“Not Reading the Edition” in “Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing”
Chapter 9
Not Reading the Edition
Cassidy Holahan, Aylin Malcolm, and Whitney Trettien
We are literary scholars who do not read.
That is not entirely true, of course. We read all the time, but it is not always what we wish to do with books, professionally. When one of us goes to a rare book room and calls up an item, we pick it up and look at the binding, turning it over and around gently to examine the spine. We touch the leather cover to see if it is original or a later imitation. Setting it down, we open it up, running a finger between the flyleaf and the book board. The spine quietly creaks. Has it been repaired? We shine a light through a leaf, searching for watermarks or hair follicles, and into the gutter, searching for stitches. We smell it. Looking at the design of each page, we ask questions like: how does the text hang together? Is the text large or small, are the margins wide or slim? Are there page numbers, running headers, gauffered edges, or indices? What are the mechanisms for moving through the book? Collate, map, scan, navigate, explore—these are the verbs that explain what we do with an old book. Not, typically, read.
The scene we are describing is the bread-and-butter work of analytic bibliography: the close examination of a book as a material artifact in order to learn something about how and why it was made, by what processes and to what ends. Bibliography is tangled up with literary studies because it is the engine that helps textual scholars produce editions for us to read: editions that identify the literary work, fill out historical context, and neutralize dissonance across variations. As early as 1932, in an apologia that effectively founded the field of so-called “new bibliography,” W. W. Greg cemented this relationship between the material text and literary studies: “Books are the material means by which literature is transmitted; therefore bibliography, the study of books, is essentially the science of the transmission of literary documents.”1
Transmission is a key word here. Greg was attempting to convince textual critics who valued their own intuition of what an author’s intentions were over the physical evidence offered through a careful collation of variants. In order to do so, he spent a great deal of his essay narrowing the purview of bibliography to include only those features of a document that contribute to the transmission of literary meaning, and thereby help the scholar identify the text. Binding, the aesthetics of typography, illustrations, provenance: “these branches” of the study of books, he writes, “whatever their own interest may be, are of bibliographical importance just in so far as they relate to the function of books as the preservers and transmitters of literary documents.”2
In the decades following Greg’s foundational work, textual critics have discovered the limitations of his narrow formulation of bibliography. In the 1960s, working at the same time as theorists like Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes and citing philosophers of science such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, D. F. McKenzie challenged the idea that inductive reasoning, grounded in the close observation of physical documents, can tell us anything about the transmission of literature, since material evidence alone is not enough to make judgments about meaning.3 “To observe at all is to bestow meaning of some kind of the thing observed,” he writes; “To gather particular pieces of evidence is to seek those relevant to some preconceived notion of their utility.”4 Thus, “the very fixity of the physical bounds within which we are asked to work is inimical to the development of a sound methodology.”5 To understand physical evidence, the bibliographer must always place it within the broader sociological and cultural contexts extrapolated from other archival sources, like performance contracts. Building on McKenzie’s critique of Greg and his “sociology of texts,” Jerome McGann cites poststructuralist critics like Paul de Man when dismissing the notion of an authorial text entirely. Rather, he argues, all literary production is fundamentally social, occurring within a dense “network of symbolic exchanges”; “to participate in these exchanges is to have entered” what he calls “the textual condition,” where the “only immutable law is the law of change,” a “ceaseless process of textual development and mutation.”6 Thus, by the end of the twentieth century, textual scholars might practice a version of bibliography that no longer had as its telos a singular, stable literary text, embracing instead the kaleidoscopic material text and related primary sources as evidence of culture, ideology, and social formations: entire worlds and ways of thinking.
In pursuing this new style of analytic bibliography, which was, by the 1970s or so, sometimes known as the “history of the book,” scholars began to practice not reading material texts, but something more like close looking, touching, and observation, grounded in a deep appreciation for all aspects of book production, both print and manuscript. Quantitative methods pioneered by the French Annales school of history around the same time that Greg was writing fed into this new “new bibliography” through the work of later book historians like Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton, who emphasized the long history of texts, from the cycle of publication to the readers who bought, collected, and exchanged books. Methods from new media studies, too, fueled the field’s rise, as foundational scholars such as Elizabeth Eisenstein drew inspiration from Marshall McLuhan’s notion of a “Gutenberg galaxy” and “typographic man,” as well as comparative work on film, television, and popular culture. And the book arts contributed a passion for structure, form, aesthetics, and what Johanna Drucker, a book historian and practicing book artist, has recently called “visual epistemology.”7 The generations who grew up reading this diverse array of thinkers felt increasingly comfortable examining those branches of the study of books that Greg had dismissed as irrelevant to his particular version of bibliography, including bindings, type design, a book’s paratextual apparatus, and the material design and structure of books across different formats. In doing so, they began to approach the codex not only as a means of transmitting literary texts, but as a technology with its own history, cultures, and affordances, just like any other. Or, as Wim Van Mierlo has put it: “Editing in the time of the history of the book requires editors to acknowledge at the very least that texts do not exist on their own.”8 Thus, a century after its founding, we now have a bibliography cum textual studies cum book history that might be entirely untethered from literary studies, where physical archival materials are studied as one of many different mechanisms that humans have used to record, mediate, and share knowledge.
