0.26 Underpinnings of the social edition  (Page 8/32)

Archival representation involves the use of computer-assisted means to describe and express print-, visual-, and audio-based material in tagged and searchable electronic form. Associated as it is with the critical methodologies that govern our representation of original artifacts, archival representation is chiefly bibliographical in nature and often involves the reproduction of primary materials such as in the preparation of an electronic edition or digital facsimile. For a detailed discussion of electronic archival forms, see Hockey (2000). In addition to the projects mentioned above (such as the English Broadside Ballad Archive ) and others, pertinent examples of projects concerned with archival representation include digitization projects undertaken by the Internet Archive and Google, and by libraries, museums, and similar institutions. Key issues in archival representation include considerations of the modeling of objects and processes, the impact of social theories of text on the role and goal of the editor, and the “death of distance.”

Ideally, object modeling for archival representation should simulate the original object-artifact, both in terms of basic representation (e.g. a scanned image of a printed page) and functionality (such as the ability to “turn” or otherwise “physically” manipulate the page). However, object modeling need not simply be limited to simulating the original. Although “a play script is a poor substitute for a live performance,” Martin Mueller has shown that “however paltry a surrogate the printed text may be, for some purposes it is superior to the ‘original’ that it replaces” (2005: 61). The next level of simulation beyond the printed surrogate, namely the “digital surrogate,” would similarly offer further enhancements to the original. These enhancements might include greater flexibility in the basic representation of the object (such as magnification and otherwise altering its appearance) or its functionality (such as fast and accurate search functions, embedded multimedia, etc.).

Archival representation might then involve modeling the process of interaction between the user and the object-artifact. Simulating the process affords a better understanding of the relationships between the object and the user, particularly as that relationship reveals the user’s disciplinary practices—discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling, illustrating, representing. See Unsworth (2000).

2.2.3. the scholarly edition

The recent convergence of social theories of text and the rise of the electronic medium has had a significant impact on both the function of the scholarly edition and the role of the textual scholar. As Susan Schreibman has argued, “the release from the spatial restrictions of the codex form has profoundly changed the focus of the textual scholar’s work,” from “publishing a single text with apparatus which has been synthesized and summarized to accommodate to codex’s spatial limitations” to creating “large assemblages of textual and non-textual lexia, presented to readers with as little traditional editorial intervention as possible" (2002: 284). In addition to acknowledging the value of the electronic medium to editing and the edition, such “assemblages” also recognize the critical practice of “unediting,” whereby the reader is exposed to the various layers of editorial mediation of a given text, On this sense of “unediting,” see Marcus; on “unediting” as the rejection of critical editions in preference to the unmediated study of originals or facsimiles, see McLeod (1982). as well as an increased awareness of the “materiality” of the text-object under consideration. On the materiality of the Renaissance text, see De Grazia and Stallybrass (1993), and Sutherland (1998).