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The Collation

Extensions of the book

Working in the Folger Shakespeare Library over the past eight months, I’ve felt some dissonance between the rich physical resources of the Library and the digital focus of my book project, Cyberformalism, which explores the capacity of full-text searchable archives like Early English Books Online to expand the domain of philological inquiry to new objects of knowledge. Advanced search tools, I argue, allow us to uncover the history not just of words but of linguistic forms: phrases, formulas, moods, syntactic constructions, etc. Though the philological stories I tell stretch over hundreds or even thousands of years, their main events take place primarily in my period of expertise, the seventeenth century.

Yet at the Folger I have often felt peculiarly distant from the early modern books that I’ve been writing about. Day in and day out, I’ve spent more time in front of a screen than a printed page, most often with Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) texts, which are keyed versions of scans of microfilm reproductions of books and pamphlets that, in many cases, sit on shelves a few floors below the desk where I work. Rather than reading all the sentences in any individual book from first to last, I’ve more often read through hundreds or thousands of isolated sentences plucked from texts in the EEBO-TCP archive, sometimes wondering if “reading” is the right word for this activity. Other researchers at the Library have confided to me that they, too, have occasionally felt the dissonance of working primarily with digital texts even as the printed book sits waiting nearby. But the demands of my digital project have intensified my sense of shamefully neglecting the Folger’s real treasures.

While the primary goal of Cyberformalism is to explore the methods of philological inquiry opened up by digital texts and search engines, it also aims to situate search in a longer history of textual finding tools. To understand this history, my first port of call has been the scholarship of book historians like Anne Blair, Anthony Grafton, William Sherman, and Richard and Mary Rouse, but I’ve also leapt at the occasional opportunity to take off my digital mittens and attend to the book as a textured, three-dimensional thing, structured for use and bearing the marks of its users. One book in particular, a work of Latin philology written by the humanist Niccolò Perotti and first published in 1489 (and often reprinted—the Folger’s copy is of a 1494 edition), has prompted me to rethink my basic assumptions about the nature of search engines and finding tools more generally. 

  1. Martine Furno, Le Cornucopiae de Niccolò Perotti: Culture et method d’un humaniste qui aimait les mots. Geneva: Droz, 1995. p. 133
  2. Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. p. 129
  3. Jean Louis Charlet, 1997. “Niccolo Perotti (1429/30-1480).” Centuriae latinae. Cent une figures humanists de la Renaissance aux Lumières offertes à Jacques Chromarat. ed. Colette Nativel, 601-5. Geneva: Droz. p. 603.
  4. Blair p. 49.
  5. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  6. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

Comments

I am very troubled by the apparent inaccurate and/or careless use of the terms “leaf” and “page” in this posting. If I am reading the text correctly they appear to be used interchangeably. Of course, they are quite different things. A “page” is one side of a “leaf,” and a “leaf” contains two pages. This is a matter I constantly harp on to my students and I was surprised to find the error in a posting in The Collation.

William Proctor Williams — March 19, 2014

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You are correct, William, that in nearly all instances here the word should be “leaf” and not “page.” I’m afraid that in the back-and-forth of editing, not all changes made it into the published version. But I’ve now updated the post and am grateful for the chance to correct our mistakes!

Sarah Werner — March 19, 2014

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Glad it’s fixed.

William Proctor Williams — March 19, 2014

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These are weighty issues that you address, Dan, issues that all scholars of early modern studies have had to address ever since EEBO gave us a kind of wide access to early printed texts that often bypasses engagements with the material object. That possible disjunction is especially acute when experienced in a place like the Folger’s Reading Room.
I find it especially productive that as you work through your own methodologies, and questions about this possible disconnect, you do so in a historicized way. You have comparative recourse to the tools and technologies of early modern media. Thinking about the functionality of the printed index through the lens of new possibilities of organizing access is a promising step towards a more robust understanding of the history of media.

We also saw a similar approach recently in another Institute program. Collin Jennings described his work on topic modelling and the indexing of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations to the summer 2013 symposium on the Orality and Literacy Heuristic, codirected by Adam Fox and Paula McDowell. Such projects model exciting new approaches to early modern studies.

Kathleen Lynch — March 20, 2014

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