Markup and the Digital Paratext

Abstract:
According to the French rhetorician and literary critic
Gerard Genette a paratext is a transitional zone: a
privileged space of a "pragmatics", of "strategy", and of action
over the audience (Genette 1997). In a digital environment, the
idea of the paratext may allow us to recognize the significance
and the mode of operation of certain crucial textual formations
that might otherwise seem inconsequential. These formations,
unlike traditional paratexts, are not always literally visible as
part of the legible textual surface, but instead operate through
the representational and performative mechanisms of the digital
interface. Their separateness is demarcated through markup,
which not only creates a boundary between text and paratext
but also makes the paratext into a space of function and
behavior: of meaning instantiated through action rather than
simply through textual signification.
Proposal:
According to the French rhetorician and literary critic
Gerard Genette a paratext is a transitional zone: a
privileged space of a "pragmatics", of "strategy", and of action
over the audience (Genette 1997). This paratextual
space—instantiated in what are traditionally considered
secondary or ancillary texts such as footnotes, commentary,
translation, and so forth—produces and ramifies the "main"
text, the object that is thus presented to our interest as primarily
significant. It is precisely through the paratexts that the concept
of a "main" text emerges at all: in a given historical moment,
depending on social, cultural, political, and other factors, a
certain text emerges, and slowly starts to circulate and acquire
status through the effects of its paratexts: comments, editions,
translations, dedications, and so forth.
In a digital environment, the idea of the paratext may allow us
to recognize the significance and the mode of operation of
certain crucial textual formations that might otherwise seem
inconsequential. An example of such a formation is the
information we might call "microtexts": that is, external,
contingently visible “microcontents” (Nielsen 2000) that
describe, illustrate or complete information within a web page
or resource. These include also embedded alternate texts that
usually appear when you move the mouse over an image, link
or any other semiotic device (Zinna 2005). Another example
is what we might call "metatexts", a category embracing both
formal metadata and also looser kinds of descriptive, normative
or regulative information, usually not directly visible to the
user, that is added in order to allow search engines and other
processing to produce coherent and useful results.
These terms arise from an external classification (one which
could be extended) emphasizing the different ways these
paratexts function as part of a publication architecture. But
digital paratexts can be also organized, according to their
cognitive and semiotic functions, into at least three flexible
(and mutually permeable) categories:
1. 1. descriptive (syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes): those
paratexts which contain information about a text, including
various kinds of metadata;
2. 2. normative: those which constrain the behavior of the text
(for instance, schemas)
3. 3. pragmatic: those which mediate or represent the text as
a discursive object, and which produce its digital
phenomenology.
These formations, unlike traditional paratexts, are not always
literally visible as part of the legible textual surface: their
"strategy" and "pragmatics" operate through the representational
and performative mechanisms of the digital interface. In print,
the paratext has (despite its marginality) a certain visible
presence on the page: its meaning may be wholly in relation to
the text it supports, but it is not different in kind from that text
(Tomasi 2005). The digital paratexts we are describing,
however, occupy a different stratum and have a different kind
of visibility and functional effect. Their presence may be felt
primarily in what the text does or in how we discover it, rather
than in the words we see when we read it. Their separateness
is demarcated through markup, which not only creates a
boundary between text and paratext but also makes the paratext
into a space of function and behavior: of meaning instantiated
through action rather than simply through textual signification.
In this respect, these categories of paratext (and in particular
the last, which is the realm of markup proper) are analogous to
the punctuation, formatting, and presentational conventions
through which a printed text is realized for a reader, or through
which an oral text is concretized in print. As Genette observes,
any transcription, including the written transcription of an oral
speech, is a form of paratext, and we can usefully extend this
idea to digital forms by observing that any encoding—in effect,
any transmediation—constitutes a form of paratext as well. Each of the three categories above illustrates a distinctive
dimension of the digital paratext, and raises a set of questions
and issues that can help us reach a clearer understanding of the
role of markup and the nature of digital texts. If we consider
markup in Genette’s terms as a “privileged space” of “action”
and “pragmatics”, what effect does this have on our
understanding of text encoding as a transcriptional activity? To
what extent do our disciplinary expectations about documentary
evidence run counter to the logic implied by these terms? The
boundary between transcription and authoring (and our sense
of where the distinction lies) may turn out to be harder to pin
down than has previously been suggested.
Similarly, to what extent does metadata operate as an active,
rather than a passive component of the textual ecology? If we
understand metadata creation as part of the authoring of the
digital document, does this change our sense of who should be
creating it and what its sources should be?
Finally, if schemas and stylesheets can also be understood as
paratexts (for instance, as suggested in Pierazzo 2006), then
we need to rethink our conception of textual meaning and
rhetoric to include not only the forms a text actually takes, but
also those which its constraints permit it to take: in other words,
the potential as well as actual forms through which we
apprehend the text.
Bibliography
Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans.
Jane A. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Nielsen, Jakob. Designing Web Usability: The Practice of
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Pierazzo, Elena. "Just Different Layers? Stylesheets and Digital
Edition Methodology." Paper presented at Digital Humanities
2006, Paris Sorbonne, 5-9 July 2006. 2006.
Tomasi, F. "Il paratesto nei documenti elettronici." I dintorni
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