And so there now exist literary scholars who do not read.
The media environment that has made possible this shift is, of course, the digital. It did so, first, by making bibliographers see the physical book in a new light. Hypertext literature and theory in the 1990s spurred book historians to highlight the unique forms of interactivity enabled by the codex, as did more research into premodern interactive book design, like volvelles, flap anatomies, emblem books, and harlequinades.9 Later, the digitization of books through platforms like Google Books or HathiTrust, where the dynamic codex becomes a vertical scroll of rectos, stimulated comparative work on what was increasingly being called not the transmission but the remediation of texts across different media.10 These digitization projects also encouraged a return to letterpress printing, papermaking, and other book arts, which are now an integral part of pedagogy in book history.11 At the same time, the actual material conditions of our networked environment have made it easier than ever to study rare books and other archival materials. These conditions include advanced technologies like multispectral imaging and artificial intelligence, used to reveal inscriptions not visible to the human eye alone, or DNA and protein analysis of biological materials like parchment; but they also include the more prosaic ways our daily work is supported by email, social networks, phone cameras capable of high-resolution photography, and cloud storage for saving and sharing them. More, the digital collections being built in individual research libraries are increasingly compatible with each other through the adoption of IIIF standards, as well as research tools for comparison, like Mirador (for viewing images) or VisColl (for encoding collation formulas). As a result, the twenty-first-century researcher who is approaching the book in conceptually new ways can now also see it in a literally new light, conducting advanced bibliographic research across dispersed libraries without leaving home.
Given the imbrication of digital technologies and book history, it is perhaps no surprise that the thinkers who helped unchain bibliography from literary studies are also some of the founding and most influential figures in digital humanities (DH), specifically digital editing and curation. McGann gave us the Rossetti Archive, which relied on the web to make visible Rossetti’s multimedia publications, as well as a tool kit for thinking about the “radiant textuality” of the web.12 Drucker, his colleague then at the University of Virginia, developed bibliographical games like Ivanhoe, in collaboration with Bethany Nowviskie, a founding figure in DH, and urged us to think about visualizing digital information in humanistic ways, under the rubric of what she called “speculative computing.”13 And of course some of the longest-running and most successful digital editions, like the Dickinson Electronic Archives, the William Blake Archive, the Women Writers Project, and the Walt Whitman Archive, were founded in this early period of humanities computing explicitly to make accessible dynamic literary texts and multimodal books that either had not been or could not be easily replicated in print. While this list is by no means exhaustive, the point here is that it was the capacity of networked digital media to readily take, share, and link image and text together that ironically helped to foment a fervor for the bookishness of books, a frenzy for studying and editing books as richly designed objects—over and above whatever literary texts they may or may not contain. Here, then, even amongst these digital editions of canonical authors, is bibliography and/as book history coming into its own as a field distinct from literature and literary studies.
While this history is known, it is not often made explicit within conversations about digital editing and its futures, where bibliography still implicitly plays the role in which Greg cast it. This is probably because, even as editors in the digital age have come to recognize the fundamental variance, mouvance, and fluidity of literary texts, it still seems almost impossible to imagine textual studies without a text at the center of the field’s practice.14 Yet, as this brief sketch of bibliography’s transformation into book history and its relationship to digital humanities shows, this is exactly what some textual critics have been imagining for over twenty years now. The cumulative effect of these subtle shifts is evident in several recent projects that combine methods from book history, quantitative analysis, and DH to expand beyond the Anglophone tradition of digital textual editing. Consider, for instance, the digital Codex Mendoza, developed by the Instituto Nacional de Arqueología e Historia in Mexico. While the editors firmly name their work as a “digital edition,” citing figures like McGann as inspiration, the website’s explanatory notes stress that Mexican codices incorporating elements of pre-Hispanic cultures “clearly brea[k] with traditional Western notions of writing” and should not be read as “texts” per se, so much as multimedia, multimodal performances: a “repertoire” to the text’s “archive,” to adopt generative terms from Diana Taylor.15 The design of the interface encourages the study of the book as such by layering over each page image a transcription of whatever text is on the photograph, viewable through a moving lens that never fully obscures the page; hypermedia, highlighted and explained in modal boxes; and a tab on the book’s materiality. Maps and a timeline place the visual content within its cultural contexts. Pushing the boundaries of edition-as-performance even further is Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda’s [Re]Activate Mama Pina’s Cookbook, a creative remediation of a family cookbook written by three generations of women in Guadalajara, Mexico, that presents the book through a video of a hand thumbing through its pages, overlaid with videos of hands cooking the recipes.16 The reader can, if she wishes, access the recipes through a digitized index; but the juxtaposition of these texts with the video installation only tends to bring into relief how impoverished the index alone is as an experience of the book’s meaning.
