Text Comparison and Digital Creativity

Text Comparison and Digital Creativity Scholarly Communication Past, present and future of knowledge inscription Series Editors Adriaan van der Weel Ernst D. Thoutenhoofd Ray Siemens Editorial Board Marco Beretta—Amy Friedlander—Steve Fuller Chuck Henry—Willard McCarthy—Mariya Mitova Patrick Svensson—Melissa M. Terras John Willinsky—Paul Wouters VOLUME 1 Text Comparison and Digital Creativity The Production of Presence and Meaning in Digital Text Scholarship Edited by Wido van Peursen, Ernst D. Thoutenhoofd, Adriaan van der Weel LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Text comparison and digital creativity : the production of presence and meaning in digital text scholarship / edited by Wido van Peursen, Ernst D. Thoutenhoofd, Adriaan van der Weel. p. cm. — (Scholarly communication, ISSN 1879–9027 ; v. 1) Contributions triggered by an international colloquium titled ‘Text Comparison and Digital Creativity, an International Colloquium on the Co-production of Presence and Meaning in Digital Text Scholarship’ , held in Amsterdam on 30 and 31 October 2008 on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-18865-5 (alk. paper) 1. Criticism, Textual—Data processing. 2. Communication in learning and scholarship—Technological innovations. 3. Scholars—Effect of technological innovations on. 4. Electronic publications. 5. Manuscripts—Digitization. 6. Early printed books—Digitization. 7. Philology—Research—Methodology. 8. Bible— Criticism, Textual I. Peursen, W. Th. van II. Thoutenhoofd, Ernst D. III. Weel, Adriaan van der. P47.T43 2010 801’.9590285—dc22 2010028034 ISSN 1879-9027 ISBN 978 90 04 18865 5 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.Fees are subject to change. Fees are subject to change. CONTENTS List of Contributors ........................................................................... Foreword: Imagining the Manuscript and Printed Book in a Digital Age ...................................................................................... Ray Siemens vii Text Comparison and Digital Creativity: An Introduction ....... Wido van Peursen 1 ix PART ONE CONTINUATION AND INNOVATION IN E-PHILOLOGY In the Beginning, when Making Copies used to be an Art . . . The Bible among Poets and Engineers ...................................... Eep Talstra Towards an Implementation of Jacob Lorhard’s Ontology as a Digital Resource for Historical and Conceptual Research in Early Seventeenth-Century Thought .......................................... Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen and Peter Øhrstrøm 31 57 PART TWO SCHOLARLY AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH Critical Editing and Critical Digitisation ....................................... Mats Dahlström 79 The Possibility of Systematic Emendation .................................... John Lavagnino 99 The Remarkable Struggle of Textual Criticism and Text-genealogy to become Truly Scientific ............................... Ben Salemans 113 vi contents PART THREE CASE STUDIES Seeing the Invisible: Computer Science for Codicology ............. Roger Boyle and Hazem Hiary Concrete Abstractions: Ancient Texts as Artifacts and the Future of Their Documentation and Distribution in the Digital Age ...................................................................................... Leta Hunt, Marilyn Lundberg and Bruce Zuckerman Ancient Scribes and Modern Encodings: The Digital Codex Sinaiticus ......................................................................................... David Parker 129 149 173 Transmitting the New Testament Online ..................................... Ulrich Schmid 189 Distributed Networks with/in Text Editing and Annotation .... Vika Zafrin 207 PART FOUR WIDER PERSPECTIVES ON DEVELOPMENTS IN DIGITAL TEXT SCHOLARSHIP The Changing Nature of Text: A Linguistic Perspective ............ David Crystal 229 New Mediums: New Perspectives on Knowledge Production ... Adriaan van der Weel 253 Presence beyond Digital Philology ................................................. Ernst D. Thoutenhoofd 269 Indices Author Index .................................................................................. Subject Index .................................................................................. 291 294 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS R. (Roger) Boyle is Professor of Computing in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds, England. D. (David) Crystal is Honorary Professor of Linguistics in the School of Linguistics and English Language at Bangor University, Wales. M. (Mats) Dahlström is Assistant Professor in the Department of Library and Information Science, University College of Borås and Gothenburg University, Sweden. H. (Hazem) Hiary is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Jordan. L. (Leta) Hunt is Associate Director of the inscriptiFact Project at the University of Southern California. J. (John) Lavagnino is Reader in Digital Humanities in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities and the Department of English at King’s College London, England. M. (Marilyn) Lundberg is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Fuller Theological Seminar at Pasadena and Associate Director of the West Semitic Research and InscriptiFact Projects at the University of Southern California, US. P. (Peter) Øhrstrøm is Professor of Information Science in the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. D. (David) Parker is Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology and a co-Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the University of Birmingham, England. W.Th. (Wido) van Peursen is Associate Professor in Old Testament at the Leiden Institute for Religious Studies and Director of the Turgama project at Leiden University, the Netherlands. B. (Ben) Salemans is Editor of www.neder-l.nl, the Netherlands. U. (Ulrik) Sandborg-Petersen is Assistant Professor in Computational Linguistics at Aalborg University, Denmark. U. (Ulrich) Schmid is Professor in the Evangelical-Theological Faculty and Researcher in the Institute for New Testament Research at the University of Münster, Germany. R. (Ray) Siemens is Canada Research Chair in the Department of English at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. viii list of contributors E. (Eep) Talstra is Professor in Old Testament and Computer-Assisted Textual Research in the Faculty of Theology at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E.D. (Ernst) Thoutenhoofd is Senior Researcher at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and University Lecturer in the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. A.H. (Adriaan) van der Weel is Bohn Professor in Modern Dutch Book History at Leiden University, the Netherlands V. (Vika) Zafrin is Digital Collections and Computing Support Librarian in the School of Theology at Boston University, US. B.E. (Bruce) Zuckerman is Professor of the Hebrew Bible in the School of Religion and Director of the West Semitic Research and InscriptiFact Projects at the University of Southern California, US. TEXT COMPARISON AND DIGITAL CREATIVITY: AN INTRODUCTION Wido van Peursen What are the effects of digital transformations in text culture on textual scholarship? What rules and guidelines are appropriate for the digital interpretation of text? What ‘virtual’ values do we turn to as the object of digital humanities scholarship? What is the role of viewpoint, language, tradition and creativity in quantitative text comparison? What connections exist between textual scholarship, interpretation, and e-infrastructures for research? These questions were addressed at an international colloquium held in Amsterdam on 30 and 31 October 2008 on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).1 The conveners, Ernst Thoutenhoofd and the undersigned, represented two institutions: the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS), a programme of the KNAW; and Turgama, a research project at the Institute for Religious Studies of Leiden University, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The VKS aims to support researchers in the creation of new scholarly practices. Turgama deals with computational linguistic and comparative analysis of ancient texts. The colloquium was given the title ‘Text Comparison and Digital Creativity. An International Colloquium on the Co-production of Presence and Meaning in Digital Text Scholarship’. The contributions to the present volume were triggered by this KNAW colloquium. The present chapter gives an introduction to the theme of the volume and explains what we mean by ‘text comparison’, ‘digital creativity’, ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’, and why these words figure in the title of this volume. It also highlights some of the issues that emerged in the colloquium discussions as being crucial for a proper assessment of the transformations in digital text scholarship, such as the question as to 1 We also gratefully acknowledge the support of the KNAW for the colour section of the present volume. 