Why is Shakespeare so often associated with information technologies and with the idea of archiving itself? Alan Galey explores this question through the entwined histories of Shakespearean texts and ...archival technologies over the past four centuries. In chapters dealing with the archive, the book, photography, sound, information, and data, Galey analyzes how Shakespeare became prototypical material for publishing experiments, and new media projects, as well as for theories of archiving and computing. Analyzing examples of the Shakespearean archive from the seventeenth century to today, he takes an original approach to Shakespeare and new media that will be of interest to scholars of the digital humanities, Shakespeare studies, archives, and media history. Rejecting the idea that current forms of computing are the result of technical forces beyond the scope of humanist inquiry, this book instead offers a critical prehistory of digitization read through the afterlives of Shakespeare's texts.
It is now 40 years since Gérard Genette's work introduced the term paratexts into literary studies, giving a unifying name to the many kinds of texts that serve as thresholds to other texts. The term ...and concept have migrated into the study of several other media forms, including video game studies, thanks principally to Mia Consalvo in Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games (2007) and Steven Jones in The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (2008). The term's meaning expanded in the process, which has been the subject of much debate since then. Over a decade later, the timing seems apt to take stock of the concept of paratextuality and consider new ways of adapting it. This introduction to a special issue titled “Video Games and Paratextuality” reconsiders Genette's reception in video game studies, and introduces a set of articles that together look beyond Genette.
Portal (2007) presents an unusually complex example for the study of video game paratexts. This article uses the case of the game’s promotional website ApertureScience.com to consider how ...paratextuality and the associated concepts of ephemerality and materiality may be further refined to open up new dimensions of video games as objects of interpretation and play. The article draws from the field of textual studies, which specializes in the particularities of media, and in the entanglement of technical detail with interpretation and meaning. The first part re-evaluates the nature of the book as an analogy for the materiality of video games, and critiques Gérard Genette’s conception of bookish paratexts and its applicability to video games. The article then offers a detailed analysis of ApertureScience.com as a paratext, including its satirical critiques of positivism and corporate research, and concludes with a discussion of the materiality of digital paratexts.
The Work and the Listener Galey, Alan
Textual cultures : text, contexts, interpretation,
08/2021, Letnik:
14, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies offers an important perspective on the value of the work-concept in textual scholarship. This response to his book, written for a seminar at ...the 2021 Society for Textual Scholarship conference, takes up threads leading outward from his argument, and in three sections considers the potential of bibliography beyond books, textual scholarship beyond editing, and archives beyond metaphor.
Was Marshall McLuhan's greatest work not his published writing but his reading? This article examines McLuhan's annotation practices in his copies of James Joyce's Ulysses and A Portrait of the ...Artist as a Young Man, and asks what kinds of evidence a prolific annotator like McLuhan might have left if he had done his reading digitally. The first half profiles McLuhan's annotation practices, illustrated by examples from books from McLuhan's personal library. The second half describes an informal experiment, in which the author tests McLuhan's annotation techniques against the capabilities of digital book platforms and formats, specifically PDF (using the Apple Preview app) and EPUB (using the Apple Books app). Overall, the article works through two questions that are relevant to book history, marginalia studies, and digital archiving. How will we understand the evidence left behind by readers when that evidence is in born-digital forms, as archived digital files? And what can we learn about digital reading and annotation from someone like McLuhan, who did those things exceptionally well in another medium? The conclusion reflects on prospects for the study of born-digital marginalia, and on the role of encyclopedism in understanding both McLuhan's and Joyce's media theory.
Shakespeare 1 I would like to think that Milton somehow knew he was writing about computing. Since the advent of digital textuality, Milton's encomium to Shakespeare in the 1632 Second Folio has ...acquired significance he could not have foreseen. Since a digital text's "deep impressions" are merely positively or negatively charged electrons on a magnetized disk surface-or the microscopic impressions laser etched into an optical disk-the devices we now associate with computing provoke a complex set of responses to preservation, largely in the absence of a single trusted substrate for digital archiving.
This article takes the Canadian band the Tragically Hip as a case study in pro-amateur digital music archiving and also considers the larger place of the band’s music within the context of cultural ...memory. After lead singer and lyricist Gord Downie’s cancer diagnosis in 2016, the band made the remarkable decision to undertake a Canadian tour, which became one of the most obsessively documented rock tours in Canadian history. Drawing on close readings of the band’s performances and some of the digital records that capture them, the article argues for the importance of considering questions of evidence and memory together, especially in the context of archiving popular music. The article begins with a discussion of the Tragically Hip’s value as an archival case study, which is based on the band’s linking of composition and live improvisation. It then turns to the engagement of the band’s songs with the materials of Canadian collective memory, the work of bootleg collectors and pro-am archivists in the documentation of performance history, and the documentation of the band’s final Canadian tour in 2016. Throughout, the article examines how professional and pro-am archiving can complement each other in the case of a band like the Hip, whose music is so closely linked to the idea of Canadian collective memory.
Reading McLuhan Reading Ulysses Galey, Alan
Canadian journal of communication,
01/2019, Letnik:
44, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Background Marshall McLuhan was not only a prolific reader but also an expert annotator of his own books. Taking as a case study McLuhan’s copies of James Joyce’s Ulyssesin the Thomas Fisher Rare ...Book Library at the University of Toronto, this article asks what we can learn about McLuhan’s reading from close analysis of his own books.
Analysis The article begins with a discussion of McLuhan’s media theory as “applied Joyce,” with particular reference to Ulysses, and then turns to an overview of the annotation techniques and strategies visible in McLuhan’s copies of the novel.
Conclusion and implications The conclusion considers McLuhan’s own books as hybrid artifacts that challenge us to rethink rigid distinctions between print and manuscript cultures.
This essay asks what bibliographical and book-history perspectives can reveal when applied to digital editions themselves as artifacts in the long continuum of Shakespeare editing. What is the ...history of Shakespearean information architecture, digital and otherwise, and how does it take material form in the working practices of editors? To what extent does available infrastructure determine editorial theory, or vice versa? What does a basic editorial concept like precision mean in the context of technologies like XML that allow us, paradoxically, to make rigorously formal models of textual ambiguity? We approach these questions via the concept of modeling as it has developed in the digital humanities. A digital model is not merely a static representation of something but rather, in the words of computing historian Michael Mahoney, an "operative representation" with moving parts-literal and figurative-that calls for manipulation, conjecture, and play. The essay begins by considering data modeling in relation to the dramaturgical modeling practices of scenic designer Edward Gordon Craig, and then turns to the data-modeling practices evident in the working papers of three predigital Shakespeare editors (Howard Staunton, Horace Howard Furness, and Edward Capell). Like digital editors today, these precursors were forced to confront an existing model of the text; through their struggles with paper-based information architectures, they illuminate the sometimes invisible infrastructures in which editorial work takes place. The essay concludes with an examination of textual scaffolding in digital editions and considers how the information architecture of the text, while invisible to the reader, impacts how the texts can be read, analyzed, and modeled.
E-books are human artifacts and bear the traces of their making no less for being digital, though they bear those traces in ways bibliographers have yet to explain thoroughly. The bibliographic ...consideration of e-books is a dual challenge in that it must reckon not only with unfamiliar forms of textuality but also with a pervasive cultural discourse about e-books that tends to mystify the textual condition itself. This article explores the dual nature of that challenge and outlines some principles toward the bibliographical study of e-books, taking the Canadian novel The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau Press, 2009) as a test case.
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