Welcome! This webpage and the code were all done as part of our great English 2033 class at Acadia University. As we have learned in class, HTML and other digital mediums are crucial as the next step in recording, storing and disseminating information in our society. It is also a lot of fun and is a great skill to learn!
"Yes, it is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall soon flow in inexhaustible
streams the most abundant and most marvelous liquor that has ever flowed to relieve the
thirst of man! Through it God will spread His Word. A spring of pure truth shall flow from
it! Like a new star, it shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light
heretofore unknown to shine among men.”
- Johannes Gutenberg, 1400-1468.
Click Here to see our Syllabus
Our readings for ENG 2033:
The Broadview Reader in Book History. Michelle Levy & Tom Mole. Broadview Press, 2017.
The Book in Society. Solveig Robinson. Broadview Press, 2003.
| Title | Page # | Author |
|---|---|---|
| What is Bibliography? | 3-12 | W.W. Greg |
| The Rationale of Copy-Text | 125-136 | W.W. Greg |
| The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention | 139-154 | G. Thomas Tanselle |
| The Unacknowledged Revolution | 215-225 | Elizabeth L. Eisenstein |
| What is the History of Books? | 231-247 | Robert Darnton |
| Communities of Readers | 251-263 | Roger Chartier |
| The Rationale of Hypertext | 459-473 | Jerome J. McGann |
| How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine | 491-508 | N. Katherine Hayles |
| Codex in Crisis: The Book Dematerializes | 555-572 | Anthony Grafton |
"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.”
- Henry David Thoreau
This first essay written by W.W. Greg talks about bibliographies, the study of them and their significance to literature and books. (At this time it’s like a new field) Greg is basically addressing the Bibliographical Society here in the early 1900’s making a case for it being a solid science and speaking to its importance (And not just people who love books talking about them, actually applying scholarly and scientific method to describing books.) He mentions how bibliographical study is not just restrained to printed books, manuscripts and even rolls and papyrus can fit into the study as well. Greg was really trying to show how studying books and texts using bibliographies to describe texts and what was in them could be an entire school of study and really was the substance to any good work; its content and sources. He mentions his love for literature and that's why he really liked bibliographical studies, exposing the meaty important parts of the text. Greg talked about other fields that are needed for studying bibliographies for example typology, linguistics, or paleography and how having these skills are needed, so there is technical skill, however all need critical bibliography. (The science of the material transmission of literary texts). He ends his text talking about what he hopes will start being taught at universities around him and the different things that a good english scholar will look for when looking at literary texts. Picking apart sources, be critical, anything that is deemed as corrupt or bias taken into account, etc. (Paleography and Typography are under ‘practices of publication’).
Another essay by W.W. Greg, in this one he talks about the importance of editing texts and preserving as much of the authors words as possible, making sure to push back any changes, intentional or not, made by others along the book trade process. He goes into the issue with reliable sources, kind of like in the last reading where he covered bibliographies and sources but in relation to the “copy-text”. A term he coined but a concept already familiar. The copy-text is the earlier or original text used to make the new edition. So basically which texts can we trust? Especially those that have been copied. Problems arise with the intentional or unintentional changes made along the way, translation for example, our tendency to rewrite in modern english can take meaning away and thus we usually preserve the original spelling to show variations in region or time. There's the question of the ‘best’ or ‘most authoritative' manuscript to trust, having to do with these very problems.
The ‘Tyranny of copytext” is a concept that Greg brings up as well. He mentions how little changes throughout the years can affect a lot of change and relying on the original work sometimes changes the meaning completely. Words and language evolves as well and that must be taken into consideration when talking about the copytext. The last pages are concerned with the problems that arise in regards to revision. He says that the editor using the copytext as the original and changing everything according to it is too “sweeping and mechanical”. He says that for the most part the original will work well as the model but it is important to know that sometimes revised editions are better than the originals and its important to know which ones that's the case for. Greg in the end sums a lot of this up by saying that revisions itself varies in character and circumstances so it's hard to have a set universal rule for it and he himself is looking to simply open discussion, not lay down a law for it.
