Markup, Idealism, and the Physical Text

In a paper presented at Extreme Markup Languages 2003, Allen Renear et al. suggest that XML documents enjoy--or suffer--a notably ambiguous status with respect to the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). That specification identifies a hierarchy of textual modalities, wherein the term "work" designates an authorial creation, "expression" designates a particular form of that creation instantiated in a particular language or medium, "manifestation" designates a particular physical embodiment of the expression (specifying type face, size, materials, etc.) and "item" designates a particular physical object with the properties specified in the expression (e.g. a particular copy of a book).

Renear et al. argue that XML documents possess a "double aspect" within the FRBR hierarchy, by which they can be seen either as manifestations or expressions, depending on how their markup is understood. This doubleness or uncertainty might be taken to indicate that the XML document is interestingly at odds with the FRBR universe. This would seem plausible in light of the resolutely documentary nature of that universe; the FRBR specification does not mention electronic documents and seems very much geared towards organizing the world of conventional libraries and their conventional contents.

Renear et al.'s analysis is self-avowedly preliminary, "intended to convene rather than advance discussion", and the first goal of the paper now being proposed is to probe that analysis in greater detail. For instance, while Renear et al. locate the XML document's dual aspect between the expression and the manifestation, there are grounds as well for considering XML documents as works. Discussions of FRBR assume that a play and a movie thereof are different works, even though their dialogue, actors, and even their sets may be identical, and in a similar way we can imagine that two XML documents which contain the same text but whose markup models that text in different genres might well be considered different works. And while Renear et al. consider the XML document not to be a FRBR item on the grounds that it is not "a concrete physical object", this line of argument seems like an oversimplification, implying that no electronic object can ever be an item, a claim we would like to probe more carefully.

But although it is clearly difficult to assign an XML document unambiguously to a single FRBR category, in a larger sense the XML document is--or can be--very much at home in the FRBR universe, which draws its intellectual inheritance overwhelmingly from the editorial traditions of G. Thomas Tanselle and Anglo-American textual editing. If our understanding of the nature of XML markup derives from the influential OHCO model, which insists on the separability of form from content and identifies the latter as the preservable informational essence of a document, then the encoded XML document represents the textual essence plus the formal structuring needed to reembody the text in what for FRBR would be an infinitude of potential specific "manifestations". Its "double aspect" thus registers the conundrum of its being both a deliberately disembodied textual mode (its physical configurations having been deliberately discarded or held in abeyance) and a form that is capable of generating contingent embodiments as needed. But this doubleness does not run across the grain of the FRBR scheme--on the contrary, it reaffirms its essential distinctions.

If we look at documentary and editorial modes which resist this kind of idealization, however, we find a different kind of problem. Within the rare book and manuscript communities, critics of FRBR have identified a number of areas of ambiguity affecting the classification of these specialized document types, particularly where the FRBR categories of expression and manifestation are concerned--in other words, where questions of the relationship between physical form and texual meaning are concerned.

These concerns are also reflected in important segments of the digital text community. Researchers such as Johanna Drucker, Morris Eaves, Jerome McGann, and others have been investigating the special status of images and what Drucker calls "configured information". From this perspective, the familiar problem of markup is that it too readily discards physical configuration, as being either unnecessary, inapposite, or too difficult to capture. To use the terms of Renear et al.'s analysis, markup that editorially describes textual structure is apt to discard physical configuration once it has served its own purpose as markup (i.e. as the clues through which we intuit the structure of the source document), since it assumes that such configurations are unimportant in themselves. And markup that authorially, performatively "instantiates" textual structure is logically anterior to any physical incarnation. Markup that aims to preserve details of a source text (a category Renear et al. do not discuss, but whose existence they would surely acknowledge) takes theoretical responsibility for capturing physical configurations, but faces limitations and challenges which are usually taken to be fundamental and nearly insurmountable: the basic disparity between the formalism and granularity of markup and the unruly realities of the physical world.

This disparity is the chief concern of the remainder of this paper, and will be explored in detail in the finished version. Can we envision a way of representing the physical object in markup that does both analytical and representational justice to the "configured information" of texts? And from an analytical standpoint, what are the thresholds at which it is useful to identify these configurations? Can we identify meaningful groupings of phenomena that reflect actual analytical categories, or does the physical realm resist such categorizations? Finally, might such an analysis provide a new viewpoint from which to undertake a reassessment of the OHCO model of markup?

Bibliography

1. Drucker, Johanna. "Intimations of Immateriality", in Reimagining Textuality, ed. Elizabeth
2. Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
3. Eaves, Morris. "Graphicality", in Reimagining Textuality, ed. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux and Neil Fraistat. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
4. International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records Final Report, ed. Marie Plassard. Muenchen: UBCIM Publications New Series, Vol. 19, 1998. (http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm)
5. McGann, Jerome J. "The Rationale of Hypertext", in Electronic text : investigations in method and theory, ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. (http://www.iath.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/rationale.html)
6. Renear, Allen, Christopher Phillipe, Pat Lawton, and David Dubin. "An XML Document Corresponds to what FRBR Group 1 Entity?" presented at Extreme Markup Languages (Montreal, 2003) and published in the conference proceedings.