0.7 Homer multitext project—a response  (Page 4/5)

Before we leave the thorny subject of authenticity, it is worth pausing to reflect further on the performance of the creation of objects that we would want others in the future to deem authentic. This is invariably an iterative process of drafting, negotiation and redrafting until the exact wording is agreed, followed by the formal sealing and signing of the document depending on the level of binding that is required to guarantee authenticity. Anyone familiar with government record-keeping in the analogue will know that it is usually possible to find the traces of the processes that led to the production of the final document. Just as with the Iliad , early drafts and variants can be radically different from the canonical document and just as valuable to scholarship, prompting the time-honoured question, “Why on earth did they do that?” As everyone who has had the misfortune to use Microsoft Word’s “track changes” knows, the preservation of drafts in the digital at the time of creation is a nightmare best avoided. Even when the canonical version has been agreed upon, that, as we well know, does not mean that it is necessarily incontrovertibly synchronic. It will be subject to just the same diachronic forces as any other text, as meanings change. Archivists with a postmodern turn have become fond of claiming that texts are always in the process of becoming, open to a variety of interpretations over time (for example, Harris 2002). You do not have to be a postmodernist to share at least something of this perspective. If it were not so, historians and lawyers would be out of a job.

The project that concerns us here is about a “becoming,” which swaps the fixity of the print culture for the fluidity of the digital in which the end is always far off in a diachronic fog. In a sense, in the oral tradition, as the title “multitext project” implies, a text is always in a “continual process of wear and repair,” as the Opies observed in the 1950s of childhood playground games. Even when a stasis is established by recording in whatever media, this process persists and can be observed, for example, in the way in which folk melodies are preserved in church hymnals and then repurposed, as Phil Bohlman has shown (Bohlman and Chow. 2006). This leads on to the question of whether there is an analogue equivalent of a website such as that of the Center for Hellenic Studies. It has the characteristics of a collection that may or may not equate to a library or an archive. The very term collection is as problematic as authenticity and inevitably involves privileging content according to criteria that often change over time as objectives and staff change (Currall et al. 2005). Privileging is always value-laden in ways that are not always explicit, however well-defined collecting policies appear to be, largely because there is rarely any record of decisions to exclude (Currall et al. 2006). Where a digital collection differs from the analogue is that content itself lacks fixity in a number of ways. Objects that apparently have fixity, such as peer-reviewed content that has an analogue equivalent, are not fixed because every time it is viewed it is logically not the same, as the bit stream is modified. Much more problematic is where the content itself is dynamic and subject to addition and subtraction (Allison et al. 2005). This makes websites the digital equivalent of the multiple renditions of the oral tradition. There is none of the fixity that is familiar in the manuscript or print culture.