Other recent work has evacuated reading from digital textual studies entirely. In her project on the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan’s scrapbooks, for instance, Bridget Moynihan and her network of collaborators have prototyped several speculative interfaces for visualizing and interpreting each page as a collage of abstracted visual and textual elements. Moynihan began by building a database of “rich information surrogates” for each clipping, including both traditional metadata and computationally extracted metadata, like the color values of each item.17 This database serves as the underlying text from which more advanced visualizations can be generated as an alternative means of reading, exploring, or navigating the book.18 For instance, from the color values of each clipping, Akmal Putra designed the Colour Collage prototype, representing each item’s color content as a pie chart reflecting pixel size and page placement. Putra also used a game engine to construct a navigable 3D network of the relations between different items in the scrapbook. Moynihan and Putra do not call their prototypes “editions” and are adamant that their “interfaces are not . . . a direct remediation of the archive of the scrapbooks, but rather a creative interpretation of, and a contribution to, this archive.”19 Yet it is also clear from their work that scrapbooks like these could not be edited using methods from digital textual studies, even those attuned to textual difference, since their creativity inheres in the material juxtapositions between images and texts, between a cutting’s source and its new context. Recognizing similar forms of creativity in women’s writing, in 2016 the Women Writers Project developed Intertextual Networks, a three-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to explore, map, graph, and visualize different citational practices within its textual corpus.20 The resulting collaborations offer visual “editions” of individual works or groups of works, often without any readable text.
At the extreme end of textless editions, numerous projects in digital book history are deploying machine reading to negotiate new scales of analysis. For instance, Asanobu Kitamoto has been using image matching technologies to collate and track the reuse of woodblock pages in bukan, bestselling books of the Edo period listing influential figures in Japan.21 This form of “differential reading,” as he calls it, might be seen as an automated version of stemmatics that seeks to identify a source text (or, in this case, a source block) and the relationship between versions. Similar technologies have been used to track the reuse of woodcut illustrations in European books printed before 1500 and in early modern broadside ballads.22 Some projects are attempting to eliminate the need for an editor entirely. For instance, HTR2CritEd is using advances in handwritten-text recognition to build “a semi-automatic pipeline to produce a critical digital edition of literary texts with multiple witnesses.”23 Because HTR2CritEd seeks to produce an edition of a text for scholars to read, it is more traditional in its projected outcomes than the other experiments in digital book history that we gesture at here; yet the project’s use of machine learning to bypass transcription—a process often seen as an important part of the intellectual work of editing, since it involves making decisions pertaining to the meaning of the text—points to a future for textual criticism where scholars work less with various versions of a work’s texts and deal more with the design of interfaces that can represent this data and metadata in ways that reflect contemporary needs and interests. Similar initiatives can be seen in EarlyPrint, a project to enrich the markup of early English printed books in the Text Creation Partnership and Early English Books Online in order to make them more available for various forms of corpus analysis. In these projects, we begin to see an entirely new form of textual studies emerging, one deeply influenced by the concurrent rises of DH and book history.
Our own contributions to this emerging trend take the form of what we might call “material texts editions” made in Manicule, an open-source, web-based application built by software engineer and interactive fiction author Liza Daly in collaboration with Whitney Trettien. Whereas digital editing platforms like Edition Visualization Technology (EVT) or digital collections like HathiTrust treat the book as a sequence of flattened pages aimed at delivering content, Manicule attempts to capture and make visible something of what Drucker has described as the “phenomenal” book: the book as a multidimensional object experienced by embodied subjects.24 In concrete terms, this means that the platform de-emphasizes reading or searching a text and instead brings into relief a book’s navigational mechanisms, internal organization, and physical structure. Drawing on the rich traditions and debates within textual studies and bibliography, Daly and Trettien thus designed Manicule to serve a growing need for editing and publishing tools that take seriously the book as a material object bearing traces of its own history, as well as histories of textual production, reading, and reception. As such a tool, Manicule supports the call for more copy-specific research in book history and interest in the material text within textual studies by showcasing the depths and breadth of knowledge that can be gleaned from a close examination of all aspects of a document’s making and design.
Manicule attempts to achieve this through a series of intentionally “hypermediate” navigational features, to borrow a still generative term from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. “Hypermediacy” names when a platform makes visible its own layers of mediation, refusing to render its interfaces transparent windows onto content.25 Many web-based book-browsing technologies deliberately do not do this. For instance, the Internet Archive’s BookReader presents digitized books as a series of horizontally scrolling page openings, with a fake fore-edge and an animated page turn. In doing so, it attempts to mimic the experience of reading a physical book, encouraging readers to ignore the limiting, two-dimensional framework in which they are actually experiencing the material object.26 By contrast, Manicule intentionally makes the “photographed”-ness of each page image obvious, even while attempting to provide a familiar perspective on the book as it might be perused in person. Thus readers can choose one of two different views in the main browser, both of paired pages that scroll horizontally: the book can be seen either as a series of openings or as a series of leaves, recto and verso set beside each other. The former offers a more natural view of the book as its makers intended it to be experienced, although a small gap is purposefully left between the two page images to avoid the illusion of transparency. The latter representation of each leaf presents a more artificial perspective, impossible to ever see on the physical object but important for certain types of bibliographical or codicological work. By offering these choices, Manicule aims to empower readers to explore the book not as a sequence of flattened pages, but as a series of relationships.
