One of the things that I kind of already knew, but didn’t really focus on until this semester, is the reason that electronic sources are simply not good enough. Perhaps in English sources it’s difference, but the way uploading information a la pre-modern Japanese has gone can be seen pretty much in the UVA e-text initiative, or the online list of Noh plays you get if you’re ever doing Noh research and type “noh translation” into google. What you get on the former is something that, while it continues to be updated, is already out of date, code-wise, and a bombardment of sources, of which it’s unclear how, exactly, they went from paper to electronic form. What you get on the latter is a mess of links to other databases that stopped updating in 2001 or 2002. Putting aside the question of what software or by-hand typing might have been used to get a book source inputted online without formal permission from the current publishers on texts out of copyright, and what errors might have been committed there making the texts mostly unusable without side by side comparison with the original sources, what is mostly common to both of these is the assumption that once a text has been put up into electronic format, one if enough.
All this is to say that I get into a lot of angry face discussions with my boyfriend (who is a die hard digital is the best, I want to live in virtual reality and never speak to any of you again mwahahaha fanatic) about the nature of text and why I like paper better than electronic. I’m not some kind of anti-electronics crazed person. I don’t think technology is where I want it to be right now – if I was going to use a Kindle or iPad full time for my reading, I would need it to be able to take notes on the pages I’m reading, be able to highlight, and what not – adding bookmarks to come back to later just aren’t good enough either. It gets complicated fast when dealing with the amount of information I do. I like to mark up what I’m reading, and I don’t feel comfortable when I can’t.
But it goes deeper than that – I look at the e-text initiative of my alma mater, and what I see is a database that has taken a bunch of “authoritative” collections online and said, “This is great, now everyone can read these! Yay!” when the real problem is that we’re dealing with manuscripts that changed over time. Without the bibliography, the footnotes, the introductions, of the original text, I can’t tell where this manuscript came from, who compiled it, what makes their version accurate. Even in modern Japanese literature, it’s a well known fact that most authors syndicated their writings in newspapers, which, if they hit it off, were later collected, but even those collections are sometimes wildly inaccurate in their assumptions because their own texts are full of transcription errors. What if someone picks this version and puts it up online and it’s the only one to survive???
One version is just not good enough, and right now, it feels like that’s all the e-text community really has on its mind. It’s understandable – there’s a lot of shit out there that needs to be digitized, but I get very prickly when I’m told that digital is best!!!1 because at this point in time, it simply isn’t true. Digital formatting makes a lot of assumptions that I’m simply, as a scholar, not comfortable with – it assumes it’s the truth, when in fact, it’s just a pale shade of reality that, when compared to the real thing, is just sad.
