Nelson and Terras 2012

Nelson, Brent and Melissa Terras, eds. Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture. Tempe: Iter, 2012.

Introduction, by Brent Nelson and Melissa Terras (1-20)

"complementary relationship between object- and text-based evidence" (3)

Richard Grassby: etic analysis (attending to the material object itself, attributes) vs emic analysis (studying the significance of the object to the humans who interacted with it, social context) (4-5)

Beyond Remediation: The Role of Textual Studies in Implementing New Knowledge Environments, by Alan Galey, Brent Nelson, Richard Cunningham, Ray Siemens (21-48)

"Culture is not a transmissible thing, to be passed on like old taxidermy whether the next generation wants it or not, but a network of imaginative investments that cannot be contained within material artefacts, yet cannot be understood without them." (22)

Tanselle -- coming out of Greg-Bowers tradition; "denies that the electronic medium can fundamentally alter his field" (28); difference between WORK, DOCUMENT, WITNESS, REPRODUCTION, COPY; "For Tanselle, a change in the medium of the work's reproduction from book to screen makes no difference to his foundational distinction; however, what Tanselle does not allow is that our conception of works as ineluctable entities may depend at least in part on an effect of the still dominant medium for reproducing these works, namely the fixity of print that emerged only a little more than a century ago." (28)

"What distinguished the electronic edition from the bibliographic one may not then be any of the former's single features, but instead its capacity simultaneously to be more than one kind of edition." (30)

reading of George Herbert's "Easter Wings" -- "the process of meaning-making at work here depends not upon a linear progression of one medium (printed text) subsuming another (illustration), but rather upon poetic effects made possible by different orders of information, thought, and experience all co-present within the same print artefact" (33)

Pierre Belon, De aquatilibus (1553), oblong quarto form to fit illustrations of fish

Digitizing Non-Linear Texts in TEI P5: The Case of the Early Modern Reversed Manuscript, by Angus Vine and Sebastiaan Verwij (113-136)

reversed manuscripts -- challenge the orientation of the screen in the digital edition

"The question that thus arises is how best to represent the conflicting textual structures that define the manuscript commonplace book and miscellany. Besides observing the integrity either of the artefact or of the text in the order in which it appears in the book, a third option presents itself; namely, a genetic approach, one that follows subsequent scribal stints in the order in which they have been written, and that may not simply be observed by turning the page. In other words, the editor must differentiate between the spatial relations of manuscript items on the one hand (i.e., how they physically appear on the page) and their temporal relations (which came first, which came later) on the other. Ideally, the editor would then record both sets of information simultaneously." (127)