Toward this end, Manicule also offers readers several ways of orienting themselves within the larger codex. Below the main, two-page book browser, there is a filmstrip of thumbnails showing several page openings immediately before and after the loaded pages. Below that, a bird’s-eye “map” of the book shows a color-coded, abstract representation of every page at once. The editor of each project can choose how to encode the pages and their color schema, depending on what they wish to highlight in the material text. For example, a scholar interested in marginalia may want to draw attention to pages with readers’ marks, or further subdivide the marks into different categories. Another may wish to divide pages according to the genres of the text contained within the book, or to highlight subsections that organize the text as a document. The bird’s-eye view allows the editor to direct readers’ attention and in turn helps readers quickly spot these moments of variance within the codex, as well as the distribution of elements across it. Finally, on a separate page, readers can view the structure of the book: which leaves are attached, how they are nested, and any insertions or cancellations. An XML file authored using an earlier standard developed by the VisColl project currently feeds this structural visualization. In a newer version currently under development, Daly is building a pipeline from VCEditor, a tool for generating an XML file modeling the book’s collation formula, to Manicule, so that editors will not need to write in XML.
Lastly, and perhaps importantly for most users, Manicule allows editors to build a tour of the digitized book. Tours are made up of stops, which are anchored to a page image. Viewing the tour on that page (noted by a bookmark icon) opens a modal box that delivers HTML content: text, image, video, sound. A JSON file assembles these stops into a linear tour, although the stops themselves may nonlinearly zigzag across the book, if the editor wishes. Clicking through a tour, the reader thus experiences a guided walk through important aspects of a book’s design, structure, or layout, according to its editor and the goals of their edition. This feature was included in Manicule with pedagogy in mind, in the hopes that editors might use it to provide some direction and context to readers who otherwise would not know how to approach a material text or where to identify its uniqueness and import. For instance, one imagines a library curator might build a digital tour to accompany a physical exhibit of a book. Since the actual book may be opened only to one page spread at a time, Manicule takes advantage of digital media’s affordances to offer a more nuanced view of an exhibit item. Or an editor of a literary text may build a tour of a digitized copy to show the interplay between the material and the textual in different versions. In the version currently under development, editors might also embed any page opening or a structural view of any quire as modular components within a multimedia essay, giving the editor more control over presentation. By thus negotiating various scales of knowledge, Manicule’s book tours may help orient a novice within a difficult document, even as the platform offers the bibliographer more sophisticated tools of analysis. In these curational or instructional goals, Manicule differs from something like BookReader or HathiTrust, which merely present the book images as they are within a prefabricated technical infrastructure, without any editorial context. It is less a platform for presentation, and more a tool for curation and editing, drawing from the lessons of bibliography and textual studies.
To show how these features influence digital editing, we turn now to sharing two recent material text editions built in Manicule: Samuel Richardson’s A Collection of Moral Sentiments, published in 1755 and digitally edited by Cassidy Holahan, and an astronomical anthology assembled in the late fifteenth century in Bavaria and digitally edited by Aylin Malcolm. The editors will describe their projects individually.
“Richardson’s Moral Sentiments”
After the publication of his three popular novels, Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753), Samuel Richardson published a 1755 print commonplace book comprising quotations and maxims extracted from these novels, titled A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions, and Reflections, Contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison. Produced in part as a bid to manage readers’ interpretations of and reactions to his novels, the book is, according to Richardson, “the pith and marrow of nineteen volumes”: a distillation of the novels’ moral lessons, stripped of plot.27 The “moral sentiments” are organized first by novel and then by alphabetized topic, including such topics as “Duty, Obedience” and “Advice and Cautions to Women.” Built with Manicule, “Richardson’s Moral Sentiments” (https://www.cassidyholahan.com/moralsentiments/) is a digital edition of this text erected upon a digitized facsimile of a copy held at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania.28 Rather than primarily aiming to recreate the text as isolatable from the codex form, the edition reproduces and emphasizes the mechanisms of the book’s organization and its functionality, such as how it teaches the user to navigate its pages and read its content. Producing this edition thus enables a better understanding of the networked nature of the book, offering the user not just a readable text, but more importantly, insight into the historical reading modes and practices it encouraged.
