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4. What Digital Remediation Does to Critical Editions and Reading Practices Terje Hillesund and Claire Bélisle In migrating their editorial work on literary resources from print to digital technology, researchers have heeded new challenges and ambitions for scholarly editions. This chapter addresses these objectives by looking at designs, aims, and uses of existing scholarly editions as they migrate from one media to another. The first part deals with issues and questions raised by the digital trend in scholarly text studies and with the shift in how historical texts are recorded , presented, and studied. Confronting the optimistic promises of added value that digital editions will bring to scholarly works, we explain through the concept of remediation how traits and configurations of editions that are present in print technology live on in digital technology even though text creation and dissemination have profoundly changed. Underscoring both the fragility of digital information, as compared to the long-lasting paper document, and the extreme versatility of its representation, which makes it capable of answering a wide variety of scholarly reading expectations, we conclude that changes expected in scientific aims and methods are still to come. Digital remediation of text is taking place within a digital context that is impelling new reading habits. Exploring these new emerging reading practices, coupled with a probing of readers’ expectations, forms the object of the second part of the chapter. Having observed how reading evolves with digital technology, we explore the enduring uses and the disruptive changes that organize the new ways readers relate to texts and documents mediated by digital technology. Finally, a brief overview presents the challenges that textual scholars will face if they choose to attend to the new expectations of readers as the digital medium becomes the main work area for reading and working with critical editions. Digital Remediation of Critical Editions The terms “digital libraries” and “digital scholarly text editions” indicate a shift in how historical texts are recorded, presented, and studied. Without trying to provide definite answers, this chapter presents issues and questions raised by the digital trend in scholarly text studies, using the British Library’s online gallery as an example of digital libraries and the Canterbury Tales Project as an example of digital scholarly editions. Is digital technology simply a new means of gaining access to materials existing in another medium, or does it bring radical changes in the representation of texts and documents? Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin addressed this issue in their groundbreaking study of the differences between media by coining the concept of “remediation.” Remediation refers to the refashioning that each new technology introduces in its presentation when a medium tries to represent another medium. “Like their precursors, digital media [ . . . ] will function in a constant dialectic with earlier media, precisely as each earlier medium functioned when it was introduced” (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 50). As remediation involves a claim of improvement, it can be understood as a process of cultural competition between consecutive technologies that present scholarly editions. But does digital technology entail more, as the “endless crescendo of enthusiasm and expectations with which Western culture is greeting digital media” (267) would let one believe? The chapter examines some of the scholarly implications of the ongoing digital remediation of text. As a starting point, it looks briefly at an earlier shift in the history of text: the transition from manuscripts to printed books. From Manuscripts to Print to Digital Media Recuyell of the Histories of Troye was the first book ever to be printed in English. The story was translated from French and printed by William Caxton in 1473 in Bruges. Caxton was the first English printer, and in a concluding letter in the book, after a description of the laborious work on the translation, Caxton praises the new invention of print: And for as much as in the writing of the same my pen is worn, my hand weary and not steadfast, my eyes dimmed with overmuch looking on the white paper [ . . . ] and also because I have promised to diverse gentlemen and to my friends to address to them as hastily as I might the said book, therefore I have practiced and earned at my great charge and dispense to ordain this said book in print after the manner and form as you may here see, and is not written with pen and ink as other books been, to the end that every man may have them at once.1 Digital Remediation 115 [18.217.194...

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