From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (review)

As its catchy title suggests and its author hopes, From Gutenberg to Google is aimed at a 'broader audience' than Peter L. Shillingsburg's previous works on the relationships between texts, editing, technology, and readers, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (1984, revised 1986 and 1996) and Resisting Texts: Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning (1997). Scholarly Editing argued that readings, or editions, need to take into account the different 'owners' of the text (the author, the publisher, the future reader or editor); Resisting Texts argued that the act of editing was a creative one that added to the 'accumulating stack of available editions'. The present work, which forms the third of this textual trilogy, looks at the difficulties of representing texts electronically and what happens to them when they are edited, stored, and viewed digitally. The main proposition of Shillingsburg's often interesting but uneven book is that 'electronic media have altered the nature of textuality' — an idea that seems true, but becomes slippery once one attempts to engage with it.

From Gutenberg to Google considers a number of topics, beginning with two chapters on how texts pass from one generation to another, focusing on the meaning created by editorial intervention, variant editions, and physical (or digital) format, and scopes the ideal digital repository for electronic texts, which would allow the storage, study, and teaching of all the varied editions of texts, from (in Shillingburg's example) Bram Stokers's notes for Dracula to the vast numbers of vampiric adaptations, films, and plays, by way of the seven editions printed during Stoker's lifetime. Shillingsburg's ideal electronic edition / archive appears intentionally utopian, if not hubristic. The importance of recognizing that there is no such thing as 'the' text, but many texts, and many readings (and printings), is stressed in the third chapter on 'Script Act Theory', which wonders whether electronic editions will be able to capture what was not written (and what the reader may have been aware was not written) as well as what was. For example, Shillingsburg suggests that readers of pirated editions of Don Juan may have garnered a 'sense of forbidden fruit', typos and all, in contrast to an awareness that they were merely not reading the authorized edition.

The core of the book outlines 'An electronic infrastructure for representing script acts', bringing together some practical problems with a host of conceptual issues. It is perhaps the most useful section of the book, briefly considering practical issues such as choosing one's XML flavour, financial matters, and working with groups, as well as the sort of questions an electronic repository might be used to answer. The final chapters consider some of the challenges of preserving the vastness of Victorian fiction in electronic form, including knowledge of its production and how modern readings affect our understanding of it; the question of discrimination and authority when approaching the numerous electronic editions out there on the Internet; and things that are lost in electronic texts (ink, oil, leather, heft, smell, the sense of newness when published, and the 'invisibility' of older typographic norms are just some forgotten things) and how they might be found. Finally, Shillingsburg takes on the cult of the 'authorized edition' and how to incorporate an awareness of ignorance, or what we do not know, into textual theory.

Any description of the mechanics of reading, the shifts in meaning induced by subtleties in form and material as well as content, is liable to become something of an abstract experience for the reader unless the author provides a good selection of examples. Shillingsburg offers some good titbits, such as the influence of Baron Tauchnitz's editions on 'casual reading' across the British Empire and textual deviations in editions of Thackeray's Vanity Fair (as well as helpful footnotes), but often the material is too abstract and deploys a writing style...