Richardson’s Collection of Sentiments is both a commonplace book and an index: each “sentiment” refers to the page number where it is sourced from in the corresponding novel. A digital edition of the Collection, therefore, would be better served by a hyperlink than it ever could be by a mere reproduction of those page references. An entirely hyperlinked edition of the Collection was out of scope for this project, given that there are nearly four hundred pages of commonplace material, each of which contains anywhere from five to a dozen sentiments. The digital edition does utilize, however, Manicule’s “tour through the book” function to offer a sampling of sentiments linked back to their corresponding novel pages in HathiTrust copies. In doing so, it replicates the book’s intended use, with the experience of leafing between multiple bound works replaced by a proliferation of browser tabs. By asking the reader to dip into the novel to read isolated lines and pages outside of the larger plot framework, Richardson encourages his readers to treat his novels as they would a biblical text, and in doing so not only strives to teach the reader how to read but also suggests an attempt to elevate the novel form and the use of fiction.29 The sampled hyperlinked sentiments also illustrate how varied the maxims’ relationships with their source material is. Take, for example, two sentiments found consecutively under the subject of “Penitence” in Sir Charles Grandison: “A generous person will make the generous confession of a fault easy to the contrite self-accuser, ii. 169 [270]” and “An error gracefully acknowledged, is a victory won, ibid.” (358).30 Of these two sentiments, one is a quotation found word-for-word on that page, and the other is not found on that page at all: it sums up some advice that is gleaned from reading that page. The hyperlinks thus recreate the disorienting experience of using the Collection: the reader is directed back to a single page—plunged into the novel and its event in medias res—hunting for an “extracted” quotation that might not even be there in the first place.
As an index, the Collection thus reorders the novels, imagining each one as composed of interconnected but detachable pieces of knowledge.31 As Rachel Sagner Buurma argues is characteristic of the index, the Collection thus renders the original novels unfinished.32 That is, by attempting to liberate scenes, dialogue, and narrative aside from the overall plot of the novel, the Collection might indeed accomplish the opposite of what is often cited as a major motive of Richardson’s paratextual materials: to dissuade misreadings of his novels.33 Moreover, as an index, the book continually redirects the reader away from its pages and back to the novels, ceding control and opening up the possibility of further readerly digression. The “Richardson’s Moral Sentiments” Manicule edition highlights how some of the links even lead to further redirections. For instance, one maxim directs the reader back to Pamela, which in turn redirects, via a footnote, to a page from John Locke’s 1693 essay “Some Thoughts Concerning Education” (13). The Collection thus imagines itself as part of a highly interconnected print culture: its intertextual network extends not just to Richardson’s novels but also to other sources, including Locke and biblical Scripture. The mode of reading that the Collection teaches, in short, resists the closure and finality so often associated with print.
While the digital edition does not reproduce this external network, it does digitize the work’s internal network. The organization and classification of information in the Collection is unmistakably influenced by the reference genres, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, that were emerging in print during the eighteenth century. “Richardson’s Moral Sentiments” contains a hyperlinked version of the work’s internal index appended to the volume, as well as a remixed version of the original index, not divided by novel. By placing the original and remixed index side by side, the edition offers both an overview of the work’s organizational structure, facilitating its intended use, and a new perspective on that structure. The remixed index does not indicate what novel is being commonplaced for each topic unless there are duplicate topics (all three novel sections have a section on “Love,” for example). Only the Clarissa section of the work, perhaps surprisingly, includes sentiments on the topic of “Power”; Richardson thought readers looking for advice on “Female Education,” conversely, were best to consult Pamela. The remixed index thus opens up new possibilities for reading the text without reading the text by offering insights into Richardson’s decisions in commonplacing his novels, and thus even his attitudes towards their intended moral lessons.
Figure 9.1. The hyperlinked index for the digital edition of Richardson’s Collection.
Following, perhaps, in the footsteps of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772), Richardson also included cross-references between the topics. A user looking to read about humility in Clarissa, for example, would also be advised to consult “Duty” and “Goodness.” In the final Grandison section in particular, the cross-references proliferate: at the end of the subject on “Love” in Grandison, for example, the reader is redirected to thirty-two other topics (318).34 The digital edition brings these cross-references to life by hyperlinking them in the margins. Allowing the user to instantly jump from topic to topic, these hyperlinks offer an alternative tour of the work, reinforcing the book’s demands for the reader to navigate it nonlinearly. Richardson also included section headings existing only for redirection, suggesting, for example, that a reader who turns to “W” to read about “Wickedness” in Sir Charles Grandison should, not finding such a topic there, instead consult “Vice.” These redirections are often quite self-evident and even redundant (the reader looking for sentiments on “Unhappiness,” for instance, is redirected to “Happiness”), suggesting they exist not just to assist the reader, but to facilitate an understanding of the book as a complex interconnected system. In addition to these hyperlinked cross-references featured in the margins, the digital edition also features supplemental network visualizations of these cross-references, which offer an abstracted view of its organizational system, revealing patterns within the Collection and offering insight into how Richardson conceptualized his novels. The digitization of these cross-references, in short, offers a way to move through and interact with the book without reading.
Figure 9.2. A double-page spread from the digital edition, with cross-references hyperlinked in the margins.
