Kenneth Price attacks terminology of large-scale text-based electronic publishing, and I think his attack is unwarranted. An invasion, if you will.
He tackles edition, archive, database, and project in his essay. Edition seems to encompass too many changes and annotations, archive and database are outdated, and project is too unfocused for his needs. However, I think therein lies the problem with Price's essay: his problems. Kenneth Price is approaching this from his own arena, and I think he fails to consider the larger literary sphere.
Scholars, especially scholars who are used to traditional print-publishing, need to have access to familiar terminology as they transition into the digital-age. I think that McLuhan is in his right to warn us not to look into the future with our rear-view mirrors, but I would argue that there are so many valid projects that use these words (edition, archive, database, project). In addition, there are so many scholars that are not Price that don't think arsenal is the terminology that the technological community should be gravitating towards.
Maybe I'm still stuck in my writer view point. I like the focus on my written product, the thing that I poured my blood, sweat, and tears into and let THAT speak for me. Price clearly wants to shift away from this mindset with his use of the word "arsenal," because he thinks it can help lend to a different mindset. He ends his essay asking this question:
"Can we imagine a world in which what is emphasized is not the created thing so much as the group of people who are now joined together for a common purpose?" (Price).
I can imagine this world, but I don't know how I feel about it. I think there is value in literature, in art, in the beauty of the product. I'm a Wilde fangirl in that way. My hope is that the large-scale text-based electronic publishing world will find a happy medium that celebrates a collaboration of scholars as well as the product of their collaboration.
No comments:
Post a Comment