Comments on: Forms of Electronic Texts

by: Christy Dena

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 05:00:10 +0000

Good stuff. I love that logo by the way. ;)

by: Geoffrey Rockwell

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 04:10:50 +0000

St�fan Sinclair can give you permission to edit. I’ll drop him a line. He organized the TADA conference where we all got T-shirts with the ironic logo “Real Humanists Build Tools”.

by: Christy Dena

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:54:11 +0000

Thanks for coming by Geoffrey. I’d love to paticipate in working out A definition of an etext, and I’m sure Jeremy (and Mark) would too. I’ve created an account with your TADAwiki but do not have permission to create a page. Would you like to keep discussing the idea here or on a wiki page? If the later, could you create a page under EText or the like?

I’ll be away for the next couple of weeks, but then I’d love to jump right in. Thanks for referring us to Renear’s OHCO ideas too.

by: Geoffrey Rockwell

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 22:55:04 +0000

Just came across this entry - you should get a TADA wiki account and post an alternative definition - lets see if we can refine an improve what we mean. Now to try to defend the “defintion” we provided.

First, the word “typically” - I was trying to describe the set of objects that get called electronic texts in humanities computing and classify them. I shouldn’t claim it is a coherent set - but the ones out there I see being treated as e-texts are typically electronic editions of literary works, linguistic corpora, born digital texts, and original files used for print. The passage you quote is followed by a list of examples. I wonder if we come up with a more logical classification that avoids the material problems you point out while still respecting the way the term is used? Alternatively one could define e-texts as X and explain that one is therefore excluding, for example transcripts of oral events.

For me the more interesting issue is the problems we have with defining “text” - see the whole debate around Renear’s OHCO theory. A cheap definition of an e-text would be to say it is an electronic version of anything that can be called a text -and that is sort of what I try in the last sentence you quote. Could we end up using e-text for those things that are not remediations (which we would just call texts)? Anyway, I’m not happy with waving my hand about readability or linguistic objects. Any ideas?

by: Jeremy Douglass

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 09:45:11 +0000

I agree this typology is a description of common forms. The thinking seems to be “where did it come from, where is it going?” - with physical-analog, oral, and born-digital being the three main options as you said above.

- Visual-Digital (image of a page to computer encoding)
- Audio-Digital (sound of words to computer transcript)
- Digital-Digital (computer to computer transcoding)

The weird thing that jumps out at me is the fourth type, #2 on their list, the classification of Postscript / PDF and other print-intended formats. Where are they going? The analog world, but they haven’t gotten there yet, and so it can be studied as digital text.

- Digital-Analog (encoding to ink representation)

Which raises the question, does Digital-Audio also count?

I like the transcription-typology approach, but I wonder if computer users with accessibility issues would tend to find such an approach helpful or just annoying, since transcription into audio etc. is a fact of life - in fact, all kinds of what you call direct or staggered remediations are post-processes that are easily available for anything digitally passing through.

I’m wandering. I may need to go look up that passage with Lev Manovich’s description of the Universal Media Machine.