Humanistic Remix
As Stanley Fish posited in 2010 in one of his columns: "Do the digital humanities somehow redefine or state a new vision for what they might be?" One of the possibilities is electronic publishing, which was the logical extension of word processing into the internet for further revision/remix.
In 1983, Michael Crichton was interviewed on the Merv Griffin show. He said, "When you type, the words appear on the screen … you can move around on the screen, change what you’ve written, pull blocks of text, put them elsewhere. You have complete freedom.”
Books are kind of isolated things, save for their capacity to commune with other books on a shelf, while electronic texts can have rich metadata, and hyperlinks to other books, yet have no physical equivalent. Even though a publication can be electronic, it is an vain exercise in imprimatur, as is, ironically, a print book; and it can be scanned in less than an hour and sent in a text file from India. Even if an author releases only a print book, or a musician releases an album only on vinyl, technology is the imminent sink hole, causing a "collapse" of the older structures above it. But the idea of the print book still gives comfort to the idea of the words being somewhat permanent. Print and electronic redound to the best of both worlds, and solves the problem of not easily changing one's mind about something one has written. (Misquotes on the internet are another story--cut/pasting/revising "truth". Complete freedom...)
In 1983, Michael Crichton was interviewed on the Merv Griffin show. He said, "When you type, the words appear on the screen … you can move around on the screen, change what you’ve written, pull blocks of text, put them elsewhere. You have complete freedom.”
Books are kind of isolated things, save for their capacity to commune with other books on a shelf, while electronic texts can have rich metadata, and hyperlinks to other books, yet have no physical equivalent. Even though a publication can be electronic, it is an vain exercise in imprimatur, as is, ironically, a print book; and it can be scanned in less than an hour and sent in a text file from India. Even if an author releases only a print book, or a musician releases an album only on vinyl, technology is the imminent sink hole, causing a "collapse" of the older structures above it. But the idea of the print book still gives comfort to the idea of the words being somewhat permanent. Print and electronic redound to the best of both worlds, and solves the problem of not easily changing one's mind about something one has written. (Misquotes on the internet are another story--cut/pasting/revising "truth". Complete freedom...)
