Text Comparison and Digital Creativity. The Production of Presence and Meaning in Digital Text Scholarship * Wido Van Peursen, Ernst D. Thoutenhoofd, Adriaan Van Der Weel (eds).

Abstract

Divided in four parts and complemented by an extensive foreword and introduction, this volume was ‘triggered’, as one of the editors puts it, by an international colloquium with the same title held in Amsterdam on the 30–31 of October 2008 under the organization and sponsorship of the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Turgama project based at the University of Leiden. Judging from the rich questions reported here and there in the volume, the colloquium must have been structured so as to create a thematic thread across talks which was further enhanced in the book. Indeed, the concepts of ‘presence and meaning’ take shape already in the foreword written by Siemens, where the reader is taken on a ‘sensory’ trip into various realizations of the book as codex form, as material object with which humans and therefore the humanistic tradition have engaged closely and at length. The interplay between presence and meaning, medium and message, form and interpretation, emerges as core interest in the examples examined here: the scope is to make the reader reflect on this interaction realized in the book as embodiment of human creation and use.