Here Tanselle is talking about properly showing an author's final intentions and the problems
that arise with that while editing texts. A distinction is drawn between vertical and
horizontal revision and how it can change the intended meaning of a text. Tanselle starts his
essay off talking about how all editors strive to keep intact as much of the authors intent of
the original work as possible. He calls back to Greg’s “The Rationale of Copy-Text” as an
essential part of modern editorial theory, laying down principles for choosing and emending a
text. Tanselle also asks the question of what even the definition of the “authors final
intention” is? He says that the editors task is not to try to ‘improve’ on the text even, if
the author made a bad choice, it is about keeping intact the meaning the author wanted to
convey to their public audience. With this he points out the three different kinds of
‘intention’:
This chapter went over the major advancements in the 20th century in terms of book sales and rising rates of readership with emphasis on the ‘paperback revolution’ in the 20s and the ‘digital revolution’ of today. It started off talking about education and literacy rates that had shot up at the turn of the 20th century due to public school implementation in the late 1800s. Many countries were starting to highly value an education for all citizens and this early education created a whole new generation of readers. The public library system was a big part of this rise in the reading of books. Public libraries were solidly in place by the 1920s and offered readers a wide range of material they could rent out for all kinds of purposes: scholarly, entertainment, for work, leisure, etc. However, more people were reading periodicals than anything else. Newspapers, magazines, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly issues. Periodicals were the dominant print medium in the 19th century. They opened up more of an avenue for readers in terms of daily reading and one could choose whatever topic they desired. The Saturday Evening Post originally started by Benjamin Franklin in the late 18th century took off in the US selling 90,000 copies at the time.
As noted in the chapter, an extremely important part of high readership in the 20th century was the ‘paperback revolution’.This was in some ways the breaking out from the ‘circulating library’ system which charged readers per volume to rent the books and would later sell old copies, taking money away from the authors. It also, perhaps more importantly, had to do with the use of paperbound books with paper covers. This was a much cheaper alternative and could easily be mass produced and sold everywhere from gas stations to grocery stores to subways. Penguin books was a big player that even today is still a large publishing company. Launched in 1935, Penguin books quickly took to the stage as a very successful paperback distributor and publisher having authors like Hemingway and Agatha Christie write books under their publishing brand. The chapter goes on to show the new world of book genres, in particular detective mysteries and ‘whodunits’ and the ability for authors to pump out novels in a mass production setting that allowed for millions of people to read their work. The readings end with the digital revolution and the implications its had on readership and also production of books. As mentioned, photocopying changed the game in many ways as mechanical typesetting made its way out.
This reading is tackling the issue of how to study and talk about book history. Darnton explains his concept of the “communications circuit”, his model for studying the history of books which connects the author, publisher, printer, distributor, bookseller and reader. It forms an interrelated circuit that is all connected and works together to preserve and disseminate information. He explains for example how the reader completes the circuit because he influences the author before and after composition. As well as how each stage affects the sale books and thus the spread of information. Darnton focused specifically on the spread of Voltaire’s work, being a French Revolution specialist himself. He talked about Rigaud, a bookseller who bought many copies of Voltaire’s works, through the socio-economic lense of the Annales article that was written on it analyzing book sale trends. He also talked about the role of the prominent STN (Société typographique de Neuchâtel) which Riguad was a customer of. The STN was operating in the 1770s and printed many different works to be sent all around Europe. Darnton mentions the capitalistic aspects of book selling, how business played a big role in these booksellers inventory. Best-sellers are what they’re looking for and Riguad seemed to bet that Voltaire’s ‘Questions’ was going to do quite well.
This chapter by Chartier focused on the ‘ancien regime’ in France which was the period from about the 16th to 18th century. He covers one aspect of Darnton’s ‘communication circuit’ and quotes multiple times from Michel de Certeau's works. Both Chartier and Certeau saw the act of reading and writing as separate, reading being free and writing fixed. He goes on to mention how reading can be interpreted and appreciated by readers in different ways and its significance is owed to the reader. Reading does not degrade with time because things can be read again and forgotten, it does not keep what it acquires unlike writing. Writing resists time, it accumulates and stays usually in its context if properly recorded. Chartier and Certeau also discern between different vessels for texts, that is different methods of recording it. Some texts have different meanings and are interpreted as such, again the reader affixes meaning through their own reading of a text.