2 wido van peursen the status of digital research objects used in e-philology. This introductory chapter is followed by four sections, each of which explores the theme from a different perspective. Text comparison and digital creativity Within the broad field of ‘digital humanities’, the present volume zooms in on philology, which can be defined as ‘the study of literature, in a wider sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.’ (OED). Philology provides a fascinating case study of the transition from ‘traditional’ research to computer-based research in humanities scholarship, because of the textual nature both of its objects of research and of the vehicle of scholarly communication and knowledge representation (see the section ‘knowledge creation and representation’ below). The present volume contains contributions from various subdisciplines of philology, but the chief focus is on biblical studies. This branch of philology has a longstanding history of traditional scholarship, witnessed some of the earliest earliest attempts to create annotated databases, and is still an area in which pioneering initiatives in e-philology are taking place. Text comparison, which figures in the first part of the title of the present volume, is at the very heart of philology. In textual scholarship we need instruments that allow us to compare various literary texts. The comparison may involve various sections of the same text (cf. Talstra’s reference to concordances),2 texts that are in some way ‘parallel’ (cf. Talstra’s reference to synopses), and texts that are more loosely related, containing, for example, motifs and themes that frequently recur in certain cultures, or other intertextual relationships. Parallel texts, texts that in one way or another are witnesses to the same composition, can be described as a continuum that ‘ranges from the extreme of extensive verbatim quotation, on the one hand, to the point where no relationship is discernible, on the other’.3 The philological activity of text comparison goes back to Antiquity. One of the means to compare texts was to present them in parallel columns, a usage that is attested, for example, in Origen’s third-century 2 An author’s name between brackets refers to the author’s contribution to the present volume. 3 Wise, A critical study of the Temple Scroll from Qumran Cave 11, 207; cf. Van Peursen and Talstra, ‘Computer-assisted analysis of parallel texts in the Bible’. text comparison and digital creativity 3 Hexapla, which presented six versions of the Old Testament (including the Hebrew text, a transliteration of the Hebrew in Greek characters, and four Greek translations) in parallel alignment. After the invention printing, various Polyglots were created, such as the Complutensian Polyglot (1514–1517), the Antwerp Polyglot (1569–1572), the Paris Polyglot (1629–1645) and the London Polyglot (1654–1657), which contained the text of the Bible in different languages (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Latin, Arabic). These multilingual editions gave an important impetus to the text-critical and philological study of the Bible. For the poster of the colloquium that triggered the contributions to this volume, we used a picture of a beautiful Polyglot Psalter from the Library of Leiden University (see Plate 6 and cover). This twelfth-century manuscript gives the Psalms in Hebrew, Latin (the version ‘iuxta Hebreaos’), Greek and again Latin (the ‘Psalterium Gallicanum’). The focus of the present volume, however, is neither on text comparison in Antiquity, nor on the production of Polyglots in the first centuries after the invention of printing, but rather on text comparison and philology in the digital age. This brings us to the other part of the title of this volume, ‘digital creativity’. In its original use as the opposite of ‘analogue’, ‘digital’ refers to the mathematical representation of information and involves the conversion of continuous information into discontinous symbols, such as alphanumeric characters. Although various digital systems have been developed in the course of history, nowadays ‘digital’ is mainly associated with the binary digital system used in computer technology. People frequently use, for example, ‘digital humanities’ and ‘humanities computing’ as mere synonyms. At the same time, however, ‘digital’ seems to surpass its assocation with calculation and computing, because in modern digital tools the binary digital system is often hidden in a black box and its users may be hardly aware of it. People who use the Internet for social networking, for example, will not readily associate this networking with calculation and binary information systems. As such, ‘digital’ has become a designation of electronic information and communication technology and the processes and techniques related to it. ‘Digital’ relates to ‘creativity’ in various ways. First, when we use ‘digital’ to describe the new ways in which information can be stored and represented, we can say that the digital media provide new possibilities for knowledge representation that go far beyond the potential of analogue data. It requires creativity to discover these new opportunities and to go beyond just using the digital tools and media in the same manner as we use the analogue instruments. Secondly, if 4 wido van peursen ‘digital’ is used to refer to electronic communication, its relation to creativity is that digital instruments offer new chances for networking and cooperation, and as such support new creative processes. Thirdly, when ‘digital’ is used to indicate the mathematical representation of information and the use of the calculation power of the computer to handle and investigate it, the relation between ‘digital’ and ‘creativity’, becomes a methodological question: how do computation, calculation and sorting of data relate to traditional values of scholarship that seem to escape calculation, such as subjectivity, the master’s eye, and the intuition of the experienced scholar? Humanities scholars who are sceptial about the potential of the computer as a research instrument for philology may see the relationship between ‘digital’ and ‘creativity’ mainly as the opposition between two modes of scholarship, quantitative approaches which are useful in the sciences and qualitative research that is typical of humanities scholarship. As we shall see, however, the interaction between human researchers and computers, and between calculation and interpretation, is far more complex. Applications of IT in, for example, bioinformatics, in which the computer interacts with the human researcher to extract knowledge from immense data collections, or studies in the field of artificial creativity, show that the ‘computational’ and the ‘creative’ do not exclude each other. Definitions of creativity often include the notions of plurality and variation. Working with huge amounts of data—even, or perhaps even more, when they are handled in interaction with IT—requires creativity. The real challenge is ‘to capture the messy complexity of the natural world and express it algorithmically’ (Boyle and Hiary, quoting Teresa Nakra, who calls this ‘the Holy Grail of computer science’). The title of this volume brings ‘text comparison’ and ‘digital creativity’ together. Its aim is to explore recent developments in comparative textual scholarship brought about by the use of IT. Presence and meaning Presence, meaning, and interpretation ‘Presence’ and ‘meaning’ figure in the subtitle of this volume. Traditionally textual scholarship is concerned with interpretation, the attribution of meaning. In The production of presence. What meaning cannot convey, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht uses the terms ‘presence’ text comparison and digital creativity 5 and ‘meaning’ to refer to the role of materiality (‘physics’) and meaning (‘meta-physics’) in textual scholarship. ‘Presence’ refers to the materiality of things, to the physical aspects, to ‘what meaning cannot convey’. ‘Meaning’ refers to that which goes ‘beyond’ what is physical. It is related to metaphysics, which Gumbrecht describes as ‘an attitude that gives a higher value to the meaning of phenomena than to their material’. Gumbrecht does not reject interpretation (unlike some other authorities, see below), but his main concern is the rehabilitation of ‘presence’. He argues that Descartes’ dichotomisation between ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ led to the introduction of the subject/object paradigm, in which ‘to interpret the world means to go beyond its material surface or to penetrate