Interesting take on the digitization of texts in a recent article by Ryan Szpiech. A few extracts:
"David A. Bell in his article “The Bookless Future” began to muse about the “dangers” of text searching:
[...] To view the text according to parameters defined by precise and limiting search terms is not simply to see only a fraction of the whole. (When, in fact, have we ever seen anything but a fraction of the whole?) Rather, as all text is transformed into data, the categories by which meaning is sifted and interpreted become narrower and more rigid. This changes the experience of the reader by limiting a priori the possible results, turning all books into reference books. The effects produced by this divide between reading and searching are impoverishing. David Levy already lamented in 2001, “We are now so oriented toward information-seeking and use that we have increasingly become blind to other, equally important dimensions of reading.” [...]
The reductive reading of a digital world, one in which text has become mechanically searchable, is a reading mediated principally through data. In an obvious way, this encourages a superficial engagement with writing and its significance, one directed at primary meaning rather than secondary or implied meaning, and one guided necessarily by selectiveness rather than completeness and by preconceived logical categories rather than creative intuitions developed at the moment of reading. The ossification of the categories of textual meaning necessarily eliminates the free and creative association characteristic of human thought, and yet it is such association that for me yields the intellectual benefits and the aesthetic pleasure of reading. Technology can produce larger and more elaborate data sets, but it cannot mimic the tangled and unexpected byways of insight and intuition. [...]
Just as Google Books does not simply strive to augment the reading of a book but to actually replace the reader’s book with the searcher’s book, so the ultimate goal of digital editions and digital facsimiles, I believe, is not only to reflect the “original,” to “capture” or “recapture” it, but to effectively replace it with a better image of itself. Whereas philology, the study of language history through texts, creates (like fetishism) a “desire for presence,” digital philology creates a simulacrum or iconic replacement for this presence. The injunction from Kings against graven images rings in my ears, and I choose a fetishism of the frail human object over an idolatry of the power of the machine."
"David A. Bell in his article “The Bookless Future” began to muse about the “dangers” of text searching:
Reading in this strategic, targeted manner can feel empowering. Instead of surrendering to the organizing logic of the book you are reading, you can approach it with your own questions and glean precisely what you want from it. You are the master, not some dead author. And this is precisely where the greatest dangers lie, because when reading, you should not be the master. Information is not knowledge, searching is not reading; and surrendering to the organizing logic of a book is, after all, the way one learns.
[...] To view the text according to parameters defined by precise and limiting search terms is not simply to see only a fraction of the whole. (When, in fact, have we ever seen anything but a fraction of the whole?) Rather, as all text is transformed into data, the categories by which meaning is sifted and interpreted become narrower and more rigid. This changes the experience of the reader by limiting a priori the possible results, turning all books into reference books. The effects produced by this divide between reading and searching are impoverishing. David Levy already lamented in 2001, “We are now so oriented toward information-seeking and use that we have increasingly become blind to other, equally important dimensions of reading.” [...]
The reductive reading of a digital world, one in which text has become mechanically searchable, is a reading mediated principally through data. In an obvious way, this encourages a superficial engagement with writing and its significance, one directed at primary meaning rather than secondary or implied meaning, and one guided necessarily by selectiveness rather than completeness and by preconceived logical categories rather than creative intuitions developed at the moment of reading. The ossification of the categories of textual meaning necessarily eliminates the free and creative association characteristic of human thought, and yet it is such association that for me yields the intellectual benefits and the aesthetic pleasure of reading. Technology can produce larger and more elaborate data sets, but it cannot mimic the tangled and unexpected byways of insight and intuition. [...]
Just as Google Books does not simply strive to augment the reading of a book but to actually replace the reader’s book with the searcher’s book, so the ultimate goal of digital editions and digital facsimiles, I believe, is not only to reflect the “original,” to “capture” or “recapture” it, but to effectively replace it with a better image of itself. Whereas philology, the study of language history through texts, creates (like fetishism) a “desire for presence,” digital philology creates a simulacrum or iconic replacement for this presence. The injunction from Kings against graven images rings in my ears, and I choose a fetishism of the frail human object over an idolatry of the power of the machine."
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