SPERBERG-McQUEEN dismissed the lowest-common-denominator approach as
unable to support the kind of applications that draw people who have
never been in the public library regularly before, and make them come
back. He advocated more interesting text and more intelligent text.
Asserting that it is not beyond economic feasibility to have good texts,
SPERBERG-McQUEEN noted that the TEI Guidelines listing 200-odd tags
contains tags that one is expected to enter every time the relevant
textual feature occurs. It contains all the tags that people need now,
and it is not expected that everyone will tag things in the same way.
The question of how people will tag the text is in large part a function
of their reaction to what SPERBERG-McQUEEN termed the issue of
reproducibility. What one needs to be able to reproduce are the things
one wants to work with. Perhaps a more useful concept than that of
reproducibility or recoverability is that of processability, that is,
what can one get from an electronic text without reading it again
in the original. He illustrated this contention with a page from
Jan Comenius's bilingual Introduction to Latin.
SPERBERG-McQUEEN returned at length to the issue of images as simulacra
for the text, in order to reiterate his belief that in the long run more
than images of pages of particular editions of the text are needed,
because just as second-generation photocopies and second-generation
microfilm degenerate, so second-generation representations tend to
degenerate, and one tends to overstress some relatively trivial aspects
of the text such as its layout on the page, which is not always
significant, despite what the text critics might say, and slight other
pieces of information such as the very important lexical ties between the
English and Latin versions of Comenius's bilingual text, for example.
Moreover, in many crucial respects it is easy to fool oneself concerning
what a scanned image of the text will accomplish. For example, in order
to study the transmission of texts, information concerning the text
carrier is necessary, which scanned images simply do not always handle.
Further, even the high-quality materials being produced at Cornell use
much of the information that one would need if studying those books as
physical objects. It is a choice that has been made. It is an arguably
justifiable choice, but one does not know what color those pen strokes in
the margin are or whether there was a stain on the page, because it has
been filtered out. One does not know whether there were rips in the page
because they do not show up, and on a couple of the marginal marks one
loses half of the mark because the pen is very light and the scanner
failed to pick it up, and so what is clearly a checkmark in the margin of
the original becomes a little scoop in the margin of the facsimile.
Standard problems for facsimile editions, not new to electronics, but
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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