that surface in order to identify a meaning (i.e., something spiritual) that is supposed to lie behind or beneath it’.4 He describes this development as follows: Medieval Christian culture was centered on the collective belief in the possibility of God’s real presence among humans and in several rituals, most prominently the Mass, that were meant to constantly produce and renew such real presence. (. . .) In modern culture, in contrast, beginning with the Renaissance, representation prevails over the desire for real presence. Representation is not the act that makes ‘present again’, but: those cultural practices and techniques that replace through an often complex signifier (and make thus available) as ‘reference’ what is not present in space or time. (. . .) My innovative thesis lies in the claim that, ever since the historical moment that we call the ‘crisis of representation’, around 1800, our culture has developed a renewed longing for real presence.5 Although Gumbrecht sketches a long pre-history of the re-awakened interest in ‘presence’, we think that it is only since the second half of the twentieth century that the hegemony of meaning has been threatened seriously. Interpretation, the academic, analytical and intellectual activity that concerns the attribution of meaning, has come under attack. In her 1966 essay ‘Against interpretation’6 Susan Sontag calls interpretation ‘the intellect’s revenge upon art’. The final words of her essay are: ‘in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art’. Robert Alter speaks of ‘the heresy of explanation’7 and claims that ‘the Gumbrecht, Production of presence, 26. Gumbrecht, Powers of philology, 11. 6 Cf. Gumbrecht, Production of presence, 10. 7 Alter, The five books of Moses, xvi; cf. Talstra’s remark on the ‘interpretative extras’ in Bible translations. 4 5 6 wido van peursen unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for explaining the Bible instead of representing it in another language’,8 the result being that ‘the modern English versions—especially in their treatment of Hebrew narrative prose—have placed readers at a grotesque distance from the distinctive literary experience of the Bible in its original language’.9 George Steiner speaks of the ‘Byzantine dominion of secondary and parasitic discourse over immediacy, of the critical over the creative’.10 And Gumbrecht ‘challenges the broadly institutionalised tradition according to which interpretation is the core practice, the exclusive core practice indeed, of the humanities’.11 The ‘re-awakened interest in presence’ is visible in the attention paid to texts as artefacts and the material aspects of the carriers of texts, which hardly receive any attention in traditional textual scholarship. In the field of biblical scholarship, for example, most standard works on textual criticism hardly pay any attention to mise-en-page, delimitation markers, paleography, and codicology. In the last decades this situation has changed and various research groups dealing with these aspects of textual transmission have been established, such as the Pericope Research Group (focusing on unit delimitation in biblical manuscripts)12 or the COMSt Network (dealing with the interdisciplinary study of Oriental manuscripts).13 Besides the understanding of a text as text, that is, ‘as reduced to linguistic sign sequences’, there is the concept of text as document, that is, ‘as a meaning conveyed by those linguistic sequences in conjunction with layout, typeface, colour and the rest of the graphical and material appearance that the document provides’ (Dahlström; cf. also Talstra on the distinction between ‘text’ and ‘document’). Dissatisfaction with the analytical academic attribution of meaning has led to suggestions to avoid distance-creating interpretation and to strive for immediacy. However, opinions differ about what this immediacy is. For Gumbrecht it is the material, physical presence of the objects of the world. This reminds us of Walter Benjamin, who speaks of the perception of an object’s aura, that is: its unique existence in 8 9 10 11 12 13 Alter, The five books of Moses, xix. Alter, The five books of Moses, xvii. Steiner, Real presences, 38. Gumbrecht, Production of presence, 1. See http://www.pericope.net. http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/COMST. text comparison and digital creativity 7 time and space. For Walter, too, presence (‘Das Hier und Jetzt des Originals’) is a prerequisite of authenticity (‘Echtheit’).14 In his essay ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’), he argues that the distance or unapproachability (‘Unnahbarheit’) of a work of art cannot be overcome by mechanical reproduction because an object’s aura cannot be reproduced.15 For Steiner, however, the mystery of ‘real presence’ means having access to that which transcends the physical reality. For Alter the immediacy is achieved by the appreciation of the artistic value of the literary work, including all its ambiguities that philologists try to explain away in their quest for clarity. Some readers of the Bible justify their avoidance of the analytical interpretation and their search for direct, spiritual access to the biblical text through the centuries-old tradition of the lectio divina.16 Both Gumbrecht and Steiner advocate ‘Real Presences’. Both will agree that going to a concert where Händel’s Messiah is performed gives a better access to that work than any musicological analysis of it and that visiting the National Gallery of Berlin to see Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea gives a more direct access to this painting than reading an interpretation of it by an art historian. And since also every mechanical or digital reproduction is necessarily always only an interpretation (see below, ‘The creation of digital research objects’) we could add with Benjamin that a mechanical reproduction of a performance of the Messiah or a digital image of the Monk by the Sea also lacks presence. When, however, it comes to texts, the differences between the views of Gumbrecht and Steiner come to the front. For Gumbrecht, ‘presence’ refers to the spatial relationship to the world and its objects and hence to the material carriers of texts. In Steiner’s view the effect of the confrontation with the primary (for example a literary text) is twofold: it gives direct access both to the physical material, avoiding the detour of interpretation, and to that which goes beyond description and interpretation, namely the transcendental real presence. 14 Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk’, 352: ‘Das Hier und Jetzt des Originals macht den Begriff seiner Echtheit aus’; English translation (Benjamin, Illuminations): ‘The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity’ (220). 15 See especially the Zweite Fassung in Gesammelte Werken 1/2 [see below, note 20], 480, note 7. 16 Cf. Reedijk, Zuiver lezen. 8 wido van peursen Presence, meaning, and digital textual scholarship We included ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’ in the title of this volume, because one of the things that requires further investigation is the question as to how ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’ relate to digital textual scholarship. On the one hand, digital textual scholarship has to face the challenges to interpretation put forward by Steiner and others. According to Steiner, ‘what looks to be certain is that the criteria and practices of quantification, of symbolic coding and formalisation which are the life breath of the theoretical do not, cannot pertain to the interpretation and assessment of either literature or the arts.’17 This claim provides a challenge to the analytical and mathematical approaches that characterise the computational analysis of texts, even more than to traditional philology. It raises the question as to how the computational, analytical work done in digital scholarship relates to the subjective moods of interpretation and intuition that characterise traditional philology.18 On the other hand, if our claim is correct that ‘the renewed longing for real presence’ increased considerably in the second half of the last century, this development overlaps with the technological innovations of the digital age, which made new realisations of ‘presence’ possible. The new technologies support the study of texts as artefacts, enable the ‘presentification’19 of research objects on the computer screen, and help discover what stories the messenger can tell beyond the message it carries (Boyle and Hiary). The present volume provides a number of examples of this role of the new technologies.20 The digitisation of textual research objects, in turn, requires reflection on the relationSteiner, Real presences, 79. But Steiner does not completely reject the philological analysis. He refutes F.R. Leavis’ claim that ‘linguistics has nothing to contribute to the understanding of literature’, because, ‘an informed alertness to the phonetic, lexical, grammatical instrumentalities of a text both disciplines and enriches the quality of interpretative and critical response’ (84). ‘Therefore radical doubts, such as those of deconstruction and of the aesthetic of misreadings, are justified when they deny the possibility of a systematic, exhaustive hermeneutic, when they deny any arrival of interpretation at a stable, demonstrable singleness of meaning. But between this illusory absolute, this finality which would, in fact, negate the vital essence of freedom, and the gratuitous play, itself despotic by its very arbitrariness, of interpretative nonsense, lies the rich, legitimate ground of the philological’ (164–165). 