From the Chronicle of Higher Education dated December 13, 2002
Literary Scholarship in the Digital Future
By JEROME J. McGANN
A widespread malaise has been notable in literary studies for more than a
decade at least, particularly among those heavily invested in the education
of humanities researchers. One of the sources of this malaise -- it has
many -- was highlighted by a special letter sent to the members of the
Modern Language Association in May by the organization's president, Stephen
Greenblatt. Pointing to publishing conditions that make it difficult or even
impossible for young scholars to meet current standards for tenure in research
departments of literature, he called the problem, correctly, a "systemic"
one. Just try to find a publisher for primary-document materials, or for any
basic research that doesn't come labeled for immediate consumption: "Sell
this by such and such a date" (before it spoils).
Do you see a digital savior waiting to descend? Do you think I see this redeemer?
Well, I don't. But because these broad institutional problems intersect with
the emergence of digital technology, we won't usefully address the former
unless we come to terms with the latter.
Consider this. For as long as I've been an educator, a system of apartheid
has marked literary and cultural studies. On one hand we have editing and
textual work, on the other theory and interpretation. I don't have to tell
you which of those two has been regarded as menial, if also somehow necessary.
And like any system of apartheid, ours has corrupted both. One of the few
who worked brilliantly on both sides of the divide, the late D.F. McKenzie,
of the University of Oxford, once remarked that material culture is never
more grossly perceived than it is by theoreticians, whose ideas tend to remove
them from base contacts with the physical objects that code material culture.
The ignorant theoretician met his match in the myopic scholar who gets lost
in the forest, transfixed by the bark of the trees.
When I describe our recent educational history in those terms, I am sometimes
suspected of fellow-traveling with a cadre of moralizers and educational instrumentalists.
But remember, William Bennett, Allan Bloom, Lynne Cheney, and Dinesh D'Souza
are not enemies of theory or interpretation; they are simply strict constructionists
in a field where Stanley Fish, Edward Said, Catharine Stimpson, and Cornel
West have been looking to broaden our ancient ideal of liberal education.
Seeing the educational history of the past 15 or 20 years only in terms of
the celebrated struggles between the two groups has obscured our view of an
educational emergency now grown acute with the spread of digital technology.
Let me make a forecast: In the next 50 years, the entirety of our inherited
archive of cultural works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital
storage, access, and dissemination. This system, which is already under development,
is transnational and transcultural. Let's say that prophecy is true. Now ask
yourself these questions: Who will be carrying out this work? Who will do
it? Who should do it?
Those turn into sobering queries when we reflect on the recent history of
higher education in the United States. Just when we will be needing young
people well-trained in the histories of textual transmission and the theory
and practice of scholarly method and editing, our universities are seriously
unprepared to educate such persons. Electronic scholarship and editing necessarily
draw their primary models from longstanding philological practices in language
study, textual scholarship, and bibliography. As we know, those three core
disciplines preserve but a ghostly presence in most of our Ph.D. programs.
The development of editorial and archival projects in digital form is now
taking place and will proliferate. Departments of literary study have perhaps
the greatest stake in these momentous events, and yet they are -- in
this country -- probably the least involved. (In England and in Europe,
the situation is less dire, probably because philological traditions there
are more deeply grounded.) Here, the work is mostly being carried by librarians
and systems engineers. Many, perhaps most, of those people are smart, hardworking,
and literate. Their digital skills and scholarship are often outstanding.
Few, however, have a strong grasp of the theory of texts. It has been decades
since library schools in this country required courses in the history of the
book. Does it shock those of you in literature departments to learn that?
We aren't shocked at our own ignorance of the history of language or the sociology
of texts.
OK, then, what's the problem? Our traditional departments have managed to
keep around a few old-fashioned editorial and bibliographical types. Let's
send them out to help with the technical jobs and hope that their (that's
our) brains aren't completely fried by beetle-browed and positivist habits.
Once upon a time, even they (that's we) were involved with the readerly text,
right?
Those contacts might, perhaps, prove barely sufficient were it not for another
recent upheaval in the world of higher education. For it happens that, between
about 1965 and 1985, textual scholars began to rethink some of the most basic
ideas and methods of their discipline. I chose those dates because Ernest
Honigman published The Stability of Shakespeare's Text in 1965, and, in 1985,
Don McKenzie delivered his famous Panizzi Lectures, Bibliography and the Sociology
of Texts (published in 1986). So disconnected had the general scholarly community
grown from its foundational subfield of textual and bibliographical studies,
however, that this watershed passed by with little notice. Both moments overlapped
with the more public emergence of what would be called "literary theory"
-- perhaps "underlapped" is better -- and drew scant attention.
