Electronic Textual Editing by Lou Burnard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, John Unsworth

Abstract

MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 179 Electronic Textual Editing. Ed. by Lou BURNARD,KATHERINE O'BRIEN O'KEEFFE and JOHNUNSWORTH. New York: Modern Language Association ofAmerica. 2oo6. viii+4I9 pp. $28. ISBN 978-o-87352-97I-6. Computers came along at an opportune time for textual scholarship. The old school of interventionist editing would have had littleuse forconcurrent mark-up schemes, linkingof transcriptions to facsimiles, and reader choice among multiple views of the source witnesses: theirmission was to replace such flawed testimony by recovering the 'true' textbeneath its fickle material embodiments. But modern editorial theory and practice aims toopen upmultiple perspectives on thewitnesses and allow readers to participate in the inescapably provisional and fluid constitution of a 'text'. This fundamental change inunderstanding ofwhat scholarly editing isabout ensured that, once the digital revolution was under way,machines had plenty of useful work todo, both in thepreparation of editions and in theirdissemination. Most Humanities scholars now recognize thatdigital techniques have transformed the practical sides of editing, changing the procedures by which editions are pre pared, presented, and used; yet some see no implications for theirbasic conceptions ofwhat they themselves might do as editors. Despite plentiful exemplars harness ing electronic tools in genuinely new and exciting ways to scholarly undertakings of undisputed value and quality (some ofwhose creators have contributed to thevolume under review), there are stillmany Humanists who see information technology as being mainly amatter of using a quirkishly overcomplicated typewriter to produce works designed tobe read on a species ofmicrofiche reader, theprincipal benefit being more efficientpreparation of copy and away around the reluctance ofprint publishers to incur the costs of typesetting and distributing lengthy textswith elaborate appara tus.Between such a view and the achievements of the authors of these pieces, there lies not somuch a knowledge gap as an imaginative and creative chasm. What isneeded is a little more ambitious than thiscollection's soberly stated aim of 'providing scholarly editors with pragmatic advice fromexpert practitioners'; but for tunately the content proves more inspiring than the label. All the authors manifestly know what they are talking about, having achieved noteworthy things in the fields they address. That said, some of them seem on this evidence better rather as doers than aswriters: not all of them can attain the clarity, range, and concision displayed, for example, by Peter Robinson, the interest and relevance ofwhose piece goes far beyond editing Chaucer, nor do theyallmatch his theoretically informedpracticality; but they all give ita good try. The assumption throughout is that all these activities will be built around the recommendations of theText Encoding Initiative (TEI), which is fair enough. Its showroom may be ramshackle and dull in places, and the guides to its labyrinthine layout sometimes badly in need of personal communications training, but theTEI is and is likely to remain the only store in townwhere Humanities encoding is con cerned. Bravely accepting the challenge of filling a chapter entitled 'When Not to Use theTEF', JohnLavagnino does his best, but ishonest (and experienced) enough to come up with precious little by way of different suppliers, concentrating more usefully on alternatives tousing theTEI tagset 'as itcomes' (which is seldom a good idea in any case). Perhaps the only serious problem with this collection is the chapter on 'Rights and Permissions in an Electronic Edition', described as 'indispensable' in thevolume introduction,which iswritten as though theUSA were the only jurisdiction editors have to consider where the rights of thirdparties and the safeguarding of their own intellectual property are concerned, which is far from the case. It leaves aside the complex intellectual-property issues raised by the transjurisdictional character of In ternetpublication and makes no mention whatever of licensing,which, forbetter or i8o Reviews forworse, is increasingly used as a second string alongside copyright as ameans of retaining some legal control over the use and reuse of electronic publications and is an area where scholars really do need appropriate legal advice. An occasional touch of unfashionable editorial interventionism might have im proved thebook.We are told too often, by toomany differentpeople, what mark-up is, why it is important todistinguish presentation fromstructure, how and why theTEI is aGood Thing, what XML isand why it is superior toHTML. A fewcontributors...