Panel: What is text? A debate on the philosophical and epistemological nature of text in the light of humanities computing research

What is text? A debate on the philosophical and
epistemological nature of text in the light of humanities computing
research

Susan
Hockey
Arts Technologies for Learning Centre University of Alberta
Susan.Hockey@ualberta.ca

Allen
Renear

Brown University
allen_renear@brown.edu

Jerome
J.
McGann
Department of English University of
Virginia
jjm2f@virginia.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Susan Hockey, Chair

The Text Encoding Initiative and other recent markup research projects in
humanities computing have fostered lively debate and discussion on the
nature of text. If we are to represent text in a form suitable for
electronic processing, we need to define what text is and what
structures we want to be able to recognize in text. This focus on the
structural components of text, pioneered by Allen Renear and his
colleagues at Brown University, became the foundation of much of the
SGML-based encoding seen in today's electronic text projects. But it
also developed at a time when many textual scholars, notably Jerome
McGann, began to move away from the linguistic and structural properties
of text and to place more emphasis on what McGann calls "bibliographical
codes", that is on texts as material phenomena where appearance and
rendition are important.
This session will take the form of a debate between Renear and McGann,
two well-known scholars who have written and spoken extensively on the
nature of text. Each will present their views in an opening statement of
approximately twenty-five minutes. They will then be given a further
five minutes to reply before the topic is open to the floor for further
discussion and questions.

1. Position statement from Renear
Allen Renear

I will present and defend a particular view of textuality. It is
a view which has roots in common sense and tradition, and which
has also proven to be heuristic in directing research and
practical for guiding system and software designers. It is a
view that seems to illuminate textual practices in the
humanities and it is arguably implicit in work of the Text
Encoding Initiative. However it is, at least in parts, coming
increasingly under suspicion. This is too bad, as this view is
not only a rather good account of textuality, it is the best
account we have.
I will advocate this theory by defending five theses; I will
argue that texts are:
1. real: they have properties independent of our
interests in them and our theories about them.
2. abstract: the objects which constitute texts are
abstract, not material, objects.
3. intentional: texts are, necessarily, the product of
mental acts.
4. hierarchical: the structure of texts is
fundamentally hierarchical.
5. linguistic: texts are linguistic objects;
renditional features are not parts of texts, and
therefore not proper locations for textual meaning.

I will rehearse the arguments, which I believe to be decisive,
and consider alleged counterexamples, which I believe fail. I do
not claim that this view encounters no hard cases, or that it
solves all problems. But in the course of the discussion we will
see that this account of text is rich in explanatory and
predictive power, implied by our modal intuitions about cultural
artifacts, and useful both in regulating further inquiry, and in
guiding the development of tools and resources. Finally, and
very importantly, I argue that this view has no serious
competitors. It is the best account of text that we have, and,
fortunately, it is a good one.
This theory of text has been developed in collaboration, over the
last ten years, with colleagues at Brown and elsewhere --
however most of those involved would demur from the ambitions,
and commitments, of my formulations here. The development of
this view can be found in the following papers.

James
H.Coombs
Allen
Renear
Steven
J.
DeRose
Markup Systems and The Future of
Scholarly Text Processing

Communications of the Association for
Computing Machinery

30
11

1987

Steven
DeRose
David
Durand
Elli
Mylonas
What is Text, Really?

Journal of Computing in Higher
Education

1
2

1990

Allen
Renear
Elli
Mylonas
David
Durand
Refining Our Notion of What Text Really
Is: The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies

Research in Humanities
Computing

Oxford University Press
1996

(Version presented at ALLC/ACH92 at Christ Church,
Oxford; 1992: ).

Allen
Renear
Practical Ontology: The Case of Written
Communication

Kjell
S.
Johannessen

Tore
Nordenstam

Culture and Value: Philosophy and the
Cultural Sciences, Kirchberg am Wechsel 1995

1995

Allen
Renear
Theory and Meta-Theory in the
Development of Text Encoding

Target paper for the The Monist, currently (1996) in
circulation in the Interactive Monist
Seminar.Summary published in
The Monist

80
3

July 1997

See: .