18 See the section ‘Scholarly and scientific research’ below. 19 Gumbrecht, Production of presence, 94. 20 See the contributions by Boyle and Hiary, Parker, Hunt, Lundberg and Zuckerman, and Schmid. 17 text comparison and digital creativity 9 ship between texts and their carriers. An artefact may be the carrier of various texts or various artefacts may together contain one text (Hunt, Lundberg, Zuckerman; cf. above, on the distinction between ‘text’ and ‘document’ made by Dahlström and Talstra). Presence of digital research objects Having observed that new technologies enable the ‘presentification’ of research objects, we have to address the question as to what sort of presence is created by digital technologies. Do high-resolution images of an ancient inscription indeed realise its ‘presence’? The claim that they do and that they provide immediate access to the objects they (re-)present,21 implies the identification of the real object, say, in a museum or in an archeological site with its digital representation in, say, an online repository. This identification can be challenged. Does the digital representation of a research object have the same ‘presence’, ‘authenticity’ or ‘aura’ as the object it represents? Or should we, with Benjamin, reserve ‘presence’ for an object’s unique existence in a certain time and place, which cannot be reproduced?22 In Benjamin’s view, the desire to bring things ‘closer’, has led to the acceptance of reproduction,23 but ‘even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’.24 Benjamin’s observations in the first half of the twentieth century on ‘mechanical reproduction’ apply very well to the ‘digital reproduction’, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 21 Cf. above, the section ‘Presence, meaning, and interpretation’ on Gumbrecht’s distinction between ‘presentation’ and ‘representation’. 22 Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk’, 352. 23 Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk’, 355: ‘Die Dinge näher zu bringen, ist ein genauso leidenschaftliches Anliegen der gegenwärtigen Massen, wie es ihre Tendenz einer Überwindung des Einmaligen jeder Gegebenheit durch die Aufnahme von deren Reproduktion darstellt.’ [The Zweite Fassung of this essay in idem, Gesammelte Schriften 1/2 (p. 479) reads: ‘Die Dinge sich räumlich und menschlich “näherzubringen”. . .’ (italics mine); on the various versions of Benjamin’s essay see the editors’ remark in Volume 7/2, 661.] 24 Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk’, 352: ‘Noch bei der höchstvollendeten Reproduktion fällt eines aus: das Hier und Jetzt des Kunstwerks—sein einmaliges Dasein an dem Orte, an dem es sich befindet’. 10 wido van peursen The relationship between the digital objects and the real objects they allegedly represent is not only very complex,25 it also develops over time. In this development the digital objects seem to evolve from mere secondary representations of traditional research objects to new kinds of research objects in themselves. In scholarly practice the ‘original’ and ‘real’ objects run the risk of being delivered to oblivion, because digital representations have taken their place. A telling example of this development may be the way in which the Codex Sinaiticus was, is, and will be consulted. As Parker notes, access to the primary materials has always been restricted and visiting the four locations over which they are scattered is ‘a formidable logistical undertaking’. The Digital Codex Sinaiticus provides a solution to these problems: access is no longer restricted and logistic problems have overcome. But now that the digital object has become available, who will ever go back to the ‘real’ manuscript? And if one does so, and arrives at new readings or new insights, will the claim of one single scholar who has consulted the original manuscript outweigh the judgment of dozens of colleagues who base their observations on the highquality digital representation of it? The real danger is that this single scholar will not be taken seriously because the community at large has not the resources to perform autopsy. The same question applies to electronic collections of ancient corpora, in, for example, the Perseus project, the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon, or the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible. Although the digital objects are most often still conceived as presentations or representations of ‘real’ data (objects in museums, printed text editions), more and more often they receive a status of their own and become independent of the realities they represent. Will the next generation of scholars still take the trouble to check printed critical editions (which, admittedly, are representations as well) for Greek and Latin texts that can be found on the internet? Or will, for example, the Perseus collection receive a status as the place where the classical literature can be found? Or will the digital (re)presentations be regularly updated? If they are inevitably interpretative (cf. Dahlström), then like translations 25 Cf. Hunt, Lundberg and Zuckerman in this volume: ‘In order to provide a solid foundation for intuitive access, one must establish and facilitate a strong relationship between the model and the “real world”. The problem is that it is sometimes not altogether clear what the “real world” is, and this “reality-concept” shifts remarkably depending on one’s perceptions.’ text comparison and digital creativity 11 or text editions they will need to be reperformed every twenty-five years or so—or perhaps even more frequently, given the tremendous speed at which digital technologies develop. Similar questions can be raised regarding secondary literature. Google Book Search opens up new horizons for the accessibility of scholarly literature. But what are the effects? Will digitised sources that can easily be accessed by a simple search command be quoted more frequently than sources that exist only in printed editions and for which someone needs to go to the shelves of the library? And will people be sufficiently aware that the quality and accuracy of Google Book Search leaves much to be desired (Dahlström)? An interesting analogy to the tendency that the digital research objects become increasingly independent from the ‘real’ objects they represent is provided by the digital representations of the ‘real’ world in virtual words such as Second Life and the way in which virtual objects function and develop there.26 In Second Life we can observe how virtual objects that started as imitations of ‘real’ objects increasingly acquire independence in relation to the objects that they originally imitated. It is to be expected that also digital research objects of philology, such as those in the database of the West Semitic Research Project (Hunt, Lundberg and Zuckerman) will start living a life of their own. The creation of digital research objects For the reasons outlined in the preceding section, the creation of digital objects—be it images of inscriptions or manuscripts, electronic versions of ancient corpora, or collections of secondary literature—is a crucial part of humanities research. It is more than just preparation for research (cf. Talstra). This is a fundamental difference between databases as they are used in the humanities and those that are used in the natural sciences. The way in which inscriptions are photographed (cf. Hunt, Lundberg and Zuckerman) or in which text corpora are transcribed and encoded, is crucial for the way in which these research objects will be studied in the future. The creation of the digital objects has to meet the standards of the various disciplines involved, such as paleography, linguistics, and philology (cf. Talstra). Even in image 26 This issue was raised by Ernst Thoutenhoofd in the closing paper to the colloquium. 