By treating the Collection primarily as a technology, rather than a text, the digital edition highlights the specific and historical modes of reading it demands of its user. It is a work uniquely suited to a digital edition because it is not meant, if we use the traditional sense of that word, to be “read.” An eighteenth-century user of the Collection would be unlikely to read the book cover to cover, or in complete isolation from the novels: the hyperlinked nature of the digital edition thus not only better facilitates the book’s intended use but also draws the user’s attention to the methodologies behind this unique print object. Recreating the Collection’s modes of use, in short, offers layers of information about the book as an object and a reading technology, ones that are related to, but can even be more revelatory than, the textual contents alone.
“An Astronomical Anthology” (UPenn LJS 445)
Our second case study reveals that not-reading has a long history. We have seen that contemporary analytic bibliography and digital environments enable scholars to appreciate otherwise unremarkable books by focusing on form rather than content. These methods can also help us recognize fellow not-readers in the past—people who used books for reasons other than transmitting or studying texts.
The manuscript on which this edition, “An Astronomical Anthology” (aylinmalcolm.com/ljs445/), is based—known as LJS 445, currently held by the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania—presents abundant evidence of such historical non-readers. LJS 445 is a late-fifteenth-century Bavarian collection of astronomical and medical texts written in Middle High German and Latin. This codex is itself a remediated object, containing material copied from three printed books: Johannes Lichtenberger’s Prognosticatio and two editions of Johannes Regiomontanus’s Calendarium (Nuremberg, 1474; Venice, 1478). It has also been heavily annotated and irreverently damaged by later users. The Manicule edition strives to convey all of these elements of the manuscript while introducing new layers of interpretation and potential user interaction.
LJS 445 begins with the Prognosticatio (9r–61v), a collection of astrological predictions about the Church and the Holy Roman Empire. First printed by Heinrich Knoblochtzer in 1488 (ISTC il00204000), this text reflects the popularity of prophetic literature in the decades leading up to the Reformation; indeed, soon after printing the Latin first edition, Knoblochtzer produced a Middle High German version (ISTC il00210000) on which LJS 445 seems to be based.35 Many of the remaining pages in LJS 445 are taken up by calendars, but this codex also contains: texts addressing the influences of seasonal and celestial phenomena on humans; a fragment of a treatise on the signs of the zodiac (147r–151r); a text on constellations, attributed to Kaspar Engelsüss and based on descriptions by the thirteenth-century scholar Michael Scot (178r–183r); a text on the planets (183v–190r); and medical texts on complexions (190r) and health regimens (198r–209v).
As this outline of its contents suggests, there are many reasons not to read LJS 445. Perhaps most obviously, it is written in two languages that are not used today outside of specialized contexts, and in scripts that few have been trained to decipher; researchers working on the Regiomontanus or Lichtenberger texts would likely begin by reading the more legible printed editions. Beyond these initial barriers to entry, premodern geocentric astronomy is both challenging to comprehend and, of course, obsolete, making it a niche research topic within medieval studies. The calendars in LJS 445 hold even narrower appeal, as they are specific to certain dates and regions. Finally, many elements of this codex were designed for purposes other than linear reading, such as its tables (e.g., 71v–72r), eclipse diagrams (111v–113v), and instruments for measuring time and lunar motion (70r–v, 114r–v).
As a material text, however, LJS 445 is extremely interesting. For instance, its incorporation of standard features of printed books, such as a title page carefully copied from Regiomontanus’s 1478 Calendarium (97r), attests to the complicated relationships between print and manuscript in the late fifteenth century. The reproduction of print paratexts in LJS 445 suggests that print already held a degree of authority, but manuscripts remained a valid option for transmitting scientific writing; indeed, luxury printed books were often designed to resemble manuscripts and/or hand-colored, a practice that continued into the sixteenth century.36 Complex astronomical images could be especially challenging to render in print; even printing eclipse diagrams in two colors was a labor-intensive process requiring multiple impressions or multiple woodblocks.37 The Manicule edition encourages users to consider these issues through tour stops that compare the manuscript with its print sources.
Figure 9.3. Tour stop from the digital edition of LJS 445, with the title page of a print edition that the manuscript imitates.
LJS 445 also contains numerous signs of use that transform or simply ignore its astronomical content. A series of whimsical doodles adorns its first few pages, including human figures in period attire and sketches of doors and flowers (1r–2v). On the third folio are an alphabet and the name “Veit engel” copied in an unsteady hand; similar inscriptions recur several times throughout the codex, sometimes accompanied by “1589” (e.g., 95v–96r, 222v). As this date suggests, all of these doodles were likely produced by two children during the late sixteenth century: Georg Veit (1573–1606) and Veit Engelhard (1581–1656) Holtzschuher, the sons of a Nuremberg patrician.38 These children’s names (and variants thereof) frequently appear on otherwise blank pages (e.g., 125r, 130v, 177r), giving the impression that they approached the manuscript more as a convenient notebook for writing practice than as a text to be read.
