McGann 2014

McGann, Jerome. A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

"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?" (1)

" textual and editorial scholarship, often marginalized in humane studies as a narrowly technical domain, should be shifted back to the center of humanist attention. Understanding the technologies of book culture is the beginning of wisdom for any practical approach to the so- called digital humanities. But you can’t do that well unless you have an intimate acquaintance with the scholarship of textualities." (2) -- resurgence of philology

Sachphilologie -- "a philology of material culture. The word signals an object- oriented and media approach to the study of history and culture. It solicits a larger perspective on the documentary record— in our context, the bibliographical as well as the digital record— and thus sets the agenda for what I am calling, after Susanne Langer, “philology in a new key.”" (3)

even with digitization, book will remain; so "What kind of research and educational program can integrate the preservation and study of these two radically different media?" (4)

"We’ve been experimenting with jerry- rigged approaches for over twenty years. But as the digitization of the traditional archive has gained inertia— a very good thing, let me reiterate— the problem for humanists has not diminished— if anything, it has grown more urgent. " (4)

philology: "the knowledge of what is and has been known"

"How then are we to save the traditional inheritance in its original material forms; and to integrate those objects— the realia of the depositories— to our new born- digital cultural works? We are living in the Last Days of book culture; that is clear. Of course this doesn’t mean we are in the Last Days of reading culture, least of all of our textual condition. But it is also clear that as we proceed to digitize our print and manuscript objects, and hence as our engagements with those objects become primarily digital engagements, the living culture that created and sustained them becomes itself an object— something, in Connerton’s words, “that is known about” rather than “something that is known . . . in one’s continuing life” (32). For the literary scholar, it is as if we had entered a bibliographical Day of the Dead." (10)