12 wido van peursen capture and editing, which may at first sight be a rather straightforward and ‘objective’ procedure, ‘virtually all parameters in the process (. . .) require intellectual, critical choices, interpretation, and manipulation’ (Dahlström; see further Parker’s section on ‘transcription as interpretation’). The same applies to other processes of the creation of digital objects, such as linguistic encoding and textual editing, which are full of decision-taking and disambiguation. Annotation and encoding, for example, most often concern the enrichment of a text by information that is in the head of the human researcher. These activities give rise to new challenges and sometimes they make us think about things we had never thought about. If we have to take disambiguating decisions regarding, for example, the identification of participants or the assignment of semantic categories such as animate/inanimate, male/female, we have to face questions such as: are there ways to use the textual data for such disambiguations? Are there signals in the corpus that can be used for that? (cf. Talstra).27 In addition to those digital objects that are intended to be representations of ‘real’ research objects, there are also new, ‘digitally-born’ objects, which can be subjected to scholarly research. This creates new challenges as well. David Crystal shows that the phenomenon of multi-authored texts of the wiki-type, for example, are not only stylistically and pragmatically heterogeneous, but also ‘disturb our sense of the physical identity of a text’: They raise the question how we are ‘to define the boundaries of a text which is ongoing’ (cf. below, the section on ‘Innovation’). Scholarly and scientific research The spread of digital technology across philology, linguistics, and literary studies suggests that textual scholarship itself is taking on a more laboratory-like image. The ability to sort, quantify, reproduce, and report text through computation would seem to facilitate the exploration of text as another type of quantitative data (akin to protein structures or geographic features of the seabed). The possibility to test hypotheses upon the data introduces experimentation into 27 Thus Joost Kircz at one of the colloquium discussions. text comparison and digital creativity 13 textual scholarship (cf. Talstra).28 And the opportunity to present the research data—not only the research results—digitally in one way or another, gives humanity scholars the chance to ‘open up the doors to their laboratory’ (see below; compare the online availability of 737 pages with appendices of Salemans’ PhD dissertation, mentioned in his note 1). This development requires also the use of more precise terminological distinctions between terms that have different meanings in the sciences but are often used indiscriminately by humanities scholars. Thus ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ can no longer be confused (see below) and ‘hypothesis’ can no longer be used as merely a synonym for ‘idea’ or ‘assumption’. This does not mean, however, that developing the potential of digital technology in textual scholarship only gives it a more scientific character. It rather highlights text analysis and text interpretation as two increasingly separated sub-tasks in the study of texts. The implied dual nature of interpretation as the traditional, valued mode of scholarly text comparison, combined with an increasingly widespread reliance on digital text analysis as scientific mode of inquiry raises the question as to whether the reflexive concepts that are central to interpretation— individualism, subjectivity—are affected by the anonymised, normative assumptions implied by formal categorisations of text as digital data. The contributions to this volume provide a number of examples in which textual analysis receives a more ‘scientific’ character, in which formalisation is used as a means to overcome the individualism and subjectivity that characterizes much philological research, or in which generalisation of analytical procedures and formal and systematic registration of the data help develop research strategies that allow the verification of its conclusions. The contributions in Part Two (Dahlström, Lavagnino, Salemans) show how this can take place in textual criticism and text editing and they elaborate in different ways on oppositions such as scholarly versus scientific; objective versus subjective; nomothetic versus idiographic; and mass versus critical digitisation. On the one hand they show how in the humanities systematic, corpusbased approaches are gaining ground and how insights and methods 28 On the notion of ‘experiment’ in biblical textual scholarship see also Talstra and Dyk, ‘The computer and biblical research’ and Van Peursen, ‘How to establish a verbal paradigm’. 14 wido van peursen from the sciences can lead to new directions in textual scholarship. (A telling example is the application of insights from cladistics in text geneaology in Ben Salemans’ contribution.) On the other hand, each of these three authors agree that ‘scholarly judgement and experience are still needed’ (Lavagnino) and that the subjective or intersubjective human judgement is indispensable. Continuation, acceleration, and innovation Imitation of traditional practices or methodological innovation? Many electronic instruments for textual scholarship that have become available over the last decades are imitations of traditional tools. Instruments for word searches in digital texts, for example, fulfil the same function as traditional concordances. Therefore, we invited the contributors to address the question as to whether the computer can do more than merely imitate, or speed up, traditional practices. Where does the use of the computer lead to new research strategies? Is there really methodological innovation? In other words, the question is ‘whether we are simply going to speed up classical techniques of collecting and sorting data or whether we are really developing a new domain of techniques for scholarly access to classical texts (…) Can we get beyond just imitating the classical instruments for sorting lexical materials (concordance, lexicon) and for comparing parallel literary texts and fragments (synopsis)?’ (cf. Talstra)29 Is our use of the digital medium in fact an imitation of the medium of the book, or do we start to employ the salient characteristics of the new medium (cf. Van der Weel)? Continuation and imitation The question formulated in our invitation may erroneously have given the impression that the imitation and even the acceleration of classical techniques is of little or no value. But this is by no means the case. First, even the imitation of classical techniques that have crystallised over the centuries is an achievement in itself. This applies, for example, to the evolution of the computer from a calculating machine 29 See also Dyk and Talstra, ‘The computer and biblical research’. text comparison and digital creativity 15 to a language machine and its subsequent use for word processing and desktop publishing in the first stage of the history of computing.30 Even though this use concerned mainly the imitation of certain aspects of conventional text production, ‘there is no doubt that it was a triumph that we managed this replication of analogue textual practices and print functions in the digital realm so well’ (Van der Weel). Even things that seem easy for a human researcher are complex to implement with computer programs. This applies, for example, to the parallel alignment of texts in a synopsis. Eep Talstra argues that the imitation of what has been done before manually is the first step in the development of innovative computational research strategies.31 The need to make explicit the parameters that are taken into account, is in many cases a step forward compared with traditional, intuitive approaches. The preparation of a synopsis involves a large variety of observations of lexical, syntactical, and literary correspondences, and decisions about the weight attached to them.32 Most of these observations and decisions remain implicit if a synopsis is made manually by a human researcher. But they have to be made explicit if computer programs are instructed to establish corresponding elements in multiple texts. In this way the use of the computer forces us to sharpen our methodological focus and to work from explicit points of departure rather than implicit presuppositions.33 Also in text-genealogical research the need to make parameters and criteria explicit constitutes a step forward. This appears, for example, from Ben Salemans’ contribution, in which he describes the need he had to formulate a list of characteristics of text-genealogical variants and to justify the acceptance or rejection of a variant as a building element for the text-genealogical chain on the basis of these characteristics. Cf. Van der Weel, Changing our textual minds: Towards a digital order of knowledge (forthcoming from Manchester University Press), Chapter 4: ‘History of text and the computer’. 