Both lavagnino and mcgann recognize the limitation of the book form in
creating critical editions of texts and trace these limitations to the very
materiality of the book, and they also see that critics, like writers and
artists, necessarily think in terms of the language of their medium. Their
actions and thoughts are conditioned by their medium and its traditions, and
their decisions regarding what to include or exclude determined by the
financial and technical practicalities ruling the medium. We made the
same argument to the Getty Foundation about why Blake needs a
hypermedia archive, about how the very idea of a hypermedia archive grew
out of our work as editors of illuminated books in books whose format
prevented us from including more than the one copy under examination and
only a few supplement illustrations and variant plates. We even
have a link in our home page to McGann's article and used it as its title
suggests, as a rational for the archive he notes in his example B. But both
critics leave the impression that the electronic medium, by its
very immateriality, is somehow mediafree, or free from all
the kind of restraints suffered by books, and thus those working in
hypermedia are making decisions without constraints. But this is not true,
as the Blake editors are finding out in our dealing with curators,
publishers, computer hardware, scanners, servers, and the almighty dollar
that pays for all this stuff and the staff that make it all work. Some
critical projects are smaller and less demanding than others, to be sure,
but all have some strings attached.
There are many practicalities that make the theoretical inclusivity
imagined by McGann impossible. Theoretically, the
codex form could include all the variants of a text and all secondary
works. We already have such forms: they are called collections
or libraries. Hypertext can include a
great deal more stuff for less money and in less space, but it is by no
means a transparent medium or free of financial and technical and legal
restraints.
Jerry's point that books studying books is problematic
does not address sufficiently the advantages and pleasures of true facsimile
production and skirts the problems of studying a material form in
a nonmaterial form. Holding the facsimile of a rare book in ones
hands is to close the gap between original and reproduction.
We experience the original codes--or as one of my students said of
my MEW Blake facsimiles: Man, are these sexy.
Exactly right. Their handmade paper and ink and delicate washes all
contributed to the experience of the original. This is something only
printed reproductions of prints, or books on books, or paintings on
paintings, can convey. Tagging watermarks or giving paper size is
to engage in abstracting information from material, to separate the
quantitative from the qualitative. It is to translate one set of codes
into another and to remove the viewer from the object studied.
As a critical tool, though, facsimiles are limited in the ways both
authors suggest: there is no place physically for a scholarly apparatus.
With the Blake Trust volumes we tried creating a hybred. The images are
to size and true color and in that sense are facsimiles, but they face a
typographic transcript and are on paper not the size of the original. The
artifact itself, then, is not recreated in facsmile.
The scholarly apparatus, though, is deliberatly and unobtrusively buried
within the book. We did not even indicate which words or lines of
text have been annotated, so that the reading experience
would not be distrupted visually by editorial symbols. If
you want to read just the images as Blake printed them, you can; if you
want to read the poetry in an easier to read typographic translation, you
can do that too. You can ignore the editors all together, as you can
the links in a hypertext, but the information is there if you want it.
This format is not the best solution, but it is what we could afford to
do in the number of pages and with the budget we were given. As it was, I
had to exclude one of Blake's small books, because to have included it
would have meant needing over 60 more illustrations and at least 25 pages
of commentary. That translates as a lot of money (about $100 per
transparency) for both the Blake Trust and its publisher. So I appreciate
the arguments that hypermedia has fewer restrictions, but I know that
they do not disappear, especially when you are working with images and
are trying to scan them archivally, which means purchasing from museums
and libraries new 35mm slides or, preferably, 4x5 or 8x10 color
transparencies, top level scanners, workstations, monitors, and
software. All of these things cost money and sometimes take
so much of ones budget or so much time to do that compromises in
quality and quantity have to be made.
I also appreciate the potential of the computer to reproduce texts orally
as well as visually, and most of all, as Lavagnino recognizes, the
ability to create parallel texts. This feature gives students
the opportunity to edit the archive's raw materials themselves,
to engage in the critical comparisons that underlie all scholarly activity.
I think the future of critical hypertext editions will rely heavily
on this feature and will need to combine
documentary editing (i.e., a facsimile reproduction of the original, or
to-size and color reproduction of the page as originally printed) with
critical editing (with its scholarly apparatus noting variants or providing
critical commentary or background information)--and to combine them
unobtusively.
One last point. The Mark Reed that McGann uses as an example of the
material restrictions faced by editors and publishers is a friend and
colleague at UNC. An excellent Wordsworthian scholar, he worked on his
two volume 13 book Prelude for over ten years. I was in the room when the
first copies arrived from the publisher. He opened vol. 1 randomly and
immediately noticed a typo. He closed the book and walked away in
silence. I thought: if only he could correct the error--that is, if only
he could retain control over his text after it is published. The beauty
of critical hypertexts is that you can continually update and correct
and add--but that will make citing information from the web a complicated
matter, because what you cite in your article may no longer exist as
cited.
Joe Viscomi