In addition to highlighting these features of LJS 445 via a tour, the Manicule edition includes a “Structure” page providing a visual overview of the relationships between this book’s construction and its contents, which are color-coded by topic (e.g., red for prognostication, dark green for medicine, bronze for calendars). The inconsistent structure of the codex indicates that it was planned and assembled section by section: the Prognosticatio section consists of three quires of sixteen leaves and a final quire of six; a calendar for Augsburg occupies a large quire of twenty-two folios; and the regimen text near the end is copied on one quire of twelve leaves. Extra pages containing astronomical instruments have been added to the two Regiomontanus transcriptions, each consisting of two leaves glued together for enhanced durability.
Figure 9.4. Structure of the first two quires of LJS 445, with attached leaves indicated by white lines.
The “Structure” view also reveals that many leaves are missing from the sections on celestial bodies and constellations. One possible reason becomes apparent upon viewing these sections in the main browser: these texts include numerous drawings of the creatures and objects for which constellations and planets were named, often depicted on a grassy field beneath a blue sky (e.g., 179v–180r). Such drawings might have helped readers to remember and recognize constellations by relating them to terrestrial phenomena, but they also provided incentives for defacing LJS 445. Nineteen of thirty-five images in the Engelsüss text have been removed or damaged, and only four of those in the zodiac text remain intact. The text on the planets lacks all of its original illustrations, which may have depicted the planets’ namesakes in classical mythology (as in another UPenn manuscript, LJS 463, 30r–37v).
In one intriguing case, a previous user has removed an image associated with the constellation Canis Minor (182v), or the Lesser Dog, by cutting along its outline, leaving only two front paws on the page. Here, the techniques of bibliography permit us to not-read what is actually not even there. The missing dog is one of this codex’s evocative absences, inviting us to consider where this image might have traveled after leaving the book. Perhaps the Holtzschuher children used it as a toy, like a paper doll; perhaps a different reader removed it for inclusion in another volume, such as a commonplace book or scrapbook. No matter what its fate, the dog’s extraction from LJS 445 would have altered its significance; outside of its original context, the image of a constellation named for a dog simply signifies a dog, a familiar earthly creature rather than a distant cluster of stars.
The missing drawing of Canis Minor also evokes our interactions with digital images in the twenty-first century—images that we might cut, save, copy, and reuse in ways far removed from their previous contexts. Like many other digital projects, the Manicule edition of LJS 445 encourages such practices, enabling users to download, transform, and share images from this manuscript. As an effort to make medieval texts accessible to a general audience, this edition thus not only reflects new developments in textual studies, but also participates in this manuscript’s long history of adaptation, remediation, and creative desecration.
These examples show that non-reading is not only a digital phenomenon but also a historical practice that has always existed against and alongside reading. From flipping through pages to cutting out images, instances of not-reading the text challenge textual studies’ understanding of what to do with a book. Digital editions that forefront the material text, such as those enabled by Manicule, rise to this challenge by showing how the evidence found in physical documents can tell deeper histories of reading, writing, and literature than can edited texts alone, even texts enriched with high-resolution images and digital markup. The digital editions not only expand public access to texts and archival material but also, in themselves, offer a critical interpretation of the material text by revealing larger structural patterns and guiding user interaction. In this manner, our digital editions encourage the reader to not-read again, in new ways.
Notes
1. W. W. Greg, “Bibliography—An Apologia,” The Library 13, no. 2 (1932): 115.
2. Greg, 116.
3. Gabriel Egan points out the connection to French literary theory in The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text: Twentieth-Century Editorial Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 84.
4. D. F. McKenzie, “Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices,” in Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 16.
5. McKenzie, 17.
6. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3, 9.
7. Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).
8. Wim Van Mierlo, “Reflections on Textual Editing in the Time of the History of the Book,” Variants 10 (2013): 138.
9. Jessica Helfand, Reinventing the Wheel (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002); Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies, ed. Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 42–79; Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, Interactive Books: Playful Media before Pop-ups (London: Routledge, 2018); Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Interactive and Sculptural Printmaking in the Renaissance (Boston: Brill, 2018).
10. Peter Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Michelle Warren, Digital Holy Grail: A Medieval Book on the Internet (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2022).
11. For example, see the BookLab in the University of Maryland’s English department, Skeuomorph Press at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Huskiana Press at Northeastern University.
12. Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Rossetti Archive, rossettiarchive.org.
13. Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
14. John Bryant, The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, eds., Text Editing, Print and the Digital World (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009); Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2015).
15. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Codex Mendoza, https://codicemendoza.inah.gob.mx/html/acerca.php.
16. Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, “[Re]Activate Mama Pina’s Cookbook,” criticalmediartstudio.com/RemediatingMamaPina.
17. Bridget Moynihan and Akmal Putra, “Prototyping the Archival Ephemeral: Experimental Interfaces for the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks,” Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 9, no. 1 (2019): 16.
18. For examples of these visualizations, see the prototypes on Moynihan’s site, Digital Decoupage: https://digitaldecoupage.llc.ed.ac.uk/prototypes/.
19. Moynihan and Putra, “Prototyping,” 16.
20. “About Intertextual Networks,” Women Writers: Intertextual Networks, northeastern.edu/intertextual-networks/about.