31 See also Van Peursen and Talstra, ‘Computer-assisted analysis of parallel texts.’ 32 Cf. Lasserre, Les synopses. 33 In a pilot study on the biblical books of Kings and Chronicles the calculation of corresponding lexemes revealed some interesting parallels that were not represented in the existing printed synopses, where no justification for disregarding these parallels had been given. The synopses appear to have given priority to the question of which textual units tell the same episode rather than recognizing all the lexical correspondences; see Van Peursen and Talstra ‘Computer-assisted analysis of parallel texts.’ 30 16 wido van peursen Acceleration A second modification to the question as we stated it in our invitation concerns acceleration. The question as to whether ‘the computer can do more than merely imitate, or speed up, traditional practices’ should not be read to imply a contrast between acceleration and innovation. Acceleration itself can lead not just to a quantitative, but also to a qualitative change. So even speeding up things is by itself innovative. The quantitative increase triggers a qualitative transformation, due to, for example, the enormous searchability. The same can be said of the new media for collaboration. At first sight they just facilitate networking and provide cheaper and faster, alternatives to letters sent by regular mail or international conferences. However, the processes of collaboration, which can be easier, faster, and more frequent thanks to the networked computer, allow cooperating scholars to discover patterns and regularities that would never be found by scholars working in isolation. Innovation Some contributions make us aware that sometimes what seems to be very innovative, such as the use of the calculating and sorting power of the computer, has its predecessors in works from long before the digital era. This applies even to one of the most salient features of electronic text, its hyperlinked nature. At a conceptual level ‘hyperlinking’, as the opposite of a linear, unidimensional representation of knowledge, relates to the models of thinking that we use to classify the world, and is related to the human condition rather than to computer technology.34 At a practical level, non-linear representations of information can also be found before the digital era, as the diagrams in Jacob Lorhard’s Ogdoas Scholastica at the beginning of the seventeenth century show (Sandborg-Petersen and Øhrstrøm). Even the footnote can be construed as a form of hyperlinking. Technology to support the non-linear organisation of information has its predecessors in the pre-digital era as well. An interesting example is the bookwheel (see Plate 7), an instrument developed in 34 For classification as an inherent element of the human condition and its role in information systems and modern information technology, as well as in history and society, see Bowker and Star, Sorting things out. text comparison and digital creativity 17 the Renaissance that could hold various books, and that enabled easy consultation of these books by just turning the wheel. The bookwheel could be used, for example, by lawyers, who consulted various sources on the same subject, or by biblical scholars, who could consult various commentaries on the same passage almost simultaneously.35 Although going from one commentary to another by a click on the mouse may go faster than using the bookwheel, the instruments involved function basically the same.36 These observations do not deny, however, that IT does cause innovation. In some areas the new opportunities provided by technology are obvious. The application of computer science in the study of watermarks has made the invisible visible, and ‘succeed[ed] where the naked eye and ad-hoc techniques would have failed’ (Boyle and Hiary). But there are more ways in which IT leads to transformation and innovation. In the first place, the use of the computer changes the basic concepts and categories of philology, including the notions of ‘text’—both as a means of communication and as an object of transmission—‘edition’, and ‘annotation’ (see below, the section ‘Transformations of concepts and categories’). In the second place, research objects themselves change. In the digital environment new types of texts are produced, such as blog posts, contributions to wiki’s, emails and the like. These texts show peculiar new linguistic features that deserve linguistic analysis (Crystal); they are subjected to social agreements of various kinds and hence provide interesting material for a sociological analysis (Thoutenhoofd); and they are part of ‘the explosion of cultural artifacts that are born digital’, which should be taken seriously by humanities scholars if they ‘wish to continue to study all of the humanities in their varied forms’ (Zafrin). Further, in the digital world we see new ways in which groups are created and identity is defined, which can be subjected to virtual ethnography (Thoutenhoofd). As we have seen above, the 35 Cf. Marcus, ‘The silence of the archive and the noise of cyberspace’, 19; Van der Weel, ‘Explorations in the libroverse’; see also Sawday, ‘Towards the Renaissance computer’. 36 Cf. Marcus, ‘The silence of the archive and the noise of cyberspace’, 19: ‘The computer is a bit less unwieldy. Online editions of early modern texts can function very much like such a scholar’s wheel, only ampler and much more compact, allowing modern scholars to locate and correlate passages on similar subjects with great ease and precision. 18 wido van peursen digital representations of traditional research objects create research objects in their own right, which become more and more independent of the ‘real’ objects they represent. It is in this context that the interaction between technological innovation and the ‘re-awakened desire for presence’ mentioned above in the section ‘Presence, meaning, and interpretation’ becomes a pressing concern. A third area in which innovation takes places is that of text editing and text comparison. Processes of text production and transmission have led to a multitude of parallel compositions.37 (cf. Talstra) The traditional ways of dealing with these works in synopses or critical text editions are bound to the limitations of paper format and size. In the last decades we have seen a number of initiatives to use the computer for text representation and comparison. One example presented in this volume is the edition of Ogdoas Scholastica, which implements text as hypertext (Sandborg-Petersen and Øhrstrøm). Ongoing developments The question as to the innovation brought about by the computer has no final answer, given the swift changes in digital humanities. The three stages of ‘the history of computing as a technology and as a digital textual medium’ identified by Van der Weel, which can be characterised by the catch words imitation, dissemination, and democratisation, cover only a few decades. They show a rapid process of innovation, invention, and discovery, rather than a dichotomy between the predigital and the digital era. Roberto Busa’s digital text of the works of St Thomas Aquinas, one of the first large digital texts, is a milestone in the early history of digital humanities, but its accuracy left much to be desired (Lavagnino) and its approach was conventional rather than innovative (Van der Weel). Since then, however, tremendous progress has been made, both methodologically and technically. This applies not only to corpus creation, but also, for example, to image capturing. The results of recent infrared captures of ancient manuscripts com- 37 On ‘works’ (rather than ‘texts’) that are subjected to ongoing processes of composition and revision, see Voorbij, ‘The Chronicon of Helinand of Froidmont’, 5: ‘The editorial team decided to produce a “historical-critical, genetic edition”. This type of edition tries to give an understanding of the process of composition and textualization of the Chronicon. It is not “the” text of the Chronicon, nor even “a” text thereof that will be edited, but rather the Chronicon as a “work”.’ text comparison and digital creativity 19 pared with the results of two decades ago show that technologies ‘have dramatically improved’ (Hunt, Lundberg and Zuckerman). Given the rapid changes we are witnessing, while being still at the treshold of a digital order, we can only imagine how the technical and methodological innovation will evolve in the future and what impact this will have on future textual scholarship. Digital technology is more than a response to challenges of traditional philology. It does not provide the final answer to questions raised in the past, nor does it promise to do so in the future. It rather becomes part of the framework of reference of research, raises new questions and helps develop new research strategies. This becomes clear, for example, in the way in which the texts that are studied and the digital instruments that are used in that study are interwoven in an electronic annotated text (see following section). Transformations of concepts and categories The innovation brought about by IT changes the basic concepts and categories of philology. The notion of ‘text’ as a means of communication changes due to ‘digitally mediated communication’, which differs both from speech (for example tone-voice substitutions) and from writing (for example hypertext linkage, framing) (Crystal). The notion of ‘text’ as object of transmission has changed due to the potential of electronic editing. Traditionally scholarly text editions contain a main text and a critical apparatus, and the establishing of the main text and the selection of variants are based on the text-critical research of the editor. However, the conceptualisation of the notions of ‘text’, ‘variant’, and ‘edition’ should be redefined in digital textual scholarship (Dahlström; Lavagnino).38 Especially in the study of interrelated textual artefacts from before the invention of printing, the new models for the representation of textual variation are useful. Thus regarding biblical studies, Talstra comments that ‘[t]he main challenge comes from the fact that biblical texts are part of the large collections of classical texts that have been produced long before the invention of the art of printing (. . .) We only possess individual copies of a text, none of them being identical to any other existing copy.’ 38 See also Buzzetti, ‘Digital representation and text model’; Eggert, ‘Text-encoding, theories of the text, and the “Work-Site”’; Schmidt, ‘Graphical editor for manuscripts’. 20 wido van peursen Other notions that require further discussion due to the new tools for knowledge creation include annotation, interpretation, hermeneutics, explanation, and commentary. Many new tools integrate text and annotation, so that they are not separate, but melt together. In the digital age, annotation is a completely new field, which includes not only traditional scholarly commentary, but also social tagging, blog comments, and comments solicited via specialised software (Zafrin). The transformation of concepts brought about by IT is also visible in more general philosophical and scientific terminology. This is illustrated by the transformations that the word ‘ontology’ underwent when it was imported from philosophy into computer science (Sandborg-Petersen and Øhrstrøm). Knowledge creation and representation Data, information, and knowledge creation In the invitation to the colloquium, we gave the following description to the theme session ‘Knowledge creation and representation’: Text, as a record of ideas, a means to construct author(ity), and a material carrier of communication between humans has been central not only to philology, but to scholarship generally. Text is knowledge represented as matter: visible and revisitable, portable and measurable. As discipline focused on understanding texts and change in texts critically, philology is therefore a unique scholarly resource for understanding ways in which text alters under conditions of new technology, but of course knowledge of text in philology is itself also a text, both epistemologically specific and formally encoded (theorised). Does new technology make philological approaches and insights into the nature of text more transparent for other scholars? What broader challenges, shared interests and opportunities emerge as text comparison becomes part of a wider move towards integrated forms of (collaborative) e-research and the multi-purposing of data collections? The innovation brought about by IT demands that also in the humanities clear distinctions are made between data, information, and knowledge. The movement to a more laboratory-like image of digital scholarship (see above, ‘Scholarly and scientific research’) requires from philologists that they start with the rough data, such as the sequences of graphemes that constitute a text. When the data are processed to be useful, and when meaningful connections between data are established, so that they provide answers to ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, text comparison and digital creativity 21 and ‘when’ questions, the data become information. The appropriate collection of information results in knowledge, which provides answers to the ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions.39 This process of knowledge creation raises a number of challenging questions. What is the role of the computer in the analysis of the data, the retrieval of information, and the creation of knowledge? Much data can now be made easily available, but how to develop abstract concepts for the preservation of ‘concrete information’? (Hunt, Lundberg and Zuckerman) Does the digital medium lead to new ways of collaborative knowledge creation? And what role does the computer play in knowledge representation? The contributions to this volume address various aspects of these questions. As noted in the preceding section, digitally mediated communication differs from speech as well as writing and leads to a new notion of text (Crystal). Hyperlinking, for example, can drastically change the representation of information (Sandborg-Petersen and Øhrstrøm). The internet creates new possibilities of worldwide data distribution, but it also provides new challenges regarding storing, distribution, and presentation of information (Hunt, Lundberg and Zuckerman), and new questions concerning responsibility and authorship (Crystal) and copyright (Schmid). New tools for collaboration and text annotation raise the question as to how we can overcome the individualism of humanities scholars (Zafrin). Interesting case studies include the tool by which various scholars annotate fourteenth-century Italian texts on the site of the Virtual Humanities Lab, Brown University (Zafrin) and the digital workflow used in the preparation of a text edition of the New Testament (Schmid), which employs the advantages of the electronic medium for collaboration. Authority The new means of knowledge creation and representation raise the question of authority. Two contrasting tendencies are at work. On the one hand, IT leads to more rigor and sharper definitions of analytical procedures due to the ‘scientification’ of the humanities; on the other hand, the new media lead to new roles and participants in knowledge creation that run counter to the strictness in the application of 39 For the definitions of ‘data’, ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’, see www.systemsthinking.org/dikw/dikw.htm. 22 wido van peursen scientific principles. The authority of the text editor seems to vanish due to the creation of digital archives, by which the editors, rather than presenting an established critical text, ‘open up the doors to their editorial “lab”.’ (Dahlström) Van der Weel calls this ‘the deferral of the interpretive burden, which shift[s] more and more from the instigator of the (scholarly) communication to its recipient’. Likewise, the traditional authority of scholars whose expertise was incorporated in established reference works seems to be replaced by the multi-authored, anonymous, and ‘democratic’ Wikipedia articles (cf. Van der Weel on ‘democratic forms of knowledge production’ that characterise the third stage of the history of computing). There seems to be an analogy between the situation that we are in now and the Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Reformation involved a challenge of the existing authorities that was supported, if not enhanced by the new medium of the printed book. Now, again, at the beginning of the digital era, the introduction of a new medium supports or enhances challenges to existing scholarly authorities. Although much can be said in support of the claim that a new revolution is on its way, a closer look at the things that are going on at the beginning of the digital era and the situation before the digital era, warn us not to exaggerate the changes brought about by IT. On the one hand, we see right now, in the beginning of the digital era that new regulations are installed, which give authority to, for example, moderators of the Wikipedia or discussion lists. In some cases the regulations were installed after a completely ‘democratic’ (or ‘anarchistic’) list was demolished by some fanatical non-experts. The Virtual Manuscripts Room, which is being developed in Birmingham and Münster, will in the future serve as a sort of wiki for ‘accredited researchers’ (Parker; cf. also Schmid). Apparently there is a desire for such a restriction even in the third stage of the history of computing, that of ‘democratisation’ (Van der Weel; see above). Yet, also in the Order of the Book (see below) authority is not beyond