Digital Documents in the Humanities: more notes to collate

At the time Northrop Frye's never re-edited Anatomy appeared, a new edition of Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art was nearing release: those releases in German in 1961 and 1965 could have been matched by revised editions of Anatomy.

More interesting to me at the moment is the other work of Ingarden available in English: "The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art".  It is now possible to imagine the construction of a collaborative digital edition of the first work with the variations, emendations, clarifications, alterations of the second work.

One might also imagine the worrisome prospects, recalling the censorship of the re-release of Copernicus' on Revolutions or a more effective means of banning books than had been available when the works of Descartes were placed on the index of prohibited reading. To some extent the prospects for web censors are limited by the widespread teaching of English and the availability of English translations - but this may be a transitory and very limited perspective.  Stop to consider Estonians neglecting Russian in favor of English and German as second languages and then imagine any situation such as that of the Fox News reports on Georgia in that recent war - or the reliance on digital "sources" in contrast to the reporting on the Nigerian civil war of the late 60's in pre-CNN news.  We very often require real documents: paid receipts for the coffins delivered to a morgue; payroll records for grave diggers.

But historians and records of interest to historians are perhaps a different case from literature.  There may still be worries.  Consider the great writers.

In a careful reading of Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" some very telling flaws are evident - they seem to reflect the philosopher-novelist having drawn too much on her own life experiences.  In a careful reading of Simone de Beauvoir's "L'Invitée", an entire phrase reveals her limitations as a novelist in what was either a private joke with J-P Sartre or a very naive notion of how philosophical theses might find expression in a novel.  Place these two novels in a Digital Library for the Internet University and I can immediately imagine how to better ensure the stature of the two great thinker-writers with only the very slightest editorial improvements - which they surely would have made themselves in a re-edition with our hermeneutical advantages.

Digital Editions could, of course, be an aid: my digital views of "The Sea, The Sea" and "L'Invitée" could have each of the passages in question high-lighted as links to my marginalia.

It is said that marginalia in copies of Copernicus "Revolutions" would require an editor of Koestler's "The Sleepwalkers" or "The Watershed" to make corrections.  But "Darkness at Noon"?  Would we alter the closing lines?  Yes, in a translation we might suggest an alternative: translation by "A" is largely to be praised but the closing lines were rendered so much finer in translation by "B".  At this point the philosopher of literature is likely to point to the manuscript.

Enter the philosophical papers of Husserl.  During the war, the Husserl papers were scattered for safety and an unintended result was that his correspondence was lost to an Allied bombing raid.  Already his work must be considered in part the result of collaboration and his efforts to respond to criticism from students and followers: so I imagine a digital re-edition of Ideen I with the transcendental idealism corrected and a re-edition of the Log.U.'en with a full recognition of co-constitution and genesis.  These would constitute new works in a way in which the routine restoration of great paintings or the rebuilding of the tower in which Kopernik worked are recognized as that same work versus "a copy made from mostly the materials of the original."  This is not like sand-blasting the grime of a grey Paris or a grey Edinburgh leaving the cities somehow seeming unfamiliar to writers who returned years later.

The simple answer might seem to be this: maintain digital images of carefully archived volumes with an option to have a robotic "amanuensis" place the original under a web cam and leaf to a page in question such that a comparison be made on a split-screen or across displays or otherwise matched.  But his too is somewhat naive as often with each new printing (before photostatic reprints became common) one new error was introduced for every two or three errors corrected.  Some works by major poets since 1805 have no single standard edition - they changed continually from the first printing to the last.

In the case of the digital novel, the use of images, video and alternate passages, chapters and endings may make my list seem very naive in its turn.

In the case of papers delivered at conferences, they - rather like sermons, speeches, readings - will soon permit the comparison of the text with the audio and/or video record.

I have before me the famous text of Richard Hughes: at least one phrase cries out to be removed lest it be cited on internet blogs and calls made for the book not to be reprinted unless re-edited and in the process, abridged.

Some lengthy works which were poorly edited before first printing merit being abridged and their authors' case is improved in the process - the collation of blog posts need not be imagined in that regard ... I am thinking of Lev Shestov versus Susanne Langer.  Abridging the former would disguise his monomania, while abridging the latter can increase her accessibility and relevance for the non-philosopher or the philosopher with no interest in the local history of her subject.  But then we come to the digital Nietszche or worse - the digital Kierkegaard.

My own tiny digital contribution is to extract prose poetry from a novel - in my case, the Thames River from "The Heart of Darkness".  This seems harmless enough.  The digital advantage is that the extracted text can be "re-imposed" on the original and my additions and emendations exposed or elided.

Were it today, the 1960's students of Frye, like the students of Husserl in '39, readily could have released an emended digital version of the Anatomy to address the alternate standpoint of Ingarden on many points.

In the next decade, enterprising students of anglo philosophy made be moved to release digital versions of work such as Wollheim's Art and Its Objects with suitable high-lighting to indicate those places where critical analysis and conceptual analysis and linguistic analysis can not be clearly distinguished from phenomenological analyses  and reflection on variations - and to provide digital links to correlated analyses in the originals and in translations.  Others may embrace the digital extraction of "the argument" into a logical space, a polemical space and a rhetorical space exposing propositions, entailments, exaggerations, ad hominem, non sequitur and clever comic bits of wit - not to mention assigning Bayesian values to hypotheses earlier and then later in an opus and in the opera.