouldn't trust the authorship of anything we read online, but there are just a whole new set of issues that we have to be concerned with, one of them being the medium's inherent malleability / instability.
Erin's post reminds us how Benjamin's concept of the aura persists into the 21st century around the book (and, I'd add, the "big screen" as per the Dargis piece about downloaded films I posted yesterday). But of course only some books are "original" in the sense of having Benjamin's aura, such as single-copy illuminated manuscripts. The "first edition" has a kind of aura (and a value for collectors), but subsequent editions do not. Of course then there's the example of the folio or the author's handwritten manuscript (say, of Joyce's ULYSSES), which has a different kind of aura and stands as an example of the kind of text scholars travel to study on fellowships. How different is the digital version from a microfilm version? Anyway, I wonder: will the digital copy actually replace these originals and obviate the need to study them? Perhaps not. I wonder if we're looking at a situation in which the online library version is a preliminary point of study (linked and tagged), but not the final one? Won't there still be a need to do the kind of primary, onsite research we're used to? I guess the question is whether or not there will be anything from the original manuscript not captured by the digital one. If not, the aura of the original would be simply romantic. But isn't Benjamin's point that it's always only been a romantic notion? Don't we have to separate the concept of the aura from the practical, scholarly value of scrutinizing on site original versions of texts?
Joanna's post raises some interesting questions (both practical and theoretical) about reading and authorship. I agree that the hyperlinking and tagging of books and articles, not to mention the kind of convergence of text, commentary, and criticism I envisioned in my note, poses some real challenges to the normal protocols of reading (NPR!). I wonder if the kind of distraction she discusses is embedded in the text or a function of the reader, however. We do have the choice of when we click, right? For example, I almost always read through an article like the ones I posted from the Times before clicking on the links, precisely because I don't want to experience the kind of disruptions Joanna and Brett talk about. I think in the world Kelly envisions in the Google Print Project article we will have to develop new protocols of reading (also NPR, that's a problem . . . ) that can avoid the disruptions they write about (though what we're discussing begs the whole question of the distinction between flow and disruption).
The authorship question is of course a more theoretical one, but I do see it as linked to the practical problems regarding reading Joanna brings up. In the case of links placed in articles by authors (like those--dead, I'm afraid--Brett placed in his) the linked material is in some sense "part" of the article, but the author has no control over when you click the link, how you respond to what's there, and whether you ever come back to her "original" article. So, again, control is in the hands of the reader and the line between authorship and reading blurs (as it did in earlier hypertext fiction where the reader really constructed the story he read through decisions about what to click even though it was written/constructed by an author).
The even thornier question Joanna raises is whether when someone places links in a prexisting text he or she is, in a sense, authoring a new version of the "original." If I place on line an annotated critical edition of THE TURN OF THE SCREW, have I authored a new version of the novella, or just produced a critical apparatus like the Norton Critical edition of the book? I tend to see this as simply an online version of the critical edition. Did anyone ever claim James lost some of his authorship rights with the publication of the Norton Critical edition? When, exactly, will authorship become blurred in the world Kelly envisions? Brett makes some very good points regarding this issue we should take up in class. I like the way he reminds us of the malleability of texts in any context, but especially online ones. This could take us back to the Wikipedia article, where the aura is not centered on the qualifications of the writer but the ability of anyone to contribute to the "authorship" of articles. In the world Wikipedia's defenders live in, authorship is always already fuzzed up in the ways Joanna worries about, yet this is precisely the quality (or aura) those who celebrate wikis love about them.
The apparatus of a critical edition of a text may not directly challenge the authorship of the text, but it does seek to shape the way that text is read, with as much ability as an author has to do so in that department. Similarly, then, placing links in a text seek to give it a particularly shape, and to guide readers in connection-making. Don't the creators or editors of hyperlinked texts ultimately have to decide which connections are the right connections? How can readers go about challenging the order or importance of those connections?
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