For many people, the copier is probably the first place they first encounter the idea of collating. Do you want the copier to collate your 50 copies of that 3-page document? Or do you want to turn your 3 piles of 50 pages into 50 piles of 3 pages by hand? That might be the most common usage, but it’s not why we wanted to call this new publication The Collation. As you’ll see, collation is a word gathering together rich associations, many of which are of particular relevance to scholars at the Folger Shakespeare Library. For editors and textual scholars, collation refers to an intricate method of comparing copies of texts, looking for moments where the text differs. Sometimes this means looking at multiple copies of the same text. Especially in the early modern period, where textual variants are common in printed works because the press could be stopped…
Author: Sarah Werner
the serendipity of the unexpected, or, a copy is not an edition
My last post focused on my frustration with the assumption that digitization is primarily about access to text: But access is not all that digitization can do for us. Why should we limit ourselves to thinking about digital facsimiles as being akin to photographs? Why should we think about these artifacts in terms only of the texts they transmit? Let’s instead think about digitization as a new tool that can do things for us that we wouldn’t be able to see without it. Let’s use digitization not only to access text but to explore the physical artifact. I spent the remainder of that post brainstorming some suggestions about what digitization might enable other than access to text, and there were some great comments about the ramifications of textualizing the digital that I’m still mulling over. In this post I want to offer some examples of why we might want to…
fetishizing books and textualizing the digital
For some time I’ve been perplexed by the way both pro-digitization and pro-book people talk about digitizing books. A crude characterization of the ways in which the two sides depict the argument as having two sides might look like this: pro-digitization: Look, I can access all these wonderful old materials without leaving my armchair! pro-book: Those aren’t books; you can’t feel the paper and breathe in their smell! pro-digitization: But we can create a universal library! pro-book: You’re not creating a library, you’re destroying libraries! pro-digitization: Nyah nyah! pro-book: Pfft! And there you go. The digitization folks talk about access and the book folks talk about being in the presence of the object. Neither side tends to present a more nuanced sense of how they might each have something to offer the other, or to recognize that there might be other considerations and uses at stake. Lest you think I’m…
SAA 2012 seminar description
(If you’re a seminar member looking for the papers, you can find them here.) As some of you might have seen in the most recent Shakespeare Association of America Bulletin, Pascale Aebischer and I are directing a seminar on non-Shakespearean Drama and Performance. Both of us have a strong interest in shifting away from early modern performance studies’ dominant interest in Shakespeare to thinking about performance in relationship to drama by other early modern and modern playwrights. Since the Bulletin text is so necessarily brief, we thought it might be helpful to share our longer seminar proposal so that folks interested in participating can get a sense of the questions that are driving our seminar. If you’re looking for an SAA seminar to participate in next year and you’re interested in these questions, please consider ours. We’d be happy to see position papers alongside seminar papers; review essays surveying the…
even the digital is physical
Many of you will have already seen the news that the Internet Archive is preserving hard copies of each book they scan into their archive. Kevin Kelly’s recent piece likens this to the need for type specimen in biology: Biologists maintain a concept call a “type specimen.” Every species of living organism has many individuals of noticeable variety. There are millions of Robins in America, for instance, all of them each express the Robin-ness found in the type of bird we have named Turdus migratorius. But if we need to scientifically describe another bird as being “like a Robin” or maybe “just a Robin” which of those millions of Robins should we compare it to? Biologists solve this problem by arbitrarily designating one found individual to be representative and archetypical of the entire species. It is the archetype, or the “type specimen,” of that form. There is nothing special about that chosen…