Chartier goes on to explain the amounts and types of books read by both the rising middle class and the noble class. How texts were interpreted and even how they were read by different classes. He makes a point in talking about how there are different ways of understanding text. There are those who are illiterate and those who are literate which contrast on each other as one can read and another cannot. However, back in the period of ‘ancien regime’ many people could read but not write, again showing how these are separate and distinct acts. Some people could interpret lettering somewhat but mostly relied on images which Chartier says ‘mirrors the text’. Seeing literacy and readership of books in this way opens up to a whole new group of people that previously would be overlooked. They too had a relationship with the printed word and print culture and were also influenced profoundly by it. Another part of this difference in reading and interpreting text had to do with orally reciting text as compared to reading it over in our minds. Chartier explains how this is a modern phenomena, reading to ourselves quietly. Back in the days of scribal culture and early printing days the function of text was to recite it orally and so that was the way that some read texts by reading it aloud. This as Chartier shows was cemented as being a part of elite social life as well. He wraps up the chapter talking about how these communities of readers are ‘interpretive communities’ which affect meaning and are bound to social difference, they are the ones that attach meaning to what they read.
This essay done by Jerome McGann is basically like an update to Greg’s “The Rationale of copy-text”, he calls it “The Rationale of Hypertext” talking about the future of scholarship online and digitally. McGann argues that having digital technologies makes the concept of the ‘copy-text’ obsolete. With digital archives, he mentions, both facsimile and eclectic editions can be brought up at once, not one or the other. (Facsimile editions: “Most useful not as analytic engines, but as tools for increasing access to rare works.” pg.463) They also allow for all kinds of mediums at once, such as paintings, songs and written text. (However later on he also argues for having physical objects in front of you and their merit in a literary sense.) McGann starts off by obviously giving credit to the ‘information highway’ and the speed and efficiency of digital information but says that the literature we inherit is and always will be ‘bookish’. That roughly means that our methods of studying, recording and keeping old information is based around books and their physical structure. However, we no longer need books to study the book. Nor is it the most important tool to disseminate and store information which changes a lot of things in this field. When using a book to study books there is a limit to the analyses one can make, because they are contained to that medium, such as: descriptive bibliographies, apparatus structures, etc. So for example when the reader wants or needs something beyond just the text like hearing a song or ballad, seeing a play or just physical features of something. The full power of logical structures is constrained by the bookish format. As McGann puts it: “The archives are sinking in a white sea of paper”.
Getting into hypertext and hyper editing now, McGann starts to talk about editing through computers and the implications. Big projects have already been around such as COLLATE for hyper-editing and analyses of manuscripts and such, and again the speed of computers changes things so drastically here. McGann’s ideal final goal would be a networked hypermedia archive, although there are many problems that would be too much to talk about here he mentions. Hypermedia is information displayed in multiple mediums, not just semantics, the three pointed out are: language visible, auditory and intellectual. William Blake is brought up as an example where a hypermedia archive would suit his work well, even mentioning something along those lines is already on the way. He goes on to show how some of Dickonson’s work like a poem she wrote: “Alone and in a Circumstance”, she wrote it in a space she made under a stamp of a locomotive which added a visual piece to her complete poem. She added an artistic addition, not literary one and because it was an uncancelled stamp it could be easily reprinted. This showed how she disagreed with the ‘auctioning’ of print publication. McGann finished his essay off talking about the Rossetti Hypermedia Archive and all the challenges and questions that might arise from using hypertext to record and study literature. He mentions how “when a book is produced it literally closes its covers on itself,'' referring to the fact that the hypermedia archive will not have later additions but can be continuously updated and made longer. Whichever way you cut it, however, digital sources just are quicker and bigger than any paper edition could ever hope to be.
This essay by Katherine Hayles, an expert in literature and chemistry, is about reading in the modern age in relation to digital vs. printed material. Hayles argues that the shift from print to digital has changed reading and cognition in us. WIth the rise of new technologies, we must rethink what reading is, how we absorb literature and in what medium and volume. Hayles also theorizes new ways of reading like hyperreading and machine reading that make online databases so fast and computational. She mentions the different trends of reading for that time, with downward trends of printed material (poems, plays, novels) but a rise in reading in general from junior high to grad school. She also brings up the concern of lowering reading rates and lowering reading ability and vice versa. “The two tracks, print and digital, run side by side, but messages from either track does not jump to the other side.” (Hayles, 493). Close reading in the following pages is covered. As Hayles and others agree close reading is what “transformed cultured gentlemen into a profession” it is stapled down as a major study of literature and being the only real method to rely on to prove the literary studies worth in society. She also contrasts it with ‘symptomatic reading’ and its implications as a contemporarily dominant close reading technique.