The "genetic" and "social" editing theories and methods
that developed in those years signaled a major shift in literary and cultural
scholarship. Yet the significance of the 1986 Hans Walter Gabler edition of
Ulysses is not widely understood to this day, except by specialists, and McKenzie's
name is, alas, scarcely known to most humanists. In that work and in other
work like it, the idea of "the materiality of texts" -- a complex
set of social and material facts -- was set on a firm new theoretical
footing. As a result, we can now see and formalize in quite precise ways the
structure and operation of "discourse networks." Close study of
the materiality of cultural products has thus brought us to a reversal of
Roland Barthes's famous injunction, "From Work to Text."
An imminent publication measures the change that overtook textual scholarship
at the end of the last century. In 1982, Harold Jenkins published his celebrated
edition of Hamlet in the Arden Shakespeare series. A lifetime's work, the
book epitomized a traditional, so-called eclectic approach, whereby Jenkins
educed a single text of the play out of a careful study of the three chief
documentary editions. But now a new Arden Shakespeare Hamlet, edited by Ann
Thompson and Neil Taylor, will replace Jenkins's remarkable work. The new
Arden Hamlet will not publish a single conflated text, but will present all
three documentary witnesses -- The First Folio (1623), The First Quarto
(1603), and The Second Quarto (1604-5) -- each in its special integrity
(or lack thereof).
The New Yorker reported the event in a piece by Ron Rosenbaum last May. The
article gives a good general introduction to the upheaval in textual studies
that has been going on for almost 40 years and has been at white heat for
20. Because the work of scholarship moves in a kind of slow motion -- that
remains true even today, odd as it may seem -- such belated awareness
would not normally be cause for much notice. But at this particular historical
moment, when information storage and transmission and methods of knowledge
representation are calling for immediate practical attention, Rosenbaum's
piece seems most interesting for what it did not talk about: the role of digitization
in current scholarship.
Force of circumstance today calls on us to develop scholarly editions in digital
forms. Even though the new Arden Hamlet is not being produced in digital form,
scholars -- including Jenkins and Thompson -- are now involved in
serious controversies over how the digital work should be carried out. The
theory and practice of traditional textual scholarship are, thus, in a lively,
not to say volatile, state of self-reflection. Scholarly editing today cannot
be undertaken in any medium without a disciplined engagement with editorial
theory and method. Scholars who think to use information-technology resources,
as now we must, face a double difficulty. We must learn to use digital tools
whose capacities are still being explored in fundamental ways, even by technicians.
We must also approach all the traditional questions of scholarly editing as
if a transformed world stood all before us.
A humanist may well wonder what to think, or how to proceed, in such an informational
white-out. Observing it, the literary critic Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg
Elegies, has advised us to a great refusal of the digital emergence.
That very bad advice does little justice to the power and usefulness of the
book. We recognize the capacity of digital instruments to simulate so many
of our elements and forms of living, and thinking, and imagining. But just
because the book has been our simulation machine of choice for centuries,
we need to study and understand it now more than ever -- not as a place
of retreat, but as a profound source, and resource -- at a moment when
we are trying to design and control digital simulation tools. The information
white-out pervading digital space signals poorly designed interface functions.
In this context, we have much to learn from bibliographical design and the
sophisticated information systems in which it is integrated. The codes of
simulation operating through printed works are at once robust and amazingly
flexible. The passage into digital culture should be made -- can only
be made, in my opinion -- through a re-engagement with print culture.
It must and will be so because, like Aeneas passing from Troy to Latium, we
cannot leave our household gods behind.
In this move back to the future, we will find ourselves arriving where we
started, but now beginning to know that bibliographical place for the first
time. And that is the other reason we are called to an involvement with digital
technology. The very differences between digital forms of expression, on the
one hand, and the alphanumeric and graphical forms we are accustomed to from
books, on the other hand, give us a remarkable vantage from which to study
books and the paper works in which so much of our cultural heritage is stored
for us.
At the University of Virginia, for example, we have been creating the Rossetti
Archive, a digital compilation of the complete writings and pictures of the
English pre-Raphaelite poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Building the
archive has brought the "proof of concept" to McKenzie's ideas about
the importance of the sociology of texts, by devising a scholarly edition
that integrates in a single work the two great functions of scholarly editing
in general: facsimile editing and critical editing. The design shows, in other
words, what textual theory, until recently, had judged an impossibility: that
digital simulations could formalize the structure of books and other material
objects.