challenge. Carotta’s book Jesus was Caesar. On the Julian origin of Christianity (Soesterberg: Aspect, 2005) in which he claims that the historical Jesus was identical with Julius Caesar was—with due respect for Aspect—not published by an acknowledged academic publisher, it did not appear in a peer-reviewed series edited by university professors, and I do not know any New Testament specialist working in an established institution for Higher Education, who takes this book seriously. This seems to demonstrate how in the Order of text comparison and digital creativity 23 the Book authority is well defined in terms of channels of publication. However, the book has been published anyway, and the struggle for authority, especially among the larger public, is not over. Carotta’s book has raised more interest from the large public than many specialised studies by New Testament professors, and even a professor of Leiden University—from the Faculty of Law—revealed himself as a strong advocate of Carotta’s thesis. Other examples, such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code show that the authority of established academic scholars is not taken for granted in society, and that books that challenge or ignore scholarly ‘authorities’ may reach a wider readership and selling numbers of which every serious humanities scholar would be envious. However interesting and innovative all the applications of the digital medium are, we have to be aware that we are still at the very beginning of the digital era and that, as Van der Weel puts it, we still live in ‘the Order of the Book’ rather than in a digital order. Van der Weel recalls that in the past new means of communication had a long way to go before their salient characteristics were fully employed or even recognised. Their usage started as an alternative to the familiar forms of communication: writing complementing speech, and print complementing writing. So the challenge is how we can avoid imitating the familiar medium and instead make full use of the salient characteristics of the unfamiliar new medium to discover the best possible use we can make of it for the task of creating ‘knowledge instruments’ such as thematically structured research collections. This volume As indicated in the beginning of this introduction, the contributions to the present volume were triggered by a KNAW colloquium, but the contents of the contributions have been modified and expanded. The present arrangement in four sections is also different, because it appeared impossible to pin-point each of the written contributions to one of the session themes of the colloquium. Moreover, we wanted to do justice to the fact that the character of the contributions differs in that some address more abstract, reflexive questions, whereas others present case studies that illustrate various aspects of the colloquium theme. Section One, entitled ‘Continuation and innovation in e-philology’, starts with traditional, pre-digital research. In the first chapter Eep 24 wido van peursen Talstra shows that many practices in digital philology have their predecessors in the pre-digital era. Talstra addresses the question as to whether we can imitate, or even go beyond, the traditional tools. Taking a more philosophical perspective, Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen and Peter Øhrstrøm discuss in the second chapter the import of the word ‘ontology’ from philosophy into computer science. They trace the origin and history of this word and its development from something that deals with ‘the entities that exist, as well as their qualities and attributes’, towards ‘something more subjective and changeable’, which deals with ‘constructing formalised, semantic, model-theoretical, and/ or logic-based models which can easily be implemented in computer systems’. Section Two, entitled ‘Scholarly and scientific research’, contains contributions that address different modes of research expressed by such oppositions as scholarly versus scientific; objective versus subjective; nomothetic versus idiographic; and mass versus critical digitisation. In Chapter 4 Mats Dahlström discusses two library digitisation approaches: mass digitisation and critical digitisation. He addresses the related question as to whether editions are presentations of facts or hermeneutical documents and subjective interpretations. In Chapter 5 John Lavagnino presents a systematic approach to emendations and describes the role that corpus methods can play to automate the collection and evaluation of large amounts of relevant data. In Chapter 6 Ben Salemans shows how the computer can help implement an intersubjective, repeatable and controllable theory. These contributions show the new, promising directions that textual scholarship can take thanks to more ‘scientific’ digital approaches. At the same time they demonstrate that the subjective and intersubjective judgment of the human researcher is indispensable and that creativity is needed in digital textual scholarship (cf. above, the section on ‘Scholarly and scientific research’). Section Three presents five case studies. They show how in concrete cases the computer can support philological research and stimulate the development of completely new research areas. The projects presented in this part address various aspects of digital imaging, collaboration tools, and digital workflows, as well as the innovation that computer science can bring about in the technical, material study of textual artefacts. In Chapter 7 Roger Boyle and Hazem Hiary show how computer science and artificial intelligence provide new opportunities for watermark location and identification. In Chapter 8 Leta text comparison and digital creativity 25 Hunt, Marilyn Lundberg, and Bruce Zuckerman discuss the challenges they faced in two closely related projects, the West Semitic Research Project and the InscriptiFact Digital Library. They discuss the theoretical model they developed for the conceptualisation of images of texts as ‘concrete abstractions’. In Chapter 9 David Parker describes a project that includes digital imaging and an electronic transcription of the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest manuscripts of the Bible, which is currently dispersed over four locations. Ulrich Schmid’s contribution (Chapter 10) deals with the preparation of text editions of the New Testament. He describes a digital workflow that ‘makes full use of the advantages of the electronic medium (collaborative, modular, updatable) while at the same time meeting the accepted standards of the printed book (sustainability, accessability, accountability)’. In Chapter 11 Vika Zafrin describes a collaborative text annotation engine that was created as part of the Virtual Humanities Lab at Brown University as well as some other commenting engines that have been used by humanities scholars for text editing and annotation. Altogether, the projects presented by these authors provide a fascinating collection of examples of the use of new technologies, which can be of tremendous help in textual scholarship (Hunt, Lundberg and Zuckerman) and lead to the development of complete new research areas (Boyle and Hiary); the digitisation of analogue research objects and the subsequent development of the thus created digital research objects in their own right (Parker, Hunt, Lundberg and Zuckerman); new directions in knowledge creation and representation making use of collaboration tools and digital workflows (Schmid, Zafrin); and the continuity with scholarly practices of the pre-digital era (especially Parker and Schmid). Lastly, Section Four provides three wider perspectives on the developments investigated in this volume. In Chapter 12 David Crystal approaches the rapid changes that have taken place over the last decades in digitally mediated communication from a linguistic perspective. In Chapter 13, Adriaan van der Weel compares the digital medium as ‘knowledge instrument’ with the printed book and explores the interrelatedness of technological inventions and social uses of the digital textual medium, especially concentrating on the social digital practices of humanities scholars. Finally, in Chapter 14 Ernst Thoutenhoofd provides a broader sociological perspective. He takes digital textual scholarship as part of a wider cluster of scientific and scholarly research activities that draws on new technologies in 26 wido van peursen which expert knowledge production is no longer an exclusively human undertaking. References Alter, R., The five books of Moses. A translation with commentary (New York, 2004). Benjamin, W., ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (Zweite Fassung), in idem, Gesammelte Schriften 7/1 (ed. by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 350–385. ——, Illuminations (ed. by H. 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