Print remediation
Preserving texts has long been an issue for archivists and with the technology available, texts are now able to be transferred to electronic editions and online archives, which would ideally make them available long after the paper books turn to dust (of course, this is up to the changes in technology, the way that floppy disks are now outdated). The idea is to store and make available online not only new texts as they emerge, but also to go back and archive texts as they make it into the public domain (to forego copyright issues). There are positives for this process, such as accessibility of texts no longer in print, ease for scholars of comparing editions without cost of travel to other archives, and an emerging conversation of what text is and how we access and store this valuable commodity. Theodor Nelson says,There is no Final Word. There can be no final version, no last thought. There is always a new view, a new idea, a reinterpretation. And literature, which we propose to electronify, is a system for preserving continuity in the face of this fact… remember the analogy between text and water. Water flows freely, ice does not. The free-flowing, live documents on the network are subject to constant new use and linkage, and those new links continually become interactively available. Any detached copy someone keeps is frozen and dead, lacking access to the new linkage. (from Literary Machines, 48? quoted in Landow’s Hyper/text/theory, 78)The web does often seem an idyllic free-flowing network of information and creativity, but there are also issues with this electronification of literature. “The Masque of the Red Death” version I have posted here, was taken from an online archive claiming “The Works of Edgar Allan Poe”. The author of the website cited two prominent publications of the story, the first in Graham’s published in 1842 and the 1850 version from a collection of Poe’s works, however, although the text here was close to the 1850 collection version, it was not exactly the same. Peter L. Shillingsburg states in From Gutenberg to Google, “editorial acts involve various kinds of problems that interfere with the simplicity of ‘the accurate reproduction of identical texts” (15).
For this print remediation process, I looked at several editions of “The Masque of the Red Death” and no two of them were identical. Not only was the version I ended up using slightly different (sometimes better) than the others, it also had a typo introduced where the word “projected” had become “protected”, changing the meaning of the passage. Although I had read the text over when remediating it, I had failed to notice this mistake, most likely entered in the transcription or editing process. This encompasses some of the major issues with online archiving: what version of the text is being used? If it’s a critical edition, how did the published arrive at this version and what other editions were consulted? When publishing a text (not only on the web) and creating a new edition of a text, what errors are being introduced? Even with the technology available to “catch” these types of errors, a misspelling like “protected” would never be found by a computer spellchecker or digital text scanner.
So the archiving and continuous composition of literature for an electronic medium is necessary, and significant. However, we can’t forget that texts have always relied and spoken through their materiality, and that some of these same issues with digital archiving have been around since textual studies began. As Katherine Hayles states:The implication for studies of technology and literature is that the materiality of inscription thoroughly interpenetrates the represented world. Even when technology does not appear as a theme, it is woven into the fictional world through the processes that produce the literary work as a material artifact. (Hayles 130)Like any issue being brought before the World Wide Web, the pool is just deeper, and it is more difficult to police than in the land of print editions. To illustrate this point, I included on the print remediation page some of the more frequented sites for Poe’s works—most of which are less than reliable, even though they claim to be “archives”. Scholars merely need to carry over their knowledge and expertise of textual studies to an electronic medium and we, as readers, must begin to distinguish between archives and learn to determine who to trust.