Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 478.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Patricia Galloway <galloway@gslis.utexas.edu> (16)
Subject: Re: 14.0472 Epstein's revolution
[2] From: Jascha Kessler <jaschak@earthlink.net> (210)
Subject: Re: 14.0472 Epstein's revolution
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2000 09:42:56 +0000
From: Patricia Galloway <galloway@gslis.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: 14.0472 Epstein's revolution
Replying to Patrick Rourke's reservations about Epstein (and concurring
with many), I still must as an alectronic records archivist hope that
the situation about totally ephemeral authorial revisions won't be quite
what he Rourke pessimistically envisions. People trying to create
archives for "born-digital" documents are attempting to craft solutions
that would indeed prevent deleted versions (by at least known authors)
from withering away from random bit rot--instead, they should be
jealously gobbled up and treasured by those who are interested in
collecting corpora. It seems clear to me that the tasks of archivists
are going to change radically, but that doesn't mean that managing
multiple versions will be that difficult a task as long as a discovery
mechanism is set in place and the copyright laws don't interpret fair
use out of existence (we may be goners already).
Pat Galloway
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Texas-Austin
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2000 09:43:38 +0000
From: Jascha Kessler <jaschak@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: 14.0472 Epstein's revolution
while we are talking about the capacity to change texts in electronic
editions, two English writers come immediately to mind, the first being of
course, as cited, Auden, in I think "1939." The line he expunged at the
last from the revised collected poems is the famous one, "We must love one
another or die." Auden remarked, famously, "We die anyway." That of course
changes a hell of a lot: the first was connected with the pre-WW II
situation, when he opted out of the Battle of Britain, with Isherwood, both
evading the US INS be forgetting that they had traveled earlier to China on
the Red Carpet, meaning a news assignment paid for by Moscow gold. (They
had a lot of fun there anyway.) Auden was talking of the necessity for
let's call it not Eros, but Agape, in the broadest sense. In the end, his
sadness and depression got to him, and didnt give a damn about love or
loving, which is sad for a poet of his sort...he needed love, and asked for
it...out of childhood, say, characterizing himself as an "anal passive."
The much more serious observation is to remind us all about Orwell's
notorious "memory hole," the bank of editing oubliettes served by
writer/editor slaves like Winston Smith, in 1984. History was altered
simply by cutting out, forging new pictures of leaders, as with the
Politburo, rewriting the old newspapers and books, and slipping the old
papers into that slot over the furnace. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia is
what Orwell had in mind, among other things, which was notorious for
replacing the leaders at May Ceremonies with new heads, after the old ones
had been, so to say, lopped. He who controls the past controls the future;
he who controls the future controls the present. Orwell hadnt imagined our
volatile and labile servers, but we are arriving at that condition via the
great open freedom of the internet, which is paradoxical and should give us
pause indeed. Though, even as we stand and muse, paused, we will be shoved
from behind, or is it from the future...and end flat on our faces, the "gun"
pressing behind our ear, and ...whose finger on the trigger? There is no
controlling this oncoming condition, I suspect. Big Brother is a jocular
term. It will be instead a Global Village, and it takes a Village to
suppress the individual, easily done. John Savage, it will be recalled, was
plucked from the "reservation" in BRAVE NEW WORLD (1936?), brought the only
copy of Shakespeare left, a book that startled his friend the copywriter for
ads in the Brave New World, which had this mantra, much like ours today in
MP3 musics: Orgy porgy, Ford and Fun...etc. That 20th Century was full of
prophecy, it would seem, and much of those will soon be forgotten, and lost
to the electronical libraries where who is or what is controlling access?
Etc. Alas.
Jascha Kessler
Professor of English & Modern Literature, UCLA
Telephone: (310) 393-4648 (9:00 a.m. - 11:00 p.m. PST)
Fax: (360) 838-8589/VoiceMail 24 hours (360) 838-8589
http://www.english.ucla.edu/jkessler/
http://www.xlibris.com
http://jaschakessler.homestead.com/
http://www.mcphersonco.com
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