The analytical bibliography of electronic texts

Analytical bibliography is the study of “the physical embodiments of texts as evidence of the
process that produced these embodiments and of
the relations between them” (Williams and Abbott, 6). It is sometimes referred to as “physical
bibliography,” and in discussions of this field
there is always a stress on the examination of
physical evidence as its defining characteristic;
the analytical bibliographer looks at paper, typefaces, bindings, and so on, not at the textual content that these materials are used to convey. The
goal has most often been to support the study of
literature, but the approach is based on looking at
aspects of transmission that readers usually disregard.
Analytical bibliography is based on the assumption that the physical form of a book contains
indications of its history. It has become commonplace in recent years to assume that electronic texts
do not contain any such indications. Although
electronic texts require some physical medium for
their storage and display, we are still inclined to
think of them as non-physical, because they are
stored digitally – and while it is not possible to
make a perfect duplicate of a book or of any
analogue representation of a text, it is quite commonplace to achieve that with digital texts. This
makes it possible to copy and transmit electronic
texts without any of the telltale signs that copying
or alteration introduces in reproductions of books,
and that analytical bibliography can reveal. For
example, in 1974 William B. Todd showed that
the transcripts of conversations in the Nixon White House issued by Nixon’s Administration had
been extensively doctored; he did this through a
study of the changing typefaces and margins in the
published volume. It is generally assumed today
that it would not be possible to detect such a
cut-and-paste job if the volume were produced
using a word-processing program: after all, one
reason for the widespread use of these programs
is the ease of making such modifications in documents. Furthermore, it is commonly believed, we
will cease to have the information once preserved
in working drafts, and we will also lose any assurance of the authenticity of texts, because there is
no physical object that stands as a guarantee of the
work, only an easily-forged electronic text.
But I argue that this is not the case. Electronic texts
do preserve significant traces of their transmission, and we can learn to recognize those indications and make deductions from them about the
history of texts. These indications are not “physical”, but the way we need to study them is entirely
in keeping with the traditions of analytical bibliography, if we understand the field in a way that
doesn’t stress the physicality of the evidence.
Analytical bibliography looks like a form of
science, in its concern with physical evidence
rather than with literary structures; but analytical
bibliographers have often said that it is misleading
to think of the field as a science (see, for example,
the comments of Tanselle). Carlo Ginzburg has
presented an argument that helps clarify this question: he proposed that bibliography is one of a
number of practices involving, not the generalization and quantification typical of the exact
sciences, but instead “an attitude oriented towards
the analysis of specific cases which could be reconstructed only through traces, symptoms, and
clues” (104). The most familiar example of this
attitude is in the method of Sherlock Holmes, who
could see in tiny details of a person’s appearance
indications of his or her origin, profession, place
of residence, and so on. But there are specialists
of other kinds who use the same sort of approach,
and not just in the realm of fiction: for example,
hunters tracking game, specialists in the attribution of artworks, and doctors seeking to diagnose
patients (particularly in the period before our century). These are all practical skills based on experience as much as on book-learning, and on the
study of “evidence that is imperceptible to most
people” (98). And there are many people today
skilled in interpreting the history of electronic
texts in just this way – though they’re more likely
to be found in your university’s computer center
than in any academic department.
The evidence this interpretation exploits is not
physical evidence – though the physical medium
does actually convey some real information (a
9-track tape or a 5.25” disk probably weren’t
created by someone using a Macintosh). It is rather
in the actual contents of electronic texts, in the
digital codes used to represent letters and, even
more, in the codes used to indicate other aspects
of the text (such as spacing and line breaks). That
there is an extraordinary variety in such encoding
is a classic problem for us in humanities computing, but it is also one that most users of computers
never give any thought to: therefore putting these
details quite squarely in the category of “evidence
that is imperceptible to most people.”
These indications can tell us a great deal about
what program created a file and what stages of
transmission it went through. Analytical bibliography seeks evidence about the techniques of typesetting and printing used in producing a book,
because such evidence can help us resolve problems about the book’s history or textual content;
similar studies can do the same for electronic texts.
Because the systems used for creating electronic
texts are implemented in software, rather than
requiring the fabrication of new machinery, this
form of analytical bibliography faces a broader
array of different procedures than physical bibliography did. On the other hand, the systematic
analysis of the texts is easier, because they do exist
to begin with in electronic form: searches for
telltale patterns are much easier to make with
computer assistance than by the laborious examination of printed pages.
Here are a few of of the types of historical indications that an electronic text may contain:
– Program of origin. Word-processor files usually
have an internal format that is specific to the word
processor in question, and generally even to a
particular version of that word processor. This in
itself provides some significant information about
dating, since a WordPerfect 6.0 file can’t have
been created before WordPerfect 6.0 was available. Even the names of files can provide some
information of this sort, since it is conventional on
many systems for the filename extension (the part
after the dot) to indicate the associated program
(this is the case on Unix, Windows 95, and VMS,
for example). It’s true that you are perfectly free
to change the names of your files; but it is generally the case that using the system is made more
difficult if you don’t use the standard extensions,
and the goal of most users is to get their work done,
not to hide their tracks. The same applies to the
internal format of files: most users are unaware
that there is any variation from program to program or version to version, and even if they are
aware they generally see no need to engage in
measures to update the formats of their old files
unless they need to use them again.