21. Asanobu Kitamoto, “Book Barcoding: A Framework for the Visual Collation and Woodblock Tracking of Japanese Printed Books,” presentation, Association of Digital Humanities Organizations, Tokyo, Japan, July 25–29, 2022.
22. Cristina Dondi, Abhishek Dutta, Matilde Malaspina, and Andrew Zisserman, “The Use and Reuse of Printed Illustrations in 15th-Century Venetian Editions,” in Printing R-Evolution and Society 1450–1500: Fifty Years that Changed Europe, ed. C. Dondi (Venice: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari, 2020), 839–69; Carl Stahmer, “Digital Analytical Bibliography: Ballad Sheet Forensics, Preservation, and the Digital Archive,” Huntington Library Quarterly 79, no. 2 (2016): 263–78.
23. Daniel Ben Ezra Stoekl, Hayim Lapin, Bronson Brown-DeVost, and Pawel Jablonski, “HTR2CritEd: A Semi-Automatic Pipeline to Produce a Critical Digital Edition of Literary Texts with Multiple Witnesses out of Text Created through Handwritten Text Recognition,” in Digital Humanities 2022: Responding to Asian Diversity (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 2022), 689.
24. Johanna Drucker, “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space,” in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schriebman (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), https://companions.digitalhumanities.org/DLS/?chapter=content/9781405148641_chapter_11.html.
25. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). On transparency in digital interfaces, see Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), esp. x–xii.
26. Zachary Lesser and Whitney Trettien, “Material / Digital,” in Shakespeare / Text, ed. Claire Bourne (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 402–23; Dot Porter, “The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine,” Dot Porter Digital (blog), October 31, 2018, dotporterdigital.org/the-uncanny-valley-and-the-ghost-in-the-machine-a-discussion-of-analogies-for-thinking-about-digitized-medieval-manuscripts.
27. Preceding the publication of the Collection of Sentiments, Richardson published three novel indexes as appendices; much of this content is reused in the 1755 text. This included an eighty-six-page appendix of the 1751 Letters and Passages Restored from the Original Manuscripts of the History of Clarissa and two appendices to the 1753 edition of Sir Charles Grandison, an “Index, Historical and Characteristical” and “Similes, and Allusions, in the Foregrounding Six Volumes”; see William Sale, Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographic Record of his Literary Career with Historical Notes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1936).
28. Rare Book Collection, PR 3662.H5.
29. As Leah Price argues, the Collection attempted to dictate not just what readers gleaned from the novel, but more importantly, the pace of that reading: the text taught readers “not so much how to live as how to read” (The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 22). By isolating the sentiments from the plot, the Collection attempted to reform readers hastily reading for the plot or habitually skipping passages by dictating an “enforced stasis” (21).
30. The numbers cited in the Collection are both part of the original text. The number before the brackets references the page number for the octavo edition of Sir Charles Grandison, and the number inside the brackets references the page number for the duodecimo editions. This schema follows throughout Collection.
31. Price notes that, by “substitut[ing] the paradigmatic for the syntagmatic,” the Collection overturns “the significance of order” of the original novels, a reordering that becomes even more pronounced in the publication of a “set of entertaining Cards, neatly engraved on Copper-Plates, Consisting of moral and diverting Sentiments, extracted wholly from the much admired Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison” in 1760 (Anthology, 17).
32. Rachel Sagner Buurma writes: “The index’s powers of offering new discontinuous forms of access to the book—separating information from interpretation and argument, segmenting what was unified, reordering its priorities—thus decomposed the book into parts, rendering it unfinished and opening it to new meanings and new uses” (“Indexed,” in The Unfinished Book, ed. Alexandra Gillespie and Deidre Lynch [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019], 384).
33. The attempt to detach the sentiments from the novels was, of course, not always fully possible: as Price notes, some of the Collection’s sentiments need to include plot details in order to convey the moral lesson, as in a note in the section “Repentance” that clarifies that Lovelace “lived not to repent!” (Anthology, 23). For discussions of misreadings of Richardson’s novel, see William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998).
34. The number of cross-references increased over time: Clarissa, the first novel to be commonplaced, contains 275 cross-references; Sir Charles Grandison, the last novel commonplaced, contains 674.
35. The Prognosticatio was clearly in high demand during the late fifteenth century, with eleven editions appearing before 1501. Jonathan Green links its popularity to publishers’ efforts to reach broader audiences via vernacular translations and images (which LJS 445 omits); see Printing and Prophecy: Prognostication and Media Change 1450–1550 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 65–71.
36. On the authority of handwritten texts in the era of print, see Siân Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), and Peter Stallybrass, “Printing and the Manuscript Revolution,” in Explorations in Communication and History, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New York: Routledge, 2008), 111–18.
37. Ad Stijnman and Elizabeth Savage, “Materials and Techniques for Early Colour Printing,” in Printing Colour 1400–1700: History, Techniques, Functions and Receptions (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 11–22.
38. Regina Cermann links these drawings to the Holtzschuher children in her description of the manuscript (Berlin, 1997), available at manuscripta.at/docs/Cermann_Olim_Kreuzenstein_22170.pdf.
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