A Diet of Worms in the Digital Age :: Digital Technology Technological Papers

A Diet of Worms in the Digital AgeI cant prove it, but t here is no doubt in my legal opinion that textual arguments watch been raging in scholarly circles for as considerable as there has been text to debate. In my minds gist I can see them ancient Sumerian scribes lecturing to each one other about clay types and wedge depth early Semitic peoples voting no on the vowel medieval European scribes intrepidly pushing forward with punctuation, spaces between words, and the lower-case alphabet, and having heated debates on the long-term viability of the cap letter. And then came the printing press Can you imagine the contention What bold new vistas were opened up for scholarship But anyone could publish anythingno matter what the quality And surely, this spelled the doom of calligraphy.With the advent of the digital age, scholarly textual debate has simply entered a new phase. At issue here what is the potential of digitally-powered scholarship, and how can that potential be realiz ed? What approaches should we take in terms of format and methodology? William H. ODonnell and Emily A. Thrush (Designing a Hypertext variation of a Modern Poem) discuss the issues involved in pattern hypertext versions of literature. Specifically, they refer to the edition of Yeatss Lapis Lazuli that they designed. The main work to be studied, they feel (be it Lapis Lazuli or any(prenominal)thing else), must not be fill with visible links. They render devised a method of windowing that anticipates the modern frames format of internet documents, and stress that any attempt at electronic analysis of a work of literature must be intuitively structured, easy to use, and customizable. Their edition of Lapis Lazuli appears well-constructed and functional and seems to have fairly broad appeal, but it seems withal to be intended more as an aid to understanding the poem than as a tool for scholarly research. This distinction separates this article around from the others considered h ere, though the basic format could be applied to other projects. quill Shillingsburg (Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials) frankly admits that what we all secretly want is to have every conceivable kind of informationtextual, visual, audiorelated to a given topic all sorted for us and available good at our fingertips. This is, of course, impossible, but he feels that electronic editions of scholarly works have the potential to come closer to that ideal than any other medium. He systematically lays out the main problems facing those who create electronic editions and suggests some ways to address them.