0.26 Underpinnings of the social edition  (Page 3/32)

In other words, the social theory of text rejected the notion of individual literary authority in favor of a model where social processes of production disperse that authority. According to this view, the literary “text” is not solely the product of authorial intention, but the result of interventions by many agents (such as copyists, printers, publishers) and material processes (such as revision, adaptation, publication). In practical terms, the social theory of text revised the role of the textual scholar and editor, who (no longer concerned with authorial intention) instead focused on recovering the “social history” of a text—that is, the multiple and variable forms of a text that emerge out of these various and varied processes of mediation, revision, and adaptation. As with New Historicism, it is outside the purview of this article to critically evaluate the claims of social textual theory. Interested readers are directed to critical assessments by Tanselle (1991) and Greetham (1999: 397-418).

2.1.3. knowledgebases

The proliferation of Renaissance text-corpus humanities computing projects in North America, Europe, and New Zealand during the late 1980s and early 1990s Representative examples include: the Women Writers Project ; the Century of Prose Corpus ; the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database ; the Michigan Early Modern English Materials ; the Oxford Text Archive ; the Riverside STC Project ; Shakespeare Database Project; and, the Textbase of Early Tudor English. might be considered the inevitable result of the desire of Renaissance scholars, spurred on by the project of New Historicism, to engage with a vast body of primary and secondary materials in addition to the traditional canon of literary works; the rise of the sociology of text in bibliographical circles; and the growing realization that textual analysis, interpretation, and synthesis might be pursued with greater ease and accuracy through the use of an integrated electronic database.

A group of scholars involved in such projects, recognizing the value of collaboration and centralized coordination, engaged in a planning meeting towards the creation of a Renaissance Knowledge Base (RKB). Richardson and Neuman 1990. In addition to the authors of the application itself, other investigators involved with the group included David A. Bank, Jonquil Bevan, Lou Burnard, Thomas N. Corns, Michael Crump, R. J. Fehrenback, Alistair Fox, Roy Flannagan, S. K. Heniger Jr., Arthur F. Kinney, Ian Lancashire, George M. Logan, Willard McCarty, Louis T. Milic, Barbara Mowat, Joachim Neuhaus, Michael Neuman, Henry Snyder, Frank Tompa, and Greg Waite. Consisting of “the major texts and reference materials […] recognized as critical to Renaissance scholarship,” As outlined in the application, the materials intended for inclusion and integration in the RKB were “old-spelling texts of major authors (Sidney, Marlowe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, etc.), the Short-Title Catalogue (1475–1640), the Dictionary of National Biography , period dictionaries (Florio, Elyot, Cotgrave, etc.), and the Oxford English Dictionary ” (Richardson and Neuman 1990: 2). the RKB hoped to “deliver unedited primary texts,” to “allow users to search a variety of primary and secondary materials simultaneously,” and to stimulate “interpretations by making connections among many kinds of texts” (Richardson&Neuman 1990: 1-2). Addressing the question of “Who needs RKB?” the application offered the following response: