New Models for Electronic Publishing

Roger Chartier rightly warns us that reading on a computer screen is not the same as reading a book when he says that

"electronic representation of texts completely changes the text's status: for the materiality of the book, it substitutes the immateriality of texts without a unique location [...] in place of the immediate apprehension of the whole work, made visible by the object that embodies it, it introduces a lengthy navigation in textual archipelagos that have neither shores nor borders" (18).

Hence any project in the electronic medium that lays claim to scholarly authority will require adaptations in both the presentation and the dissemination of its materials. My work on developing an electronic edition of Lyrical Ballads (by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798-1805) helps illustrate how these changes may be realized. Bringing such an edition before the public has made it clear to me that the evolution of electronic publishing will necessitate innovations that are not just technological but also institutional.

On the technical side, Peter Shillingsburg has set out the minimum requirements for a scholarly electronic edition. Such works need to have 1) "a full accurate transcription and full digital image of each source edition," 2) "a webbing or networking of cross-references connecting variant texts, explanatory notes, contextual materials, and parallel texts," and 3) "a navigational system" so that readers can thread their way through this complex hypertext environment (Shillingsburg 28). In preparing an electronic Lyrical Ballads we have tried to meet these standards, first by painstakingly transcribing in text files each of the four lifetime editions of the collection, and by gathering together digital images of every page of every edition. These images will complement our e-texts by being presented in windows set side-by-side on the computer screen. Second, our e-texts will be encoded using TEI-conformant SGML to ensure the preservation of their complex logical structure and to enable hypertext linking that will create a webbing of cross-references and make possible their distribution in a networked environment. The scholars engaged in this project have recently formed a decided preference for online delivery over CD-ROM distribution. Not only is Internet dissemination more efficient and cost effective, it also permits easy correction of errors that are likely to plague any scholarly edition. More important, the fluid nature of the World Wide Web will allow us to take ready advantage of new standards and new forms of interface as they develop. We can constantly add new materials and we can explore new paradigms for their presentation that will help accomplish Shillingsburg's third goal of ready navigation through a multiplicity of variant texts. Lately our new method of marshalling scholarly apparatus which I have called "dynamic collation" has been enhanced by the addition of popup windows generated by javascript which preview variant readings whenever the reader passes the cursor over a revised passage in the electronic text. This reconceptualization of how variant readings can be presented in the digital medium grounds in actual practice David Greetham's proposition that "dismembering scholarly apparatus" will be a consequence of the transition to the new medium (329).

The real challenge for online publication, however, is what might be called the lack of mature institutional structures on the Web. So long as anyone can publish anything on the WWW, the quality of its materials remains questionable. Certainly, Matthew Kirschenbaum is right to remind us that "publication entails a great deal more than simply the act of making public." Hitherto, some degree of authority has been conferred on a website by its association with an institutional host such as a university, as well as by the reputation of its author. But the imprimatur of an established publisher would be an even greater guarantee of the reliability of these immaterial texts. We are in the midst of negotiations that would see the electronic Lyrical Ballads published under the auspices of Cambridge University Press, through the good offices of the website of "Romantic Circles", a reputable online journal hosted by the University of Maryland. By reporting on the progress of these negotiations and their outcome, I hope to indicate ways in which both the Net and established publishers will need to evolve in an electronic world in order to guarantee standards of authority.

The future of electronic publishing depends upon us asking questions about more than technical standards. Online scholarly archives must also meet standards of peer evaluation, editorial practice, and institutional approval that have traditionally ensured the quality of print publications.

References

Chartier, Roger (1995). Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia.
Greetham, D. C. (1999). Theories of the Text. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew (1998). "E-dissertations?" Online posting. 4 Oct. 1998. Humanist Discussion Group. 6 Oct. 1998 <humanist@kcl.ac.uk>.
Shillingsburg, Peter (1996). "Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials." In Richard J. Finneran (ed) The Literary Text in the Digital Age. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. 23-35.