Electronic Textual Editing

Lou Burnard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and John Unsworth, eds. Electronic Textual Editing. New York: Modern Language Association, 2006. vii+419 (and compact disk). $45.00 cloth; $28.00 paper. In the dim, dark past there was, as some of you may remember, Project OCCULT; that is, "The Ordered Collation of Unprepared Literary Text." The year was 1 970 and the programming to do this miraculous thing was in SNOBOL 4. In the more than thirty-five years since then I have attended and/or spoken at more panels and conferences on the subject of computers and textual editing than I can number, even with a computer, but still the golden time of computers producing definitive editions, perfect in every respect, has not arrived. What did happen, as we all know is that computers got faster with larger memories and smaller size at a speed which meant that a computer was out of date as you unpacked it from its shipping box. And the fact that you were unpacking it from its shipping box was new too, since before the middle 1980s computing was almost entirely mainframe computing. When, in 1983, I turned on my spanking-new KayproII it proudly announced on its monochrome screen, "64k internal memory." Today I can buy a laptop with 1 gigabyte of internal memory and a high definition color monitor for about a third of what that KayproII cost. And then there is the WorldWideWeb and drag-and-drop and wireless connectivity and on and on. The result of all this speed, capacity, and economy we all know-any fool can put up a text on the WWW and any fool usually does. If the expansion of printing during the nineteenth century swamped us with text, the electronic revolution has raised the textual water level to several feet over our head. Jerome McGann and Dino Buzzetti say in the book under review: Scholarly editing is the source and end and test of every type of investigative and interpretational activity that critical minds may choose to undertake. Well understood by scholars until fairly recently, the foundational status of editorial work is now much less surely perceived. Hermeneuts of every kind regularly regard such work, in Rene Wellek's notoriously misguided description, as "preliminary operations" in literary studies. Odd though it may seem, that view is widely shared. . . . (54) If this is the case, and I believe it is, then the electronic revolution has had the effect of obliterating nearly a century of hard, careful, thoughtful textual endeavor. "Hermeneuts," and I assume they make a large percentage of the readers of this journal, have always been more inclined to perform their work from the handiest book, no matter the origins of its texts, than to undertake the labor of seeking out and using a scholarly edition, but the electronic revolution now spares the "Hermeneut" even the effort of getting up to get the book off the shelf a few feet away. This situation has been exacerbated because although from at least the 1960s most graduate programs in the humanities, and especially in English, required students, particularly Ph.D. students, to take a course in research methods which typically introduced the students to physical bibliography and textual criticism, from the mid-1990s these courses have been cut from the curriculum as required courses and sometimes cut entirely. This means that our younger, and a few of our older, "Hermeneuts" must now stand in the frigid blast of the electronic revolution without any proper protective garments. Their abilities to judge the fitness for their purposes of the edition of the primary work which is in their hands or on their screens will be impaired, and unless or until the profession decides that this is no way to prepare "Hermeneuts" for their critical work and re-establishes courses which educate them in such matters, any number of books like the one under review, from the MLA or similar organizations, will not make any headway in producing order out of chaos. This volume from the MLA will probably not do much directly to solve this problem but it is an attempt to speak at least to scholarly editors and tell them how the fruits of their labors can find their way into electronic form. …