Electronic Scholarly Editions, Kenneth M. Price

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-6-5&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-6-5&brand=9781405148641_brand

Kenneth Price sets out his stall to examine how Electronic Scholarly Editions are changing how we look at and produce texts for scholarly research and examination. He indicates that there has been a move towards digital production over traditional methods in the last few years, yet he finds fault with this. The question of their sustainability is raised due to the internet’s ever changing technologies and methods of display. There is also a problem with those digitizing many of the works that are now part of electronic scholarly editions; according to Price, whilst they have the technological knowledge, they lack the content knowledge to produce sufficient and true versions of the original text or ideas. there is a difference between digitizing and scholarly editing according to Price; digitizing merely produces information, however, editing produces knowledge.
The reasons for making Electronic Scholarly editions is questioned in this piece but the author however focuses on the challenges involved rather than the reasons for this work. Price gives a few positives and at the start of the second section, such as an editors ability to have endless room and content in the archive along with the inclusion of illustration and colour that traditional publishing denies due to financial restraints. These ideas are then however turned on their head by Price. He raises the questions as to whether this content can then be seen as pure and wheter the author initially intended for it to be part of the original script, with Price suggesting that simpler texts are purer and better designed for archives meant to depict the true nature of the writer.
The question of what is relevant to the archive or edition is focused upon as one of great significance. Price argues that the scholarly editions that are made digitally allow for all the secondary sources, ideas and contributors to a text be explored and recognised but then counters this argument with a negative view of including so much material. He suggests that people fail to know where to draw the line in terms of author’s content; should phonebooks and shopping lists be included for example. For me, Price raises more questions here than he answers.
The difference between Digital Libraries and Scholarly Editions is next to be examined by Kenneth Price in this piece. He gives us the fundamental principles of the digital library as often commercial and more focused on providing quantity rather than quality. He suggests that digital libraries are designed to give a searchable body of material rather than a specialised body of material with scholarly judgement not being seen as paramount. Digital archives and editions are however, as seen by the author, more fine grained and intent on producing works that are close to the original and relevant to a specific area of study, rather than being part of a bigger picture. The issue of the finished article is also questioned, with Price suggesting that authors release material as it is finished in drips and drabs due to the fact that the scholarly editing is never finished on a specific text.
To finish the article, Price focuses on the problems related to online digital editions in the bigger picture. Issues of funding, translation, growth of audience and accessibility of the works being produced. He raises questions of funding and the difficulties involved in obtaining federal funding for projects involving more controversial writers for example. International standards of mark up and across the board use of TEI and XML marking up and tagging systems are vital for the growth of electronic scholarly editions also. Issues of translation, access and interpretation are all linked as editions are spread all over the world via the web. The editions must have the ability to change and adapt to their audiences in distant parts of the world due to language and access barriers.
To finish, I feel that Price's evaluation of Electronic Scholarly Editions is one that explores and examines in detail what many believe to be the future of the academic world.

Reading on Screen: The New Media Sphere. By Christian Vandendorpe

This essay sets out its stall to give a brief summary of the main points of the development of reading and writing. The development of the codex, or book form of writing, along with the development of a miniature writing form and the development of spaces between words all helped reading and writing come to the fore. Of course the printing press really helped the book take off and allowed page numbers, paragraphs and form to mould a book into what we know it as today....good luck to anybody trying to read a book with no spaces between words or no paragraphs between ideas. With the development of mass production of many diverse ideas in book form, Vandendorpe tells how people decided to browse numerous books rather than focus on one, in a way mirroring todays actions on the internet.

Our author continues to detail the development of reading and how the computer and the internet has made it so easy to pluck information from anywhere around the world with the click of a mouse and read it off our screens. There are three types of internet on-screen reading according to sources consulted by Vandendorpe; Grazing, Browsing and Hunting. Browsing being prominent with online newspapers and magazines and hunting being linked to search engines. The author briefly explores the most suitable font for screen and pages alike, citing many of the same reasons for the chosen fonts in each case.

We also see how the computer programmes for production of text and the internets digitization of books, is like the past, moving away from scroll format and into a two dimensional version of the codex to allow the reader or typer a better overview and control on their flow of writing.

Hypertext, Vandendorpe explains, allows the reader of a screen to have an ever evolving book at our fingertips when reading on the world wide web. The hypertext allows us to shift from idea to idea as the codex did at first. The hypertext however allows us to shift from book to book, an impossibility in the primitive centuries unless one had access to a vast library and a vast amount of time. The hypertext is apparently detrimental to the eye in terms of reading as it is designed to flow effortlessly along a page until a border tells it to stop. This would signal the death of the column only for the limitations of a computer screen force it to form in an orderly and neat manner that is easy on the readers eye.

In the end, Vandendorpe gives a rather philosophical and idealist view on the future development of writing and reading, citing that maybe the changes seen in the last three centuries could well be the benchmark for the range of development in the next few years of the text as we know it.

Blogs and Blogging: Text and Practice. By Aimeee Morrison

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405148641/9781405148641.xml&chunk.id=ss1-6-1&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ss1-6-1&brand=9781405148641_brand

Ms Morrison decides in her introduction to in a way hype up internet blogging, throwing numerous impressive statistics at us readers on the rise of the blog and its importance as a way of the public to vent their indispensible thoughts upon the world. She claims that blogging has become a form of "citizen journalism", a place where the public can foster their "personnel expression".
As Morrison proceeds in her piece, she again waxes lyrical on the blog and blogosphere for its interactability and its self-referentialism. She continues to give excellent examples of the usefullness of blogging for expressing thoughts and sharing ideas through hypertext links and simple social networking blogs such as facebook and myspace.
Morrison moves her essay quickly along into discussing the technologies behind blogging and brings terms like HTML, CMS and RSS into the equation; terms that simply confuse the regular internet user, like myself, who is happy with seeing the image on the screen and not really caring what makes it this way.
Next to fall under the gaze of Morrison are the different genres that blogging takes up. The author tells us of online diaries, personal journals and edublogs to name but a few. I feel that Morrison explains the genres and different aspects that blogging allows very well in this section of her essay. Morrison also offers us ways to navigate the blogosphere by presenting search engines such as googles blogsearch tool, which personally I found very useful and the blogcarnival website.
The issue of anonymity is also brought forward by Morrison as she tells us that even if the blogger tries to hide his or her identity through by what she calls "security by obscurity", that bloggers true identity will inevitably be figured out. She highlights the point that academics writing on blogs or discussion forums also face the same issues and maybe in a way this helps to keep the information they provide clean, pure and referenced. Morrison uses this link to drag the issue of blogging in academics into the equation and puts forward its advantages, such as discussion and interaction between academics that is usually available for all simpletons like us social bloggers to attain.
Overall, in my humble opinion, Morrison displays a willingness to encourage and promote blogging for all the article's readers, wheter they be academics or students, politicians or voters or any other form of living being with access to the internet and a computer.