Text and Genre in Reconstruction Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions Edited by Willard McCarty OpenBook Publishers To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/64 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. Willard McCarty is Professor of Humanities Computing and academic staff member of the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication, King’s College London, Editor of Humanist and of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. He is recipient of the 2006 Richard W. Lyman Award, National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation, U.S., and of the 2005 Award for Outstanding Achievement, Computing in the Arts and Humanities, The Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs, Canada. Willard McCarty Text and Genre in Reconstruction Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions Cambridge 2010 Open Book Publishers CIC Ltd., 40 Devonshire Road, Cambridge, CB1 2BL, United Kingdom http://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2010 Willard McCarty. Contributors are free to re-publish their contribu- tions in whatever other ways they choose. Some rights are reserved. This book is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and non-commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Details of allowances and restrictions are available at: http://www.openbookpublishers.com As with all Open Book Publishers titles, digital material and resources associated with this volume are available from our website: http://www.openbookpublishers.com ISBN Hardback: 978-1-906924-25-6 ISBN Paperback: 978-1-906924-24-9 ISBN Digital (pdf): 978-1-906924-26-3 Cover Image: Scribbly Gum, Brisbane Water National Park, New South Wales, Australia. Photograph taken by the Editor, August 2008. See page 187, this volume. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initia- tive), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers To Warwick Gould FRSL, FRSA, FEA, Professor, Director and friend – ‘But every now and then, just weighing in Is what it must come down to...’ Acknowledgements All of us who have contributed to this volume, long in the making, would like to acknowledge with gratitude the help of many kinds given by the publisher and especially to its Managing Director, Dr Alessandra Tosi. The Editor in turn pays tribute to the authors, who have been magnificently cooperative and patient. Thanks are due to the Institute of English Studies (to its Director, for whom the dedication) and to the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, and its Director, Professor Harold Short, for unstinting support of the Seminar from which most of the essays in this volume originated. Contents Contributors viii Introduction Willard McCarty 1 1. Never Say Always Again: Reflections on the Numbers Game John Burrows 13 2. Cybertextuality by the Numbers Ian Lancashire 37 3. Textual Pathology Peter Garrard 71 4. The Human Presence in Digital Artefacts Alan Galey 93 5. Defining Electronic Editions: A Historical and Functional Perspective Edward Vanhoutte 119 6. Electronic Editions for Everyone Peter Robinson 145 7. How Literary Works Exist: Implied, Represented, and Interpreted Peter Shillingsburg 165 8. Text as Algorithm and as Process Paul Eggert 183 9. ‘I Read the News Today, Oh Boy!’: Newspaper Publishing in the Online World Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland 203 References 219 Contributors John Burrows is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Newcastle, NSW Australia, Director of the Centre for Literary and Linguis- tic Computing there from 1989-2001 and winner of the 2001 Roberto Busa Award for his work in literary computing. He is the pre-eminent scholar in computational stylistics, with numerous publications on questions of authorship in 17th through 19th-century English literature. Marilyn Deegan, trained as an Anglo-Saxonist, is Emerius Profes- sor of Humanities Computing, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, and Director of Research Development. She is Edi- tor, Literary and Linguistic Computing, co-author of Digital Futures (2002) and co-editor of Digital Preservation (2006). Formerly she was Professor of Electronic Library Research, De Montfort, and Director, Forced Migration Online, Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford. Paul Eggert is an Australian Research Council professorial fellow, based at the University of New South Wales at ADFA in Canberra. He chairs the Board of the AustLit database, and has been involved in experimental elec- tronic edition projects since the mid-1990s. He was founding general editor of the Academy Editions of Australian Literature (10 vols, 1996-2007). His edition, with Elizabeth Webby, of Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms appeared in 2006. He wrote Securing the Past: Conservation in Art, Architec- ture and Literature (2009). Alan Galey is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where he also teaches in the Book History and Print Culture Program. His research focuses on the history and future of the book, specifically with regard to digital scholarly editing and theories of the archive. He is a co-leader of the Textual Studies team on the Implement- ing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and holds a SSHRC research grant for a project titled Archive and Interface in Digital Textual Studies: From Cultural History to Critical Design. Contributors ix Peter Garrard has held faculty positions at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, and the University of Southampton. He is currently Reader in Neurology at St. George’s, University of London. His numerous papers on cognitive neuroscience, language and neurodegenerative disor- ders are widely cited. His 2005 article in Brain on ‘The effects of very early Alzheimer’s disease on the characteristics of writing by a renowned author’ (128.2) received worldwide media attention. Ian Lancashire is Professor of English at the University of Toronto and a member of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2006 he won a prestigious Killam Research Fellowship in English Literature. He is a specialist in Ren- aissance drama, General Editor of Representative Poetry Online and Lexicons of Early Modern English, founding Director of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities there from 1984 to 1996, Canadian pioneer in the digital humanities, software developer and author of numerous books and arti- cles. His Forgetful Muses: Reading the Author in the Text is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press. Peter Robinson is co-director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing, University of Birmingham, textual editor special- izing in Chaucer, software developer and founder of Scholarly Digital Edi- tions. Since the 1980s he has pioneered digital techniques for editing, most notably the use of philogenetic software applied to the study of large tex- tual traditions. Currently he is working with the Institute for New Testa- ment Textual Research, Birmingham, on both the Nestle-Aland 28 and the Digital Nestle-Aland editions. His Canterbury Tales Project is a normative starting point for scholars interested in digital editing. Peter Shillingsburg, formerly Director of the Centre for Textual Schol- arship, De Montfort, is Svaglic Professor of Textual Studies, Loyola Uni- versity, Chicago. He is author of five books (most recently From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts) and numerous articles on editing, general editor of The Works of W. M. Thackery and editor of four other editions. He is a pre-eminent theoretician of digital editing practice. Kathryn Sutherland is Professor and Reader in Bibliography and Tex- tual Criticism, St Anne’s College, Oxford. Her interests are in bibliography, textual criticism and literature 1750-1850. She is author of Jane Austen’s Tex- tual Lives (2005) and numerous essays on textual criticism and its digital aspects. Her book with Marilyn Deegan, Transferred Illusions: Digital Tech- nology and the Forms of Print, was published in 2009. x Text and Genre in Reconstruction Edward Vanhoutte is director of research at the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, Ghent Belgium, and head of the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies (CTB). He pioneered electronic textual editing in Belgium and the Netherlands, is Associate Editor, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and author and editor of books and articles on (electronic) textual editing and humanities computing. Introduction Willard McCarty 1. The Question in Principle In his Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture, the great neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch relates a story from his youth. When in 1917 he entered Haverford College, a Quaker institution in the United States, Rufus Jones called him in and asked him about his intentions: ‘Warren,’ said he, ‘what is Thee going to be?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘And what is Thee going to do?’ And again I said, ‘I have no idea; but there is one question I would like to answer. What is a number, that a man may know it, and a man, that he may know a number?’ He smiled and said, ‘Friend, Thee will be busy as long as Thee lives.’ I have been, and that is what we are about. (McCulloch 1988/1960: 2) Changing what needs to be changed in the above quotation, the central complex of questions that work in digital textual studies has been orbit- ing all these years emerges: his ‘we’ is us, the writers and readers of this book, and conjoined to (rather than substituted for) ‘number’, is ‘text’ (and so ‘book’).