A Diet of Worms in the Digital Age :: Digital Technology Technological Papers

A Diet of Worms in the Digital AgeI basist prove it, but there is no doubt in my mind that textual arguments have been raging in scholarly circles for as eagle-eyed as there has been text to debate. In my minds eye I can see them ancient Sumerian scribes lecturing each some other about clay types and wedge depth early Semitic peoples voting no on the vowel medieval European scribes boldly pushing front with punctuation, spaces between words, and the lower-case alphabet, and having heated debates on the long-term viability of the capital letter. And then came the printing press Can you imagine the contention What bold fresh vistas were opened up for scholarship But eachone could publish anythingno matter what the quality And surely, this spelled the doom of calligraphy.With the advent of the digital age, scholarly textual debate has simply entered a new phase. At issue here what is the potential of digitally-powered scholarship, and how can that potential be realized? What approa ches should we take in terms of format and methodology? William H. ODonnell and Emily A. Thrush ( intent a Hypertext Edition of a Modern Poem) discuss the issues involved in designing hypertext editions of literature. Specifically, they refer to the edition of Yeatss Lapis lapis lazuli that they designed. The main wager to be studied, they feel (be it Lapis Lazuli or something else), must not be cluttered with visible links. They have devised a method of windowing that anticipates the modern frames format of internet documents, and stress that any attempt at electronic analysis of a work of literature must be intuitively structured, easy to use, and customizable. Their edition of Lapis Lazuli appears well-constructed and functional and seems to have fairly broad appeal, but it seems also to be intended more as an aid to understanding the poem than as a tool for scholarly research. This distinction separates this article somewhat from the others considered here, though the basic fo rmat could be applied to other projects.Peter Shillingsburg (Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials) aboveboard admits that what we all secretly want is to have every conceivable kind of informationtextual, visual, audiorelated to a given topic all sort for us and available right at our fingertips. This is, of course, impossible, but he feels that electronic editions of scholarly works have the potential to come closer to that ideal than any other medium. He systematically lays out the main problems facing those who create electronic editions and suggests some ways to address them.