ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

A Librarian goes to Grad School

As the token librarian in our crowd, I guess it seems obvious of me to talk about the Rosenwald collection at the Library of Congress And though I think it’s great, I also think I’ve been brainwashed by a bunch of English students (!) into thinking that it’s only the first step in the right direction. As a library school student, I’ve spent a large portion of my graduate study thinking, reading and talking about information access and information use, and even some about storage and retrieval, but never about interpretation. So it is both novel and challenging for me to approach collections of books/literature/information from this direction. Though I take just a bit of offense at McGann’s assertion that, “many, perhaps most of these [librarians] are smart, hardworking and literate” (with the underlying implication that some of us aren’t…), I have to agree with him when he writes about “a system that can simulate every realizable possibility – the possibilities that are known and recorded as well as those that have yet to be (re) constructed”. Though I’m sure that many of the students in my program (specifically the archivists) might have a problem with (or more likely, just don’t see a need to think about) the idea that “bibliographical objects are social objects”, I am not one of them. Taken individually, the collections we looked at for this assignment seem to each do part of what McGann (via McKenzie) theorizes. The Rosenwald collection certainly deals with the “known and recorded possibilities” (and only some of them, at that), while systems like TextArc open up possibilities “yet to be (re) constructed.” The Library of Congress site is obviously an archive trying to achieve a user experience that is as close to actually reading a codex text as is possible in an online environment. And it does an admirable job. The scans/colors/visuals found here are unparalleled in any of the other collections we explored, but the collection is meant only to be viewed. It cannot be manipulated, de- or re-constructed in any way. The restrictive interface allows the user/reader to look at the pages in the same way they would if they were holding the physical book-object itself. One can flip pages or look at the catalog information. This collection is a perfect example of the “primacy of the physical object” that McGann mentions in his article. There is an attempt to “re-create” the codex experience and provide access to materials that a user might otherwise find inaccessible. There is no room for the re-constructive interaction that McGann mentions as part of a “social object”, and, unlike TextArc, no tools specific to the digital format for helping a user or reader with interpretive interaction with the texts. At the other end of this spectrum is TextArc, which has almost no resemblance to the actual physical objects that represent Blake’s texts and images. The fact that there are no images at all associated with a writer/artist whose text and images are physically intertwined seems an important political statement by Paley about how texts can or should be read. Or maybe it has nothing to do with Blake’s particular case since the library for TextArc is basically based on whether something is beyond copyright infringements. Intentional or not, the fact that this tool allows only manipulations of the text is still important when looking at Blake since a “reader’s” interpretation is formed without the images. I find it ironic that a completely “alternative” way to view a text is actually based on a very traditional bibliographic tool such as a concordance: yet another political statement about user interaction/text interpretation/social construction of meaning. As I continue to explore TextArc, I am amazed at how many different interpretive entry points it allows into a text. And specifically how easy it makes it to do things like analyze where certain words show up most often. Certainly, it doesn’t surprise me that words like “night”, “fear” and “tear” are conspicuously absent from the first half of the songs (Innocence), but it does make my understanding of the text that much richer. Based on the Webster’s definition offered by McGann, TextArc fits perfectly into his theory of textonics as a “geology that has to do with text structure”. Whether the text structure is textual or visual is another matter. Which part of TextArc would he consider “the constructive arts”, I wonder? Though a tool like TextArc isn’t a system that “can simulate every realizable possibility”, it does move in the direction of possibilities yet to be constructed. The question that I struggle with on an individual professional level is what place does a tool like TextArc have in my chosen profession? The Rosenberg collection has an obvious place: On a computer in my library, just as the physical books themselves are on a shelf in the LC Rare Book collection. I wouldn’t have to convince anyone of the usefulness of such a tool. But how would I do the same with something like TextArc? Posted by Melissa at May 5, 2004 05:04 PM