Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction
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A NEW REPUBLIC OF LETTERS A NEW REPUBLIC OF LETTERS Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction Jerome McGann Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by Jerome McGann All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data McGann, Jerome J. A new republic of letters : memory and scholarship in the age of digital reproduction / Jerome McGann. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72869-1 (alkaline paper) 1. Humanities—Research. 2. Humanities—Study and teaching. 3. Memory—Social aspects. 4. Learning and scholarship—Social aspects. 5. Communication in learning and scholarship—Technological innovations. 6. Digital media—Social aspects. 7. Internet—Social aspects. 8. Globalization—Social aspects. 9. Social change. I. Title. AZ186.M35 2014 001.3—dc23 2013036538 For those future philologists, my instructors: Alex Gil, Matt Kirschenbaum, Beth Nowviskie, Steve Ramsay, and Andy Stauffer Dove sta memoria Contents Preface ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 I from history to method 1. Why Textual Scholarship Matters 19 2. “The Inorganic Or ga ni za tion of Memory” 32 3. Memory: History, Philosophy, Philology 49 II from theory to method 4. The Documented World 77 5. Marking Texts in Many Dimensions 90 6. Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text 113 III from method to practice 7. What Do Scholars Want? 127 8. Philological Investigations I: The Example of Poe 147 9. Philological Investigations II: A Page from Cooper 168 Conclusion: Pseudodoxia Academica; or, Literary Studies in a Global Age 199 Notes 209 Ac know ledg ments 231 Index 233 Preface What we call literature is an institutional system of cultural memory— a republic of letters. The general science of its study is philology and its Turing Machine is what scholars call the Critical Edition. Driven by the historical emergence of online communication, this book investigates their character and relation. Although it is cumulatively or ga nized, each chapter has an integrity of its own, so a seriatim reading might not be best for every reader. As the ti- tles of the three parts indicate, the book weaves a set of discussions around the relation of theory and method within the general horizon of an histori- cal critique. Part I engages the issues through the long- standing tension between the claims of philosophy and philology. It begins to investigate a key theme of the book: that a functional refl ection on literature and culture should be- gin as a question of method rather than theory, and hence with a study of the critical scholarly edition and its historical and institutional character. Pivoting on the controversy between Wilamowitz and Nietzsche, the dis- cussions in Chapters 1–3 accept the discourse of Continental Philosophy as their conceptual framework. This is done in order to give the relevant historical shape to the book’s philosophical and theoretical issues. Moving away from that discourse, Part II examines the relation of the- ory and method in the strongly procedural terms that have emerged under the horizon of digital technology. Chapters 4 and 5 are the most theoreti- cal in the book since they sketch an interpretive method that maps digital to traditional philological functions. The centrality of the critical edition is reexamined in Chapter 6 in relation to its new digital problems and affordances. Finally, the question “What is to be done?” frames the issues taken up in Part III, which reengages in more practical ways the historical and x preface institutional issues raised in Part I. Chapter 7 argues the need to situate humanities research and pedagogy, including close interpretational prac- tices, within our present (and changing) institutional horizon. Chapters 8 and 9 then lay out two exemplary case studies. Each suggests the inter- pretive expectations that have emerged for literary scholars because of the coming of digital technology. The Introduction provides an overview of the book. The Conclusion is a set of cautionary refl ections addressed most particularly to scholars of the West. Given the need for a new kind of philology, online and there- fore global at an entirely new level, what ethos underpins that famous and still relevant question “What is to be done?” Abbreviations ARP Applied Research in ’Patacriticism. A Mellon- funded research lab to develop software for interpretive study of humanities materials: http:// en .wikipedia .org /wiki /Applied _Research _in _Patacriticism . ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Code for representing text in computerized communication equipment. DPLA The Digital Public Library of America: http:// www .dp .la . ECCO Eighteenth- Century Collections Online: http:// gdc .gale .com /products /eighteenth -century -collections -online /. Flickr An image and video hosting website and an early model for social software: http:// en .wikipedia .org /wiki /Flickr . IATH The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. University of Virginia’s pioneering digital humanities research center: http:// www .iath .virginia .edu /. NCCO Nineteenth- Century Collections Online: http:// gdc .gale .com /nineteenth -century -collections -online /. NINES Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth- Century Electronic Scholarship. A freely available online aggregator of long nineteenth- century scholarly research and publications: http:// www .nines .org /. PDF Portable Document Format. ISO open standard document exchange format: http:// www .nines .org /. SCI Scholarly Communications Institute. A Mellon- funded institute for promoting digital scholarship: http:// uvasci .org /. SGML Standard Generalized Markup Language. ISO standard for e-text markup: http:// en .wikipedia .org/wiki /Standard _Generalized _Markup _Language . SSHRC The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Canadian national council for supporting scholarship in the social sciences and humanities: http:// www .sshrc -crsh .gc .ca /home -accueil -eng .aspx . TEI The Text Encoding Initiative. A professional consortium for developing and maintaining standard models for digital texts: http:// www .tei -c .org /index .xml . XML Extensible Markup Language. A standard encoding language for human and machine- readable documents: http:// en .wikipedia .org /wiki /XML . A NEW REPUBLIC OF LETTERS γραμμάτων τε συνθέσεις, μνήμην ἁπάντων, μουσομήτορ᾽ ἐργάνην. —Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound I. 460– 461 And more than all, at last came memory, Teacher of every art, mother of song. —Translation by Thomas Medwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley Introduction I Here is surely a truth now universally acknowledged: that the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be recurated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures. But as the technology of cultural memory shifts from bibliographical to digital machines, a diffi cult question arises: what do we do with the books? This is a problem for society at large and many people are working at it, none more assiduously than certain ex- pert persons, often technicians. Highly skilled and motivated as they are, book history and the complex machineries of books fall outside their pro- fessional expertise. Humanist scholars, the long- recognized monitors of cultural memory, register a problem in this situation. For humanist think- ing has been shaped by the institutions and the technology of books.1 Prima facie, these problems must now be approached in digital terms and venues. Much of my work for the past twenty years has taken ex- actly that approach, through the founding of institutions like IATH and NINES, and in helping to build information machines like The Rossetti Archive, IVANHOE, and Juxta.2 But I want to take up the question again in a more traditional form— this book and the older technology it repre- sents. Now more than ever, I believe, we need to understand how biblio- graphical technology works. Designing optimal digital environments re- quires it. The notorious “Crisis in the Humanities,” still with us, is by no means simply an intramural problem for an ivory tower and bookish academy. Society at large is sorely mistaken when it views cultural studies as a surplus educational function—trivial, it is often thought, when set beside (for instance) those STEM fi elds of science, technology, engineering, and math. For all their importance, those disciplines are unequipped to inves- tigate the relation of language and literature to society. 2 introduction Why that understanding is a precious resource for our present presentist culture is one of the two primary concerns of this book. The other is prac- tical: how to exploit that resource for societies now moving to orga nize their cultural memories in digital forms. The practical aim is primarily di- rected to the traditional custodians of cultural memory. It argues that tex- tual and editorial scholarship, often marginalized in humane studies as a narrowly technical domain, should be shifted back to the center of human- ist attention. Understanding the technologies of book culture is the begin- ning of wisdom for any practical approach to the so- called digital humani- ties. But you can’t do that well unless you have an intimate acquaintance with the scholarship of textualities. That scholarship once had a name to conjure with: philology. The interests of this book thus reach back to the nineteenth century, when philology gained an apex of achievement, and when advances in global communication began to pick up speed. Not