Celebrating Parker on the Web

Celebrating Parker 2.0 Participants

Stanford Text Technologies' fourth Collegium focused on a celebration of Parker on the Web 2.0 (Parker Library on the Web), which was launched as an Open Access resource in January 2018. Hosted at CESTA by Benjamin Albritton, Georgia Henley (the main, and brilliant, organizer), and me, we had twenty-five speakers here at Stanford for three days, from March 25th to 28th, culminating in a Mirador workshop led by Ben. Our format was unusual; months in advance, we gave our participants a manuscript from Parker's collection at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge to work on, and each session paired up colleagues to see what, if any, connections could be made between the assigned manuscripts. Everyone was encouraged to tweet as #Parker2, so that our conversation can be discovered alongside tweets from the Parker Library's own #Parker2 conference held earlier in March.

The manuscripts described and analysed by our participants ranged in date from the sixth-century St Augustine's Gospels (MS 286, presented by Mateusz Fafinski) to the fifteenth-century Troilus and Criseyde (MS 61, presented by Sian Echard). We worked with Latin, English, Welsh, and French texts, focusing on materiality--paper, membrane, ink, bindings--and scribal practices, artistic signification, communities of readers, textual transmission, medieval pedagogy and pastoral care, the act of collecting, and modes of display and reception. Major themes emerged over the three days, though discussion of these didn't always elicit intellectual consensus. Some of these were highlighted on our whiteboard (including the semi-visible 'role of conservation', 'technology-in-practice', and 'making'):

Many speakers noted the elitism and connoisseurship of book collecting and manuscript studies-- unfortunate modes of scholarship and commodification that result in a fixation on the 'lollipops' in the repository, the de luxe volumes and canonical, known-author texts. We had some of these on our list, too (Matthew Paris in MS 16 and 26, presented by Joey McMullen and Cat Jarman, respectively; MS 4, the Dover Bible, presented by Catherine Karkov; and MS 98, a scroll, presented by Anne McLaughlin), but the majority of manuscripts that colleagues talked about were the utiliarian, the everyday, as if such a category could really exist for these extraordinary survivors of the past.

A variety of Ss from Parker on the Web manuscripts, dated from c.1060 to 1220, and extracted using machine learning techniques (Stanford Global Currents)

Calls were made by Orietta Da Rold to "set the data free", or, as Alexandra Bolintineanu pointed out, for the Parker resource to be used to help expand the possibilities of scholarly investigation into medieval manuscript production that include a deeper understanding of the role of digital data in mediating these materials. Standardisation of repositories' metadata seems a major desideratum going forward, as does some effort to standardise the ways scholars describe features of manuscripts (especially script, as Peter Stokes demonstrated). As Erica Weaver suggested in her analysis of MS 422, 'deeply felt textual experiences' are as evident in our early literary materials as they are now, and whether in the flesh or on the screen, these manuscripts are as fascinating, moving, and compelling now as they surely were a millennium and more ago.

Thanks to Matthew Parker! Thanks to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Stanford University Libraries, and Cambridge University Library, and to all the teams, who have worked to collect, preserve, digitise and display these fabulous manuscripts. Thank you to Vice-Provost and Librarian, Mike Keller. Much gratitude to Georgia Henley, CESTA's Rani Sharma, Celena Allen, Amanda Bergado; Jon Quick, Peyton Lepp, Jeanie Abbott, and Max Ashton.

Participants and Topics

Andrew Prescott, “Form”; Suzanne Paul, “Function”; Orietta Da Rold (210) and Cat Jarman (26); Elizabeth Boyle (153) and Alexandra Bolintineanu (162); Benjamin Albritton (260) and Anya Adair (383); Catherine Karkov (23 and 4); Lindy Brady (144) and Carla María Thomas (402); Katie Lowe (178) and John Gallagher (320); Peter Stokes (367) and Erica Weaver (422); Sharon Rowley (41) and Mateusz Fafinski (286); Elaine Treharne (201) and Joey McMullen (16); David Johnson (322) and Abigail Robertson (161); Anne McLaughlin (98) and Siân Echard (61); Julia Crick, “Reflections”.

Campus ArchiTEXTure

Today, in the midst of a thunderous downpour, we examined Florida State University's Dodd Hall as an example of text:

Built in the late 1920s, this 'gothic collegiate' building now houses Classics, Religion and Philosophy, together with the FSU Heritage Museum. Inscribed over the doorway in Gothic-style letter-forms is an unattributed quotation:

It's clear, then, from these public words that this building belongs--ideologically, architecturally, and contextually--to an institution of learning. But is it (a) Text? We had a long discussion about the building's textness and its dominant features: its cathedral-like appearance, indicating the reverence with which we should approach these buildings (and their being off-bounds to those who don't belong?); its red brick, FSU-style, corporate identity. It is also a building that, like a chapter of a book, belongs to something much larger than itself: one instance of its co-textual (or syntagmatic) relationship with other 'legacy' buildings on campus is its place as #8 on the list of Legacy Walk things-to-see. These are the markers and buildings that remind onlookers and participants of the history of FSU and those who have passed-through its doors (http://www.fsu.edu/~legacy/).

Of most concern in reading this building as Text, though, was its intentionality. If the architect built this building as a library, and wasn't concerned with some larger meaning (no 'intentionality'), then does meaning inhere in it at all? Is it a text if Text = meaning? Well, rather like the adaptive reuse of medieval buildings in modern contexts, its meaning changes, and the onus of textness is on the reader (back to Barthes!), rather than the object itself. The text means something different to each participant; that is, text is necessarily subjective. As such, this building we pass on most days takes on a textual complexity that is performative, eventful, and unstable. We might wonder, then, if all Text, at all times, is ultimately unstable?

