Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

39
allows each of these channels to be placed <strong>in</strong> a historical or cultural framework that can help the reader
better understand how they vary, rather than <strong>in</strong> an apparatus that often obfuscates these differences.
Nonetheless, Dué and Ebbott acknowledged that build<strong>in</strong>g a multitext that moves from a “static
perception to a dynamic presentation” and attempts to present all manuscript witnesses to a reader
without an <strong>in</strong>terven<strong>in</strong>g apparatus faces a number of technical challenges, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g how to highlight
multiforms so they are easy to f<strong>in</strong>d and compare, and how to display hexameter l<strong>in</strong>es (the unit of
composition <strong>in</strong> the Homeric epic) as parts of whole texts rather than just po<strong>in</strong>t out the differences (as <strong>in</strong>
an apparatus). While these issues are still be<strong>in</strong>g worked out, the authors concluded that three ma<strong>in</strong>
pr<strong>in</strong>ciples drive their ongo<strong>in</strong>g work: collaboration, open access, and <strong>in</strong>teroperability.
Similar criticism of modern critical editions and their <strong>in</strong>ability to accurately represent the manuscript
tradition of texts has been offered by Stephen Nichols. Nichols stated that the modern editorial practice
of attempt<strong>in</strong>g to faithfully reconstruct a text as the orig<strong>in</strong>al author <strong>in</strong>tended it has little to do with the
“reality of medieval literary practice” and is <strong>in</strong>stead an “artefact of analogue scholarship” where the
limitations of the pr<strong>in</strong>ted page required editors to choose a base manuscript to transcribe and to banish
all <strong>in</strong>terest<strong>in</strong>g variants from other manuscripts to the apparatus (Nichols 2009). He also voiced that
there was very little <strong>in</strong>terest <strong>in</strong> provid<strong>in</strong>g access to orig<strong>in</strong>al manuscripts, as many scholars considered
the scribes who produced them to have <strong>in</strong>troduced both copy<strong>in</strong>g errors and their own thoughts and thus
to have “corrupted” the orig<strong>in</strong>al text. The advent of digital technology, however, Nichols concluded,
had produced new opportunities for study<strong>in</strong>g literary production:
The Internet has altered the equation by mak<strong>in</strong>g possible the study of literary works <strong>in</strong> their
orig<strong>in</strong>al configurations. We can now understand that manuscripts designed and produced by
scribes and artists—often long after the death of the orig<strong>in</strong>al poet—have a life of their own. It
was not that scribes were ‘<strong>in</strong>capable’ of copy<strong>in</strong>g texts word-for-word, but rather that this was
not what their culture demanded of them. This is but one of the reasons why the story of
medieval manuscripts is both so fasc<strong>in</strong>at<strong>in</strong>g, and so very different from the one we are
accustomed to hear<strong>in</strong>g. But it requires reth<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g concepts as fundamental as authorship, for
example. Confronted with over 150 versions of the work, no two quite alike, what becomes of
the concept of authorial control And how can one assert with certa<strong>in</strong>ty which of the 150 or so
versions is the ‘correct’ one, or even whether such a concept even makes sense <strong>in</strong> a pre-pr<strong>in</strong>t
culture (Nichols 2009).
Thus, the digitization of manuscripts and the creation of digital critical editions have not only provided
new opportunities for textual criticism but also might even be viewed as enabl<strong>in</strong>g a type of criticism
that better respects the traditions of the texts or objects of analysis themselves.
While Monella (2008), Bodard and Garcés (2009), and Dué and Ebbott (2009) focused largely on the
utility of digital editions for philological study and textual criticism, Notis Toufexis has recently
argued that digital editions are central to the work of historical l<strong>in</strong>guistics as well. As he expla<strong>in</strong>s,
historical l<strong>in</strong>guistics “exam<strong>in</strong>es and evaluates the appearance of new—that is changed—l<strong>in</strong>guistic
forms next to old (unchanged) ones <strong>in</strong> the same text or <strong>in</strong> texts of the same date and/or geographical
evidence (Toufexis 2010, 111). Similar to Stephen Nichols, Toufexis criticized modern critical editions
for creat<strong>in</strong>g a far simpler l<strong>in</strong>guistic picture than was actually the case with<strong>in</strong> medieval manuscripts. He
described how scribes might have unconsciously used newer forms of language and not copied the old
forms found <strong>in</strong> a manuscript or how they might have made specific decisions to use older forms as a
stylistic choice to elevate the register of the text. For these reasons, the <strong>in</strong>clusion of all text variants <strong>in</strong>
the apparatus criticus is necessary not just for philologists but also for historical l<strong>in</strong>guists who wish to