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TEXTUS EX MACHINA: ELECTRONIC TEXTS AND MEDIEVAL STUDIES Most medieval scholarship arises from an encounter with the surviving texts of the Middle Ages and the documents which convey them. The use of computers to store and analyse these texts has a surprisingly long history. A s early as 1949, when the computer was still in its infancy, Roberto Busa began developing an electronic concordance to the works of Thomas Aquinas—the Index Thomisticus. Until quite recently, though, this kind of activity took place at the margins of medieval scholarship, and had little effect on most researchers and students. It is only now that computers are being more widely applied in ways which promote and assist textual scholarship of this kind. Electronic texts are finally coming of age in medieval studies. In the near future, electronic editions will be an essential part of a medievalist's tools for research and study. Electronic Texts Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an 'electronic text'. There are only patterns of binary digits stored in a computer which, taken together, represent a text.1 But it is a convenient shorthand to use the term 'electronic text' to refer to a computer file orfilescontaining the text of literary and scholarly works, stored in digital form. A n electronic text should also be designed to be used by electronic means, usually with a computer or terminal. This distinguishes it from electronicfileswhich are compiled only as part of the process of preparing printed editions, whether in typesetting for texts or in indexing for printed concordances. For the purposes of this paper, an electronic text is also considered to be limited to those texts which are published or distributed in some way for others to use, rather than simply being stored in one person's private computer files. Electronic texts can be analysed in terms of their use of three essential features: a markup scheme, which tells the computer how to display the text; a delivery mechanism, for conveying the text to the reader or user; and an 1 CM. Sperberg-McQueen, 'Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts', Literary and Linguistic Computing, 6 (1991), 34-46. P A R E R G O N ns 14.2 (January 1997) 68 Toby Burrows interpretative mechanism, enabling readers to display and interrogate the text.2 These can perhaps be thought of by analogy with those features of a printed book which are designed to present the text to the reader. Some of them are structural (tables of contents, chapters, pagination and indexes), while others relate more to the display of the text—such as paragraphs, headings, bold and italics. W e tend to take these as givens because of their familiarity, but they affect fundamentally the way w e read a printed book. The mechanics of electronic texts, while equally fundamental, are still in a largely novel and experimental state. Markup Schemes All computer files need markup or encoding of some kind, in order to be displayed on a screen and manipulated by appropriate programmes. In particular, the formatting of the text and its structure are controlled by its markup. Interpretative and analytical information is also given as markup. Word-processing software like Microsoft Word automatically applies its own kind of encoding to any text created in it. But each proprietary brand of software has its own set of codes for marking up the text, and each usually has considerable difficulty in translating to or from another brand. This is a major disadvantage in distributing an electronic text, akin perhaps to publishing a book which can only be read with prescription spectacles from a specific firm. What electronic texts need, above all, is a generic form of markup and encoding which enables them to be transferred easily between a variety of different kinds of hardware and software. The forms of generic markup which are currently being used for electronic texts can be considered in three groups: ASCII, H T M L and S G M L . In fact, these categories overlap in various ways, but they offer a convenient way of analysing existing texts and identifying their advantages and disadvantages...

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