– System of origin. Files that are not created by
word processors or other programs that use a
characteristic internal format, but are in the “plain
ASCII” format that is somewhat system-independent, still commonly have variations in their
content that indicate their source. For example,
such files when created under MS-DOS often have
control-Z characters at the end, and lines are divided by a carriage return/line feed sequence; both
conventions are inappropriate on other systems
(see Gaylord for further details of this sort).
– Traces of transmission. While it is commonly
believed that electronic texts travel from system to
system and place to place without alteration, this
is actually not always the case. Indeed, it is easy
to see errors in printed texts that can be directly
attributed to various errors in electronic transmission. One of the most common is the ossified soft
hyphen: the line-end hyphen that has been turned
into a hard hyphen when a file has been moved
from one program or system to another, because
what was moved was the text with its line breaks
and not the stream of words. The upshot is split
words in the middle of lines, such as “mis-take”.
In recent years electronic mail has become a common means of transmission for plain text, but it
can introduce artifacts of its own. A common one
is the conversion of the word “From”, when it
appears at the start of a line, to “>From”, so as to
avoid confusing some Unix mail programs (see
Costales 399-400). The introduction of schemes
for transmitting eight-bit characters or attachments has multiplied the possibilities for such
changes in the text, changes that are easily overlooked if they only occur here and there in a
document.
– Typists and their interaction with programs. It
is often the case that a text’s author is recognizable
through habits of spelling, punctuation, or spatial
layout; but some of these habits can be conditioned
by particular programs. The vi editor on Unix, for
example, normally treats the h, j, k, and l keys as
cursor keys rather than alphabetic symbols; consequently the vi user who switches to another
editor or word processor is likely to salt the text
with a lot of j characters.
Few word-processing programs today make any
attempt to record a history of changes to a file, but
typists nevertheless leave traces of their revisions
in most word-processor files. Any file that undergoes much revision usually winds up with a number of superfluous font changes (a change into
italic immediately followed by a change back into
roman, for example, with no actual text affected);
the absence of such incidentals is a sign that little
change has been made in the text since it entered
the computer, or that it wasn’t typed by a person
at all but was converted from some other form by
a program.
The chief objection that might be made to the
study of these indications is that they could be
faked, and that – since only a pattern of bytes needs
to be faked, and not anything involving physical
materials like paper and ink – it is comparatively
easy to do this in an undetectable way. In practice,
though, there are two substantial obstacles to forgery. The first is the problem of skill and knowled181
ge: the desire to fake the file format used by a
particular word processor doesn’t mean you can
find out or easily mimic that format, or that you
will have the skill to do it correctly.
The second obstacle is that of time and convenience. Most of the time, most of us are just trying to
get our work done, and creating a deceptive electronic trail is the farthest thing from our minds.
The study of electronic texts reveals a further truth
implicit in the tradition of analytical bibliography:
that producers of texts do so in a social matrix,
constituted by the available technology, and they
want to concentrate their attention on writing rather than on the technological means. The forger
necessarily takes an interest in the means; but most
texts are not produced by people with forgery in
mind, and the incentive for the labor of forgery is
rarely great. Whether the system we use for text
production is mechanical or electronic, we generally want it to do the job while requiring the
minimum amount of effort from us.
And even when deception is in question, it is very
difficult to acquire enough knowledge to create
one that is foolproof. A decade after Richard Nixon’s resignation, in a White House that now used
electronic mail and word processing, further criminal activities still wound up being exposed because the criminals weren’t aware of the traces
they were leaving. Some of the main evidence
against Oliver North was in his electronic-mail
messages, messages he assumed vanished when
he deleted them – but which were preserved on
backups (see Draper). Electronic texts aren’t the
free-for-all that we are often led to imagine: just
like printed texts, they are created, read, and transmitted within systems we didn’t create, that influence us and that we can fully break out of only
through the exertion of extraordinary effort.
Works Cited
Costales, Bryan, with Eric Allman and Neil Rikkert. Sendmail. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly,
1993.
Draper, Theodore. A Very Thin Line: The IranContra Affairs. New York: Hill and Wang,
1991.
Gaylord, Harry. “Character Representation.”
Computers and the Humanities 29 (1995): 51-
73.
Ginzburg, Carlo. “Clues: Roots of an Evidential
Paradigm.” 1979. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Tr. John and Anne C. Tedeschi.
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
1989. 96-125.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Bibliography and
Science.” Studies in Bibliography 27 (1974):
55-89. Rpt. in Selected Studies in Bibliography
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
1979). 1-35.
Todd, William B. “The White House Transcripts.”
Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 68 (1974): 267-296.
Williams, William Proctor, and Craig S. Abbott.
An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985.