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Adriaan Van Der Weel, Digital Text and the Gutenberg Heritage Chapter 1 Adriaan van der Weel, Digital Text and the Gutenberg Heritage Chapter 1: A Historical Perspective In trying to fathom the significance of the digital revolution for textual transmission, whatever else we are doing, we are also trying to understand the future of the book. Even the most passionate defender of the culture of the book will need to face the fact that digital forms of text are going to make huge inroads on the status of the book. Book historians have not been slow in recognising this. Beginning with such visionaries as Roger Chartier and Don McKenzie, book history has in recent years begun to take a wider view of itself. Since it has managed to break loose from the fetters of textual bibliography and adopted a new place within a history of ideas framework, book history is finding a new definition as the study of the history of textual transmission in society.1 When Don McKenzie proposed in the first of his Panizzi lectures in 1985 that it was necessary to “define ‘texts’ to include verbal, visual, oral and numeric data, in the form of maps, prints, and music, of archives of recorded sound, of films, videos, and any computer-stored information, everything in fact from epigraphy to the latest forms of discography”2 this was still a radical suggestion. In fact, he probably hardly suspected in what literal sense these “text forms” would converge technologically, in the shape of digital bits . When McKenzie gave his lectures in the British Library in 1985 the World Wide Web did not yet exist, and the signs that such a powerful and widespread technological change was afoot were certainly not written large. But in the early twenty-first century there is indeed no escaping, to paraphrase McKenzie, the challenge which this broad new vista poses for book historians. To take up this challenge book historians can no longer maintain a narrow focus on recorded text in the shape of 1 {This is reflected by the recent and current emergence in many universities of “Book studies” programmes, an appellation designed to transcend the narrow categories of traditional book history (bibliography and palaeography), vocational book studies (publishing, fine printing, etc.), new media studies, etc., and to unite them into a single interdisciplinary field of study.} 2 {D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (The Panizzi Lectures 1985), London, 1986, p. 5.} manuscripts or print, but must be prepared to evolve into textual historians. A book historical perspective on the recent digital developments has much to recommend itself. It is almost impossible to begin to grasp the ubiquitous digital developments in all their ramifications and consequences fully on their own terms—the chief problem being that it isn’t at all clear what these terms are. In addition, we are confronted with an unprecedented convergence of “media” (text, image, sound) in bits and bytes, at the same time as we can observe a similar convergence of functions. In the same digital environment we consult library catalogues, do our shopping, make ticket reservations, apply for a new driver’s license, chat, email, read newspapers, and download music, ebooks and movie clips. In this whirlpool of developments a book historical perspective offers a coherent and familiar perspective. It may not have a ready explanation of every single phenomenon, but it offers analogies, comparisons, and a disciplinary rigidity that has been too much lacking in the discussion of the digital revolution. A book historical perspective is a useful one also because book history as a discipline is centrally concerned with the dissemination of knowledge, which is also at the core of the digital revolution. Even those who impatiently shrug off the history of the book as a burdensome relic of a superseded technology cannot evade the continuity that runs from script through print to digital text. It is no coincidence, and very useful—often even necessary—that book terminology, together with the comparisons that it invites, remains pervasively present in all discussions of the digital revolution: from web pages to electronic publishing. It is as well then to embrace the historical perspective as an opportunity for an analysis of this terminology, in order to gain a better understanding both of what it is that we are replacing and of what it is that is replacing it. Indeed, an important reason for choosing a book historical vantage point is that in trying to asses the significance of the digital revolution it is precisely one of our problems that we remain firmly in the grip of our “typographic condition”. We involuntarily look at the new developments with typographically biased eyes. A book historical perspective can help us examine the familiar concepts (whether or not they are expressed in a familiar terminology) we stand in danger of using too glibly. As at least one critic has remarked, transferring terminology from one arena to another of course also has its dangers: Many cognitive scientists accept the computer metaphor of mind so uncritically that it is inconceivable for them that mental life does not flow through buffers and circuits in an algorithmic embrace of the biological hardware.3 We should not reach for metaphors too easily when trying to describe especially things that we don’t quite understand. They might obscure deep-running differences. At the same time, some of the phenomena this book deals with are yet to be given a name by which we may begin to understand them. As long as we are aware that we are studying unfamiliar phenomena in terms of what is familiar we can probably avoid the worst pitfalls. The advantages of adopting the book historical perspective as a unifying perspective probably outweigh the disadvantages. The book historical perspective allows analysis of the continuities and discontinuities in the transmission cycle of texts, from their production via their distribution to their consumption. Stressing historical continuities and discontinuities can enlighten our perception of the new phenomena we are confronting. Conversely, of course, a study of the digital forms of textual transmission can throw an unexpected light on earlier technologies and offer unexpected insights in the history of the book. 1. The technologising of the word A particularly inspiring example of such a bidirectional approach is Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, of 1982. His primary investigation is of the gigantic shift in thinking that resulted from the arrival of the “technology” of writing in oral societies. In fact, he ranges much more widely, also examining the comparable major shift in textual transmision caused by the advent of print as a further instance of the “technologising of the word”. The “technologising of the word” is a particularly attractive concept when we are dealing with such a high-technology development as the electronic transmission of text. 3 {Andrew Dillon, “Myths, Misconceptions, and an Alternative Perspective on Information Usage and the Electronic Medium, in Hypertext and Cognition, ed. by Jean-François Rouet et al., Mahwah NJ, 1996, pp. 25-42, at p. 25.} Accepting Ong’s appraisal of writing as a technology,4 the “technologising of the word” has been a very long historical process. But in this process we may discern a very limited number of major shifts, involving the adoption of what Michael Heim has called “transformative technologies”.5 Elizabeth Eisenstein has persuasively argued6 that the invention of printing with movable type enabled a transformation of the worlds of science and religion of such magnitude that it ended up changing the very texture of society. If the effects of this transformative technology may be called revolutionary, this is a fortiori true of the transformative technology of writing. We may turn to Julian Jaynes7 and Eric Havelock8 for an intimation of the almost inconceivable impact of that first transformative technology, not just on science, philosophy, literature or religion; indeed, not only on the texture of society, but on the human mind itself. Compared to the transformative power of the technology of writing, that of the current digital transformation is likely to be more limited in scope. There are continuities between print and the digital transmission of text that there were not when writing was introduced. But what it might lack in transformative power it make sup for in revolutionary immediateness. Certainly, each of these transformations in the way text is recorded has been radical enough to cause a certain amount of anxiety in circles concerned with literary production. From our contemporary point of view we may, naively, suppose the invention of writing to have been greeted with a sense of relief that the survival of literary compositions (and other writings) was no longer dependent on the defective memory of individuals. In reality, the technology was met with great distrust. Plato resented the incursion of writing into the 4 {Orality and Literacy, pp. 81-83.} 5 {In Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, New Haven & London, 1987, Chapter 2.} 6 {In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, CUP, 1979. Criticism#} 7 {The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, Boston, 1977.} 8 {Preface to Plato, Cambridge, Mass, 1963.} realm of memory.9 Later, Juvenal worries about the short life cycle of papyrus rolls in his first Satire. Horace talks, jokingly, about the unaesthetic moths eating his books. Moths were of course one of the major threats to the papyrus rolls of Greek and Roman antiquity, but the point is that it is paradoxically the (comparatively) new medium of alphabetic script that threatened the continued survival of their writings. The monument more durable than bronze that Horace has wrought—his poetry—is not really affected by such material hazards at all—as long, that is, as it is not written down but is carried in the hearts and minds of its readers.
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