0.26 Underpinnings of the social edition  (Page 2/32)

This article offers a brief outline of the development of both REKn and PReE at the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL) at the University of Victoria, from proof of concept through to their current iterations, concluding with a discussion about their future adaptations, implementations, and integrations with other projects and partnerships. This narrative situates REKn and PReE within the context of prototyping as a research activity, and documents the life cycle of a complex digital humanities research program that is itself part of larger, ongoing, iterative programs of research. Much of the content of the present article has been presented in other forms elsewhere. See Appendix 1 for a list of addresses and presentations from which the present article is drawn.

2. conceptual backgrounds and critical contexts

2.1. conceptual backgrounds

The conceptual origins of REKn may be located in two fundamental shifts in literary studies in the 1980s—the emergence of New Historicism and the rise of the sociology of the text—and in the proliferation of large-scale text-corpus humanities computing projects in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

2.1.1. new historicism

New Historicism situated itself in opposition to earlier critical traditions that dismissed historical and cultural context as irrelevant to literary study, and proposed instead that “literature exists not in isolation from social questions but as a dynamic participant in the messy processes of cultural formation.” Thus, New Historicism eschewed the distinction between text and context, arguing that both “are equal partners in the production of culture” (Hall 2007: vii). In Renaissance studies, as elsewhere, this ideological shift challenged scholars to engage not only with the traditional canon of literary works but also with the whole corpus of primary materials at their disposal. As New Historicism blurred the lines between the literary and non-literary, its proponents were quick to illustrate that all cultural forms—literary and non-literary, textual and visual—could be freely and fruitfully “read” alongside and against one another. It is outside the purview of this article to evaluate the claims of New Historicism. Interested readers are directed to the following early critical assessments of New Historicism: Erickson 1987, Howard 1986, and Pechter 1987.

2.1.2. the sociology of text

A concurrent paradigm shift in bibliographical circles was the rise of the social theory of text, exemplified in the works of Jerome J. McGann (1983) and D. F. McKenzie (1986). “If the work is not confined to the historically contingent and the particular,” the social theory of text posited, “it is nevertheless only in its expressive textual form that we encounter it, and material conditions determine meanings” (Sutherland 1997: 5). In addition to being “an argument against the notion that the physical book is the disposable container,” as Kathryn Sutherland has suggested, “it is also an argument in favor of the significance of the text as a situated act or event, and therefore, under the conditions of its reproduction, necessarily multiple” (1997: 6).