FROM THE BOOK TO THE ELECTRONIC EDITION OF LITERARY TEXTS
Abstract of the paper for the workshop on the
Impact of Electronic Publishing on the Academic Community
Stockholm, 17-20 April 1997
The first and still most popular approach to the activity mentioned in the title, which is now rather large in absolute terms, but still rather small in comparison with the production of books, past and present, is the effort to reproduce the immediate physical aspect of the printed books by means of the electronic devices now available, in particular the Cathodic Rays Tube Screen, which is the heir of the old listing printout or the teletype printer, the system of which is still at the base of the encoding standards (ASCII etc.).
This approach presents many inconveniences, of which the principal seems to be the difficulty to do linguistic and other scientific analysis of texts produced in that way; but the one which concerns me here above all comes from a theoretical consideration of the process. This is what I try to discuss in this paper.
I start from the observation that the printed book has been so far the only possible means to disseminate the literary production, and itself the heir of the manuscript, which initially it tried simply to reproduce by imitation. Therefore many features that the book necessarily had were and are taken as a matter of course, without asking whether they might be different under different circumstances, viz. new systems to communicate the text which it contains.
In fact the material production of the book conformed to exigences dictated by the its support, namely the paper, while the electronic devices can supersede them. This is evident e.g. in the recent trend of hypertext production etc. Is it advisable to try and avail ourselves of such different situation and textual organization to disseminate, that is, publish (also) the literary texts produced in the past? And eventually, how?
To answer such questions one should take into consideration the definition and essence of the ``text'', not in order to define it per se, but to bring to awareness the distinction between the text as a conceptual entity, that which exists in the mind of the author, or of the reader, and the text as it is represented, or we might say ``materialized'' by means of a physical support.
As a physical (material) support we do not mean only the paper, but also the air (for the voice). Therefore we are reminded that a thorough consideration of the problem ``text'' should include the procedures of scripture, language (spoken or written) and before all this, of message. We may say that the first existence of a text, e.g. in the mind of the author, is something immaterial, probably also not yet a messagge; and secondarily it becomes a message, but also not yet a material entity.
It is in order to convey the message to other people that the author produces a material representation of the mental message, through voice or scripture (or otherwise). To obtain this material representation it is necessary to have a set of material entities (e.g. air waves shaped in different ways; or different signs on paper--the glyphs); but also a competence which dictates how to organize those material entities. This competence is what is called the language.
The relationship between language, speach, and scripture, is very complicated, as everybody knows. But unfortunately people tend to forget all this when they transport the written texts upon an electronic support, and simply tend to reproduce the elements of writing as such, or rather to place into the electronic support some codes which eventually become the eqivalent of the writing elements on a screen or on paper.
One should remember instead that the signs of writing have very different values, of which I shall mention three cases: the letters of the alphabet; the so called diacritics; the disposition of the signs on the page, which is in itself an important feature of writing. Everybody pays attention to the alphabetic signs; but the same is not true for the two other elements. They are not part of the same level of representation of the text. For instance, they are often used to make (more) explicit the connotations of the linguistic representation of the text, and are easily understood by the human intelligence, but not by the analytical possibilities of the computing devices.
If we see the electronic editions of literary texts simply as another way to obtain a visible object like a book, there is no problem in what I said until now; but if we consider the electronic editions as a powerful means to produce some automatic analysis of the texts we must reduce the different levels of the reproduction of the text which exist in the printed objects to one level. In other words, we must make explicit the meaning of all the components of the printed object.
A letter will be a letter (but what about their use as numbers, as e.g. in a list: (a)... (b)... (c)... ?); but a dot has a number of meaning which would generally be lost if we do not encode them in as many elements. And the same may be said for the meaning of the a capo or of the centered strings, the small capitals, the different fonts, the quotations, etc.
I believe that an important task of meetings like the present one may be to draw the attention of scholars to these problems, in order to avoid waste of efforts in planning and executing editions of electronic texts.