Rethinking Rethinking Text(uality) in Digital Text(uality) in Digital

ContextContextEphemera and Archives WorkshopEphemera and Archives Workshop

Dec. 2-4, Rice UniversityDec. 2-4, Rice University

Chen JingChen JingInstitute of Arts and Humanities, SJTU, Institute of Arts and Humanities, SJTU,

ShanghaiShanghai

Text in Print Culture

In the print culture, the concept of text is concrete but also abstract.

"the actual order of words and punctuation as contained in any one physical form, such as a manuscript, proof or book……..a text (the order of words and punctuation) has no substantial or material existence, since it is not restricted by time and space.…The text is contained and stabilized by the physical form but is not the physical form itself.

-------Peter Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age

A work is an "abstract artistic entity," the ideal construction toward which textual editors move by collating different editions and copies to arrive at their best guess for what the artistic creation should be. It is important to note that the work is ideal not in a Platonic sense, however, for it is understood to be the result of editorial assumptions that are subject to negotiation, challenge, community norms, and cultural presuppositions. "work as such can never be accessed but through some kind of text, that is, through the specific sign system designated to manifest a particular work.”

------Anna Gunder, Forming the Text, Performing the Work

Text in Digital Context

Text as information

One of the most important founders of cybernetic theory, Norbert Wiener discusses the idea of “art is information” in his work. He believes that the information is form (module) so the value of art depends on the obsession and affectivity of the information. The reason of the existence of the cliché in traditional works is the reproduction of the same information in the different works. Just like the perspective is very brand new in early Renaissance, but when it has become a basic technology for people, the specificity of this kind of information is neglected accordingly.

Sound and image, voice and text have become mere effects on the surface, or, to put it better, the interface for the consumer. Sense and the senses become mere glitter. Their media-produced glamour will last throughout the transitional period as a waste product of strategic programs. In computers everything becomes number: imageless, soundless, and wordless quantity. And if the optical fiber network reduces all formerly separate data flows to one standardized digital series of numbers, any medium can be translated into another. With numbers nothing is impossible. Modulation, transformation, synchronization; delay, memory, transposition; scrambling, scanning, mapping-atotal connection of all media on a digital base erases the notion of the medium itself.

------Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

Text as Process

An even more serious objection to Shillingsburg's definition is its implicit assumption that "text" does not include such qualities as color, font size and shape, and page placement, not to mention such electronic-specific effects as animation, mouseovers, instantaneous linking, and so on. Actually in most contemporary electronic texts, screen design, graphics, multiple layers, color, and animation, among other signifying components, are essential to the work's effects. Focusing only on "the actual order of words and punctuation" would be as inadequate as insisting that painting consists only of shapes, ruling out of bounds such things as color, texture, composition, and perspective. In the electronic text, there are data files and programs that process the files, hardware functionalities that interpret or compile the programs, and so on.

Case study: Hyperxt and the William Blake Archive

Hpertext and Its Materiality

In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article in The Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think", about a futuristic proto-hypertext device he called a Memex. Bush think that human brain is inclined to follow the association to make the occasional choices so he proposes there is an electromechanical device that an individual could use to read a large self-contained research library, and add or follow associative trails of links and notes created by that individual, or recorded by other researchers.

Enlightening by Bush’s idea, Ted Nelson coined the terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' in a model he developed for creating and using linked content in 1963. He later worked with Andries van Dam to develop the Hypertext Editing System in 1967 at Brown University. Douglas Engelbart independently began working on his NLS system in 1962 at Stanford Research Institute, although delays in obtaining funding, personnel, and equipment meant that its key features were not completed until 1968. In December of that year, Engelbart demonstrated a hypertext interface to the public for the first time, in what has come to be known as "The Mother of All Demos".

Landow summarizes 11 kinds of forms of link, including the Unidirectional Lexia to Lexia, Lexia to Lexia Bidirectional, String[Word or Phrase]to Lexia, String to Lexia Bidirectional, String to String, String to String Bidirectional, One-to-Many, Many-to-One, Typed Links, Reader-Activated Links, Author-Created Links. Just these links form the relation between the texts to structure an inner organizing form of hypertext. And the realization of these links depends upon two sides, one is the design of the program that need to be set and program by designer and another is that the organizing of links represent the intention of the operator (writer and reader). Both of them work on the signifying strategies of hypertext.

Signifying LinksSignifying Links

（（ Lexia to Lexia Unidirectional Lexia to Lexia Unidirectional ）（）（ Lexia to Lexia BidirectionalLexia to Lexia Bidirectional ） （ ） （ String[Word or Phrase]to LexiaString[Word or Phrase]to Lexia ））

（（ String to StringString to String ） （ ） （ One-to-Many One-to-Many ） （ ） （ Many-to-OneMany-to-One ））

(Typed Links)(Typed Links)

How to create a hypertext version of the print text?

1) digitalizing the original print page into the visual page；

2 ） in view of the representation of the print page to fit the interface, transforming the notes and conferences into lexias, then the structure of the print texts will be totally changed;

3 ） keeping the original chapters of the print book, then linking the chapters with the content according to a linear order;

4 ） the most challenging and also most interesting translation is using the possibility of hypertext to include all kinds of materials, just like other scholars works, comments of reviewer and other kinds of materials.

In this sense, William Blake Archive is a hypertext version of encyclopedia of William Blake. It realizes the hypertextuality of the hypertext: 1) both of the manuscript and print book become the “original codes” to be encoded in hypertext space to form a new relationship that fill the gap between the words and speech; 2) reader could travel in archive with the immersion feeling of body so the resistance to idea of romanticism and the authority of linear narrative that is intended proposed by Blake is digitally realized; 3) the image isn’t the sub-text of (word) text and there is a discrete network between the image and image, image and text, text and text and the different texts could complement one another to form a relation of intertextuality; 4) following the links and navigation bar, the archive provides a possibility of participation for readers who can choose the reading approaches by themselves to create the special texts(works).

THE END

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