Collecting Full-Text CD-ROMs in Literature: Theory, Format, and Selection - humanities library purchasing

Library Trends, Spring, 2000 by Roberta Astroff

   concerns itself with extraliterary matters, including letters, diaries,
   films, paintings, medical treatises, etc. It looks for an opposing tension
   in a text, then for an opposing tension related in history. New
   historicists seek "surprising coincidences" ... that may cross generic,
   historical and cultural lines previously maintained, highlighting
   unsuspecting lending and borrowing of metaphor, ceremony, dance, dress, or
   popular culture. (Veeser, pp. xii, 248)

The specific social and cultural contexts of the work, such as contemporaneous mortality rates, the economic structure of the publishing industry, and the social structures of race, gender, and class, are seen as actively shaping the literary work. The work's intertextuality thus extends beyond its relations to other literary texts to other forms of discourse. At the same time, "textual and editorial work are once again being seen for what they are and have always been: the fundamental ground for any kind of historically oriented intellectual work" (McGann, 1996, p. 2).

Despite the very real differences in theoretical foundations and despite jeremiads about the absence of literary works in today's literature departments, a quick look at current research and course syllabi across the literature departments at a research university showed definite patterns and commonalities significant to librarians. First and most obvious is the centrality of a primary text, even as theorists argue about the definition of "text." In other obvious patterns, researchers need and create concordances; explore the relations between music, art, politics, and literature in specific eras; and compare translations, editions, folios, and manuscripts. Graduate students are asked to evaluate editions, compare them, and create their own critical (and at times electronic) editions. Undergraduates are asked to explore events and conditions of the author's time period and to identify trends in art and music contemporary to the literary work being studied.

The electronic text format can be very useful in each of these approaches to literature. As Ellis (1993) noted: "In the humanities, ... each new paper directly or indirectly works upon a `core' or primary text. Thus as far as the humanities are concerned, core texts (in full-text) must be included in the electronic universe to adequately represent [the] structure of the field" (p. 26).

Scholars have used machine-readable texts to produce concordances since the 1960s. Later formats that allowed for Boolean searching made electronic texts useful to research in stylistics, linguistics, and lexicography (Ellis, 1993). Now, the quality of image reproduction on CD-ROMs and some World Wide Web sites means facsimiles of original manuscripts can be used for research purposes. The ability to display two or more editions or translations side by side facilitates close textual analysis that can otherwise require travel to archives. Unsworth (1996) notes that:

   We can expect to see increasing interest in editing (including the theory
   of editing), in bibliographic and textual scholarship, in history, and in
   linguistic analysis, since these are areas in which the new technology
   opens up the possibility of re-creating the basic resources of all our
   activities and providing us with revolutionary tools for working with these
   resources. (p. 5)