Pour une lecture ouverte du texte electronique

Abstract

It is apparent that the presentation of a text in the electronic medium as a string of electronic characters may have advantages for scholarly reading. Because it is dynamic, the text on the screen offers the reader many possible kinds of frag mentation. Study of scholarly uses of such texts shows that the segmentations in the text depend on the computer treatments available, such as indexing or linking commentaries. The hypertextual paths induced in such a way by the constraints of indexing systems or on the adjacent commentaries are different from a so-called open' reading (in the sense of a reader's engagement), which aims to permit the reader to define paths according to previously determined units. This statement allows us to reopen the debate on the relationship between digitization and hypertextualization. Moreover, it raises questions about the type of reading that emerges from codification and structuring models. The argument of this paper is that the status as object of electronic forms of canon ical texts must be reconsidered according to the specific features of the medium