Digital Representation and the Text Model

ID oes the digital representation of the text demand the definition of a model? In and of itself, every representation and, consequently, every form of text representation entails the implicit or explicit assumption of a model, at least if we accept the postulate that the “map is not the territory.” 1 So, the conventional image of a text, handwritten or typed, is itself a text model. The same thing can be said, then, of its digital representation or, to be more precise, of every form of its digital representation, regardless of its specific kind. The problem of the model presents itself, therefore, as a problem of adequacy with respect to the conventional model and representation. With respect to the conventional representation, an adequate digital representation should in no way impoverish the informative content of the text. If the digital text representation is not original, that is, if we consider a reproduction as opposed to a text produced directly in digital form, the first fundamental criterion for adequacy is constituted by the exhaustivity of the representation. In order to obtain the exhaustivity of the representation, markup is usually resorted to. In fact, textual information in machine-readable form is represented primarily by way of the binary coding of the characters: in this way, the “text” is conceived, from a computational point of view, as a type of data and the treatment of the text, that is, the “storage and processing of textual material,” comes to consist in the treatment of “information coded as characters or sequences of characters.” 2 It is evident, however, that the computational notion of the text as a type of data does not coincide with the notion of the text as a product of literary activity. The pure and simple character sequence is not adequate enough to represent all of the information contained in the “literary material as originally written by an author” (TP 1). Hence the need to furnish additional information by way of embedding markers defined by a given markup language.