Dr Toby Burrows, Principal Librarian, Scholars' Centre, The University of Western Australia Library, Nedlands, W.A. 6907
A PAPER FOR "MULTI-MEDIA : MEDIEVAL TO EARLY MODERN : FIFTH CONFERENCE OF THE PERTH MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE GROUP, 11TH MAY 1996"
After many years' experimentation, electronic texts are finally coming of age in medieval studies. In the near future, electronic editions will be an essential part of research and study for medievalists. This paper will look at the important questions surrounding the development of electronic texts for medieval studies.
Electronic texts vary greatly in their nature and purpose. A range of tools can be used for constructing and disseminating them: standard encoding formats like ASCII, HTML, and the Text Encoding Initiative; software like Netscape and DynaText; and methods of distribution like CD-ROMs, the Internet and the World Wide Web. The value and use of each of these different tools must be closely examined, from the user's point of view as well as from the publisher's and editor's.
A rapidly growing corpus of medieval texts is now available in electronic form. Some are commercial publications, while others are freely distributed, usually over the Internet. Among the best-known are the Patrologia Latina Database, the Canterbury Tales Project, the Electronic Beowulf and the Dartmouth Dante Database. These vary considerably in the approach they take, and in the nature of the electronic edition presented. The quality of each must be weighed separately and carefully.
Electronic texts in medieval studies offer several important advantages. It is possible to search an entire text or corpus of texts instantly for particular words or combinations of words, and to see these in their contexts. Variant readings can be collated and linked in ways which make comparison easy, but also retain the possibility of seeing the text of only one witness at a time. Images, or digital photographs, of manuscripts can be seen alongside transcriptions of their texts. Editions can be stored in a central location and made available across local and international computer networks.
Yet there are also several important obstacles and difficulties to be tackled. Computers of a certain size and cost, with appropriate connections to the networks, are essential for users of electronic texts, let alone for publishers. With a variety of different software formats involved, there is a significant amount of learning needed. Electronic texts are often unsuitable for prolonged reading and study. The size and complexity of some texts, with their multiple images and parallel transcriptions, can be overwhelming and hard to grasp as a unified whole. This cognitive disorientation is also associated with a certain undermining of the idea of a coherent edition and an authoritative text.
Other issues which need to be considered are the (im)permanence of electronic texts and their scholarly validation. How can the continuing availability of such texts be assured? What role do libraries have in this process? How can such editions be subject to review by the academic community? Electronic texts raise many questions of this kind which are hard to answer in the present circumstances.
Nevertheless, electronic editions are of increasing importance in medieval studies. It is no exaggeration to say that they have the potential to redefine and extend the scholarly encounter with the text, which is at the heart of so much of our study of the Middle Ages.