The Origin of Texts

The OED, s.v. 'origin', describes this as

the act or fact of beginning, or of springing from something; beginning of existence with reference to source or cause; rise or first manifestation

Under this same entry, 1b., the citations include the following from 1867: J. McCosh Method Divine Govt. (ed. 9) iii. ii. 377, 'The origin of evil, like every other beginning, shrouds itself in darkness'. Perhaps this 'darkness' about the origin of everything is most apt to discussions of textual genesis.

Seemingly conversely, though, the OED's meaning 2a, reveals 'origin' as

a. That from which anything originates, or is derived; source of being or existence; starting point. Now freq. in pl.

Trying to untangle these two proximate definitions of 'origin' is headache-inducing, and yet, in textual studies, the 'origin' can take on an, arguably, extraordinary and disproportionate significance. For textual critics, especially those trained in the classics or early literatures, determining the 'origin', the Ur-text, the fons is the goal of the editor. Interesting debates in the 1990s emerged among the traditional philologists (see, for example, the essays in D. G. Scragg and P. E. Szarmach, eds., Editing Old English [Brewer, 1994]) and the new philologists (P. Zumthor [Towards a Medieval Poetics], B. Cerquiglini [In Praise of the Variant] Stephen Nicholls [The New Philology]). The issue at stake was how to present the text. At the risk of oversimplifying complex arguments, it is the debate about whether to present a reconstructed, hypothetical proto-text that best illustrates the author's intended text (see the rationale of the Piers Plowman Project here: http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/) or whether to privilege the variant, or at least given the variant its long overdue sustained consideration (also part of the remit of the Piers Plowman venture). For many editors, treading a via media between these seemed preferable; for others, the argument for presenting simulacra, perhaps with en-face transcription, was a key desideratum. 

Turn-the-Page Display in the foyer of the British Library

At this point, and with very little real effect visible in the pbook or ebook presentation of scholarly critical editions, the debate has tailed off and has transformed into a debate about the nature of digital editing: how best to present a word-based or word- and image-based text on screen, utilising all the dynamic interface potential of the digital realm. Now, it is possible to have a manuscript version of a text, complete with a myriad of tools for interpreting and accessing not only that text, but all the co-texts almost simultaneously. None of this helps solve the issue of 'origin', though; how to access or present the 'original'. This is particularly the case when, as is most common in fact, the 'original' does not exist. Chaucer's original Wife of Bath's Tale does not survive, any more than an original version of Hamlet does. If 'origin' is the 'beginning of existence' or 'that from which anything originates', then authorial intentionality is surely the only origin for Text. Anything other than this is a remake, a version. Or is everything subsequent to the mental act an 'original' of its own? This might certainly permit us to account for the uniqueness of all text, particularly by virtue of its peculiar materiality. 

Perhaps more provocatively and fruitfully, though, we should go along with Cerquiglini and state with certainty that 'There is no such thing as originality'. We can say, then, that all texts are rendered equal and as such deserve individual study, sustained examination and a recognition of their own intrinsic value.

Text beyond price

An examination of heterotextuality proves that not all texts are born equal. Looking at all manner of texts--from 'Exit' signs to chalk graffiti, a sorority house to a bulletin board--it's clear that what links these texts is the intention to communicate; other attributes are variable. The building, the sorority house with its colonial architecture and Greek identifier, is replete with institutional authority, its academic credentials emblazoned across its facade; but it also shares a larger, national and ideological function, allied to all other sorority houses of its type (and, every sorority house, of course). The bulletin board, outside a room housing a writing centre, is also institutionally authorised, both reflecting and contributing to the university's identity and purpose. It also shares an important feature in common with the chalk graffiti (wittily and exclusively referencing the BBC Sherlock Holmes series); namely, its transience and ephemeral nature. In this, even though the bulletin board functions as an institutional sign like the 'Exit' notice screwed into the ceiling, the latter is made different through its permanence and legal mandate. All of these texts can be examined through their intentionality, materiality and functionality (as I've just done), but it's the extra (literally 'outside') variable--their value, 'aura', authenticity--that adds the essential feature of Text. How are these examples to be valued? Clearly very different values come into play: the financial (real estate prices), the legal (how to get out of the building in the case of a fire), the aesthetic (the graffiti, the sorority house. For some, the aesthetic appeal of graffiti is non-existent.). What about the ineffability of value, though? So-called 'sentimental value'? The visceral response to a worn-out old notebook? This becomes Text-beyond-price. This is the core of Text that can never be reproduced in any other medium.

The Invisible Aspect of Text

Walter Benjamin's 'Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is, rightly, one of the most important articles in the modern era, particularly for its aesthetic approach to Text. If Text is interpretable through its intentionality, materiality and functionality (more capacious descriptions than the alternative triad--'production, transmission and reception'), the missing element, and often the most significant element, is 'aura'. 'Aura' is notoriously difficult to pin down, but might, variously, be thought of as 'authenticity', 'originality', 'value', 'appeal', 'authority'. For Benjamin, loss of 'aura' emerges from reproduction, though the democratisation of art, for him, had great benefits. The essence of Text, then, is its irremovable intent, material, and function, but always weighted by the variable of 'aura'.

Here, from sixty minutes' hard work, are the two classroom boards with tweetable reductions of Benjamin's fundamental message, completed by the teams of my 'What is (a) Text' Senior Seminar.