But the Rossetti Archive has also spun off other interesting ideas and practical
consequences. Not least significant has been the argument it implicitly makes
for what Marxists like to call "the praxis of theory." The move
to put into effect a set of ideas in concrete ways is itself a theoretical
event; that is to say, a way of seeing. Gertrude Stein's demonstrative argument
for "composition as explanation" forecast and supported what we
have rediscovered day by day in building the archive. We have, therefore,
begun to imagine how digital tools can be more directly used for our traditional
interpretive work as humanist scholars.
So a small group of faculty members and graduate students is currently working
on several projects of that kind. The first, the IVANHOE game, is a Web-based
software application that organizes a collaborative work space for research
and interpretation of humanities materials, traditional as well as digital.
Digitization brings certain advantages. It can simulate a wide variety of
materials -- books, maps, pictures, and so forth -- that are the
traditional focus of our acts of interpretation. It can access those materials
no matter how widely they are dispersed, and it can store, retrieve, reorganize,
and transform these massive corpora according to the designs and purposes
of specific users.
IVANHOE thus encourages one to explore not so much the "meanings"
of materials as their many possibilities of meaning. Interpretation can emerge
only as a performative operation and event. "Possible meanings"
develop in various ways -- partly through competition and collaboration
among players, partly through the use of masks and roles to constrain the
players' interpretive engagements, and partly through immersing players within
a vast field of digitally enhanced and geographically dispersed materials
that are specifically organized for further enhancements. We then introduce
electronic visualization tools into that field to help us grasp and invent
the shapes of thought, both our own and others', as they emerge through our
acts of navigating the materials and linking them together in new, imaginative
ways.
Physicists tell us that a quantum world thunders silently beyond (or below)
our human scale of perception. It is a world full of contradictions where
everything is as it is perceived, and so everything changes depending on where
and how and why you choose to take observations. In one perspective, photons
are wave functions; in another, they are particles. It is a world of random
order and disorder. We were finally able to establish regular contact with
this world only after the invention of statistical mathematics. To the end
of his life, Einstein disbelieved in the reality of quantum worlds, maintaining
that they are nothing more than a set of (more or less useful) mathematical
functions.
Reality or apparition, a quantum order of bibliographical objects becomes
accessible to us through computerization. I am not speaking about the physico-chemical
makeup of paper objects but of the immense number of dynamic relations and
functions that make up the field of discourse of social texts. We touch the
hem of this garment whenever we open a Web browser. The field of textual relations
accessible through that digital device is statistically significant at a quantum
order. People are trying to build quantum computers precisely to improve controlled
access to that discourse field.
When such computers are built and made stable enough to be used, history tells
us they will initially have very clumsy interfaces. In the meantime, we have
our hands full trying to design interfaces for our current digital tools and
systems. We must have them in order to translate the computer's statistical
operations into terms that our minds can seize, understand, and put to human
uses. The need is especially apparent when the database is a bibliographical
arena of discussion. The interface we have built for the Rossetti Archive
is barely adequate to the archive's data set of materials. At present, the
archive organizes some 11,000 distinct files, about half of which are SGML/XML
files, and the other half image files. When it reaches its scheduled completion
date, some four years from now, it will have about twice that many files.
Now take those files and understand that they are interconnected by a set
of some 200,000 hyperlinks. Then add to your equation the fact that every
SGML/XML text file is structurally divided into hundreds of types of divisions.
Finally, factor in the specific divisionary instances that make up any particular
file, which will range from several hundreds to many thousands. I could ask
the server holding the archive to make the actual counts in each case, but
I think you can see the staggering number of possible relationships that the
archive puts into computational play at any moment of its use. When those
ways of involving users get integrated into the archive's computational field
-- when those engagements are stored and made accessible in the system
as a whole -- the archive will become a dynamic interpretive environment
of enormous scale. Most important, its dynamics will be completely formalized.
Let me close with what is for me -- a fetishist of imaginative writing,
especially poetry -- the most important moral of this story: that poems
and other imaginative kinds of social texts are quantum fields. Although we
have said for a long time that their meanings are inexhaustible, pursuing
a sociologics of textuality in a digital frame of reference helps us to specify
more clearly why and how that is the case. I offer the quantum poem not as
a useful metaphor, but as a fact about the facts making up fields of poetry
discourse -- a computable fact. The implications of that view of social
textuality for humanities studies seem to me considerable. It will provide
us, I believe, the only method adequate to the textual condition we now see
clearly unfolding before us.
Jerome J. McGann is a university professor at the University of Virginia.
This essay is adapted from a lecture he gave upon receiving the first Richard
W. Lyman Award, presented by the National Humanities Center to honor pioneers
in the use of digital tools in the humanities. He has just been named a recipient
of a Distinguished Achievement Award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His
book Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (Palgrave, 2001)
won this year's James Russell Lowell Prize, awarded by the Modern Language
Association.
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