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[ 259 Electronic Errata: Digital Publishing, Open Review, and the Futures of Correction paul fyfe It is hardly possible to write a history of information separately from a history of the corruption of the press. —Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism I nwritingaboutmid-nineteenthcenturynewspapers,WalterBenjaminnotesthe prevalence of the réclame, a paid publisher’s advertisement printed instead as an editorial notice and hidden within the miscellany of the page. For Benjamin, this “corruption of the press” was so widespread as to necessarily inform any “history of information” (28). But Benjamin’s insight can also apply by corrupting the very word “corrupt” to mean something like “error.” As bibliographers and textual critics well know, it is hardly possible to write the history of information without attention to errors, accidents, variants, and changes—the dynamics of corruption and correction that pattern the history of published print. As this essay will argue, it is also hardly possible to write the future history of information—an enterprise in which the essays in this volume are very much involved—separately from those same dynamics as they manifest, in new ways as well as old, in online and digital publishing. But we have yet to do so. As Steven Berlin Johnson argues, “[t]he history of knowledge conventionally focusesonbreakthroughideasandconceptualleaps.Buttheblindspotsonthemap, the dark continents of error and prejudice,carry their own mystery as well....These questions, too, deserve their own discipline—the sociology of error” (Ghost Map, 15). This essay undertakes such questions for the current moment in electronic publishing by looking to the history of printing errors and the labor of correction. That history offers valuable perspectives on the proliferating effects of “accidentals” and error within the automation,syndication,and algorithmic relations of the web. It further informs how scholarly publishing’s digital futures might (or might not) part iv ][ Chapter 15 paul fyfe 260 ] deal with the issue,including open review,crowdsourced or distributed corrections, automated redundancy systems in libraries, and intelligent computing agents. The history of error also opens some theoretical perspectives (sometimes noted as lacking in digital humanities discussions), suggesting that, even if we do not dedicate technologyorlabortotheseissues,thedigitalhumanitiesneedstoreckonconceptually with what, in a different context, John Unsworth called“the importance of failure .” Scholarly publishing will inevitably change, but before its print-based model totters into the grave we need clearer commitments about the error proofing it has traditionally undertaken as well as the consequences of reinventing or abandoning such functions altogether as we move to new formats.1 Certainly, the discussions about the digital transformation of publishing, especially (though not exclusively) the publishing of critical work and scholarly resources,have mapped an array of important issues whose problems and opportunities need to be resolved, including peer review, credentialing, collaboration, intellectual property,multimodal textuality,encoding standards,access,and sustainability .2 But largely absent from these discussions, or playing only a minor role, is the fate or future of copyediting, fact checking, the often thankless tasks of verification and correction that usually happen behind the publishing scenes. This omission is at once entirely consistent with the historical instability of copyediting (as I will suggest) and uniquely problematic from a contemporary perspective. While “Jhon Milton”isaneasyenougherrortocatch(nonethelesshise-bookAreopagitica iscurrently for sale on Amazon [Trettien]),the typographical,factual,and citation errors that characterize any publishing endeavor,online or in print,will not be resolved by casual or professional use in the ways commentators have envisioned.3 Electronic errata have potentially cascading effects that we would do well to consider in imagining futures for digital publishing and networked scholarly communication.4 So, also, do new regimes of correction have limitations and theoretical compromises that we should not ignore. Before situating this argument historically, I want to make two major caveats about the present moment. Discussions of online publishing and digital projects have in fact deeply considered the problems of “error”in terms of preservation and their own technical obsolescence, including everything from hardware to browser interoperability to the degradation of links or “link rot.” Second, there has been abundant attention to the errors of digitization, OCR, and metadata cataloguing, exemplified in Geoffrey Nunberg’s ongoing critique of the Google Books initiative and projects like MIT’s “culturomics” initiative that depend on the integrity of Google’s data. Furthermore, any programmer worth her silicon knows the simple equation of “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO), which underwrites the integrity of data and code. My argument is not that we are ignoring...

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