From here she gets into digital and print literacies. University students are a strong reading demographic and the stats show they’re moving towards more digital than anything; so the question is how to apply good reading techniques that one would acquire from printed reading? From here she goes into the differences between hyperreading and print reading and the differences between the two. In a study done, the movement of eyes tracked of a person reading a webpage showed they read in an “F” pattern and as they moved down they read in a vertical form reading the left hand material. This showed that webpage reading is sloppy to the max. Close reading and hyperreading are not on the same track according to Hayles. However search bars and machine searches are a valuable part of archivists or scholars toolkit. Some like Nicholas Carr think that hyperreading is processed differently in our brains and thus leads to shortened attention span, causing us to skim over everything. (Not too far a cry from social media users today). Another study Hayles brings up is in the ‘Reading on the Web’ section of her essay. In this study two groups were told to read “The Demon Lover’, one with print and the other with links. The first group out performed the others in comprehension of plot and said they enjoyed the story more as well. “Increased demands of decision making and visual processing” was one of the conclusions reached. Another factor is the ability to create new neural pathways by repeating things, when scrolling or moving less is retained than a simple physical page turn.
As Hayles goes into her second last section ‘Anecdotal Evidence’ she talks about the stories told to he about other students, for example. How many teachers were telling her that they no longer assign long chapters because students don't retain it well, so short stories are used more now. Hayles hypothesizes a shift in cognitive attention. At the end of her essay she ties everything up nicely by talking about the similarities between digital and print and the advantages of the latter. As she mentions “Reading has always been constituted through complex and diverse practices. Now it is time to re-think what reading is… in the rich mixtures of words and images, sounds and animations, graphics and letters.”
Codex in Crisis: The Book Dematerializes: Alferd Kazin, writes book on American intellectual and literary movements from the 19th century “Without leaving Manhattan Kazin read his way into ‘lonely small towns, prairie villages, isolated colleges” The book as it becomes digitized in our modern world Emphasis on Google Books as an example, pros and cons of using this kind of system Dreams of a ‘universal archive’ or database that could contain “entire history of the human race” The author believed competent government can do a better job than markets in some cases in making books and information available to the public
The Universal Library: Comparing the library of Alexandria with Google Books. Library of Alexandria was founded in 300 BCE, started collecting Greek literature. Confiscated all scrolls that came in ships, made copies and gave them back to the owner. They developed new methods of bibliography, philology and categorizing their books. Like Google the library of Alexandria developed a good method for reproducing and capturing texts.
Googles Empire: Here Grafton talks about Google, its origins and uses. Started as a project to have a database for books in stanford 95% of scholarly inquiries start with Google. As Google, Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, etc compete, the internet has become a vast bookstore. Everyone also has access to computers more or less so it is a very universal and global thing. The Google Library Project → partnered with big libraries, Stanford, NYC, etc.
116 Million Books → 60 Million Brits. 36 Million Books → 1.1 Billion Indians. “World poverty… is embodied in lack of print as well as lack of food” (562).
However this is getting better, more access in remote regions. “The mass of old and new texts on the Web will not be an English-only-zone”, there are lots of other languages already. There are also errors that will come with digitizing libraries. There is no unified single database for early works and literature; rather a patchwork of different databases and archives → Google nor other companies have found the solution to amassing everything together but accessibility is still going up as time goes on. Since the digital revolution we have come to understand what makes physical archives and libraries so distinctive and useful → Simple ex: You want to see a document of a commanding officer in the Air Force, you must have the proper paper to show it is genuine, not just the plain text → For spotting important physical aspects of a book, no image can do the justice of having the physical thing in front of you. (Smell it, see it, feel it, TASTE IT?). Watermarks, Binding, Marginalia → multiple copies of texts, manuscripts, and so on. These are all essential to a deeper understanding of the works and provide important background on the individual.
Publishing Without Paper: It's not just research that's changing, writing and publishing as well “Revolutions are caused… by raising expectations” (569). Increasingly less articles in paper being read, students chose digital media. Many big Universities like Harvard are getting their faculty to publicly post their publications. Using digital archives has many pros however, search engine, hypertext, etc. New media of the 1900s transformed things just as much as the internet, newspapers in Berlin could have printed papers in 18 minutes after getting the news at the central office. Not as flexible or high speed as the internet but the mix of serious and funny, provocative and everyday → created new culture and ideas, changed communication among towns and cities. Some say libraries doomed to ‘extinction’. New digital sources are being read differently, average of 4 minutes spent on e-book sources.
Future Reading: We should not avoid the ‘open road’ that leads to an ‘electronic paradise’ (572). To really get a physical feel however libraries fill that distinct need. “Knowledge is still embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable… books” (572).
Access is important → Really nails down the importance of digital reading. We need to shape digital practices to those of the physical library.