Steven
J.DeRose
David
Durand
Elli
Mylonas
Allen
Renear
Author's Response to Three Comments on
'What is Text, Really?

Journal of Computer
Documentation

1997

Allen
Renear
Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories of
Textuality

Kathryn
Sutherland

Electronic Textuality: Investigations
in Method and Theory

Oxford University Press
1997

Although criticisms of this view from within the humanities
computing community have been expressed in conference papers by
Claus Huitfeldt, Dino Buzzetti, Fabio Ciotti, and others (see:
),
it is widely thought that very serious problems for this theory
can also be found in the influential work of the theorist of
textual criticism, Jerome McGann.

2. Position statement from McGann
Jerome J. McGann

The question framing this ACH session involves a
misconception. It assumes that "text" is a unitary
phenomenon and that its concept can be thought as
self-identical. But while both of these assumptions may be
undertaken for heuristic purposes, neither represents what
Wittgenstein called "the case".
In the field of Humanities Computing the idea of text has
been dominated by conceptions practically realized in the
TEI implementation of SGML markup. Several key theoretical
papers published by Steve DeRose, Allen Renear, "et al."
explain the ground of that implementation.
This ground, explicitly "abstract" (Renear1997), represents a
view of text as essentially a vehicle for transmitting
information and concepts (final cause). Text is
"hierarchical" (formal cause) and "linguistic" (material
cause), and it is a product of human intention (efficient
cause).
I invoke these Aristotelian categories because Renear
correctly insists upon the "platonic" character of the
TEI/SGML approach to textuality. That self-description,
traceable to several Platonic works, the Republic in
particular, helps to clarify the differential involved in
"poetic" or noninformational forms of textuality. There is
no question but that most of our textual archive is
hierarchically organized. On the other hand, there is also
no question but that poetical texts comprise a key, perhaps
even a defining, part of the corpus of our humanities
archive. When Plato called for the expulsion of the poets
from the city, he was arguing for a certain theory of
textuality.
Unlike expository text, poetry is not organized in a
determinate hierarchy. TEI and SGML markup, therefore, while
reasonably adequate vehicles for expository and
informational texts, fails to render those features of
poetic text that are most salient for its makers and users.
Poetical texts are recursive structures built out of complex
networks of repetition and variation. No poem can exist
without systems of "overlapping structures", and the more
developed the poetical text, the more complex are those
systems of recursion. So it is that in a poetic field no
unit can be assumed to be self-identical. The logic of the
poem is only frameable in some kind of paradoxical
articulation such as: "a equals a if and only if a does not
equal a".
This essential character of poetical text helps to explain
why content in poeisis tends to involve more broadly
"semiotic" rather than narrowly "linguistic" materials. The
sonic and visible features of text are, so far as the poets
who make these texts are concerned (or the readers who
engage them), nearly as apt for expressive poetical purposes
as the semantic, syntactic, and rhetorical features. Each of
these features represents a field of textual action, and
while any one field may be individually (abstractly) framed
in a hierarchized scheme, the recursive interplay of the
fields produces works whose order is not hierarchical. Of
course a governing hierarchy can be imposed upon such works.
TEI and SGML create, as Renear shows, a certain type of
"linguistic" hierarchy, one that privileges text as a
container for storing information. But even that linguistic
hierarchy is highly specialized (it does not consider, for
example, the rhetorical structures that overlap and infect
the syntax and semantics).
The case of poetry in fact defines a kind of textual ethos,
as it were, that may be seen to pervade genres not normally
thought of as poetical. Certain kinds of philosophers lend
themselves to a hierarchical approach - St. Thomas, Kant,
Hegel. Others don't. Not without reason has the Bergen
Wittgenstein project abandoned TEI/SGML as a system for
marking up the corpus of Wittgenstein's texts; and the
scholars setting out now to "edit" the Peirce archive are
well aware that TEI/SGML does not lend itself to an adequate
treatment of Peirce's work, and least of all to his
existential graphs. "Text" in Kant "is" one thing, but in
Peirce it "is" something else again.

Reference

Allen
Renear
Out of Praxis: Three (Meta)Theories
of Textuality

Kathryn
Sutherland

Electronic Text: Investigations in
Theory and Method

Oxford
Clarendon Press
1997
107-26