New textualities

Abstract

This article introduces EJES, vol. 11, issue 2, New Textualities. It briefly outlines the relation between theoretical and technological changes that has led to a re-examination of textual forms in the digital age. Texts as both social text and technotext are tentatively explored in the context of remediation and proliferation of textual materialities that defines contemporary culture. The six articles contained in this issue deal with specific aspects of this linguistic and literary context, in which texts, metatexts and tools for analysing texts are fostering a new critical awareness of textual phenomena and textual representation.

Keywords:

• remediation
• textuality
• social text
• digital archives
• electronic editing
• cybertext

Notes

1 See, for instance, IATE – Interactive Terminology for Europe (EU inter-institutional terminology database system), an European Union web-based resource for translators, launched in March 2007 <http://iate.europa.eu/>.

2 The Text Encoding Initiative guidelines comprise formal representation of definitions for hundreds of textual features. These guidelines are known as TEI P3 (1994), TEI P4 (2002) and TEI P5 (forthcoming). A first release of TEI P5 is available at <www. tei-c.org/P5/> (accessed 15 March 2007). See Johanna Drucker's article in this issue for a discussion of the questions involved in formalising textual features.

3 Book History, an annual journal published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, has a running series on ‘the state of the discipline’, which charts this renewed interest in the history of books as social and material objects (see vols 1 – 9, 1998 – 2006).

4 Text, published annually from 1979 to 2005, was re-launched in 2006 (two issues a year) as Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation (Indiana University Press), which reflects this theoretical representation of material text as cultural text in contemporary textual studies.

5 For a sample of significant projects see: Electronic Beowulf (British Library, 2 CD-ROM set) <http://www.uky.edu/∼kiernan/eBeowulf/guide.htm>; Piers Plowman Electronic Archive (SEENET, Society for Early English and Norse Electronic Texts/University of Virginia) <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/seenet/piers/>; The Aberdeen Bestiary (University of Aberdeen) <http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/index.hti>; Roman de la Rose (Johns Hopkins University) <http://rose.mse.jhu. edu/>; The Canterbury Tales Project (University of Birmingham, 7 CD-ROM set) <http://www.canterburytalesproject.org/>; Women Writers Project (Brown University) <http://www.wwp.brown.edu/>; William Blake Archive (University of Virginia) <http://www.blakearchive.org/>; Rossetti Archive (University of Virginia) <http://www.rossettiarchive.org/>; The Walt Whitman Archive (University of Virginia) <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/>; Dickinson Electronic Archives (University of Maryland) <http://www.emilydickinson.org/>.

6 See, for instance, NINES – A Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship <http://www.nines.org/>. In February 2007, NINES launched Collex, ‘an open-source collections- and exhibits-builder designed to aid humanities scholars working in digital collections’ <http://nines.org/collex>.

7 The Temporal Modelling Project (2003) <http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/time/time.html>; ABO Artists' Books Online (2006) <http://testetext.lib.virginia.edu/cocoon/abonline/>.

8 DMVI – Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustration, a project developed by Julia Thomas, Tim Killick, Anthony Mandal and David Skilton at The Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research (CEIR), Cardiff University's School of English, Communication and Philosophy <http://www.dmvi.cf.ac.uk/>.

9 For a catalogue of online works, see the Electronic Literature Directory (University of California at Los Angeles) <http://directory.eliterature.org/>.