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)

Digitizing Collection, Composition, and Product: Tracking the Work of Little Gidding, by Paul Dyck, Ryan Rempel, with Stuart Williams (229-256)

"we have found that XML and digital images offer an effective way not only of delivering information about material culture but, more importantly, of doing primary research on cultural objects. Our ideal method is digital from the ground up, aimed at a process rather than a product, or put another way, a product that is always produced by a scholarly process. An important correlative of this process is that, from beginning to end, our goal is to keep central the material object of study. On the back-end, then, we have a set of XML-encoded texts being dynamically combined in imitation of the material object, and on the front-end, we have the image of the object itself. In designing this interface, we are blurring the distinction between editing and presentation: we imagine the presentation interface as a version of the editing interface rather than as a new project." (229-230)

"The Ferrars' method shares with today's electronic compositional culture some important and mutually enlightening similarities. Most notable is the transportability of the text or image fragment and its redeployment in new compositions. While subsequent centuries witnessed the addition of images to printed texts and the assembly of various cut-outs in scrapbook form, the Little Gidding concordances stand out as serious books made entirely of fragments from other books. They are the apotheosis of the commonplace book; the proof that a most important text -- and simultaneously a rare object -- can be compiled out of commonly available materials. Since the textual transportability that they employ relies upon a vigorous system of textual encoding, they supply the model for their own digitization, allowing us in turn to model their material process of composing the page." (230)

"The research of the past few decades has brought to light the particularities of early modern book culture, and in particular, its profound mixture of what we tend to describe as manuscript and print practices. For all their oddity, the Little Gidding concordances can now be seen as strangely typical of their time: they bring together traditional practices of composition with the new experience of relatively cheap print. Rather than copying by hand, the makers used scissors and glue to form a new text out of the material of the source. In this way, the broadly circulated text of the Gospels was made into a private book and circulated as a manuscript might." (232)

intertextuality

"The Ferrars, in building their own multimedia mixes, would have likely understood their practice within the theory of commonplaces, the gathering of materials under common heads, allowing their employment to particular rhetorical ends. The concordances in fact use the word 'head' to describe the 150 chapters: these heads each contain a collection of materials. Unlike other early modern commonplace books, though, these have narrative profluence. They thus serve simultaneously as narrative and as a storehouse of materials, fit for reemployment toward emergent occasions." (236)

"this LG reference system -- what we might generatively think of as Little Gidding markup -- has been layered on top of the canonical markup of the biblical text, that is, the marking of the text into books, chapters, and verses. This is all to point out that the LG community began with one of the most structurally encoded texts available and then restructured it, using the biblical text's canonical markup as an ordering system, but also using typeface as markup." (236)