Chapter 5. CONTENT IS NOT CONTEXT: RADICAL TRANSPARENCY AND THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF INFORMATIONAL PALIMPSESTS IN ONLINE DISPLAY

Abstract

or for the internet, dividing structure and content— the layer approach used in modern web development— has in luenced our modern notions of textual presentation. Conscious of it or not, popular conceptions of “content” treat the text as a Platonic ideal loating in the cloud, divorced from any mechanisms of production or display. Since the presentation and display layers are handled separately in most modern web and publishing tools, the underlying assumption is that content can luidly it any container it is placed into, like water poured into beakers of differing shape, but similar volume. As scholars of medieval manuscript and early print culture can attest, however, this is ultimately a dangerous misconception. For example, in this very volume Timothy Stinson has pointed out that the act of “translating” a medieval scribal text to printed works has “profoundly shaped conceptions of medieval authorship and textuality and coloured the way we understand, read, and teach medieval literature.” 1 How much more, then, does the separation of presentation and display alter our understanding? Likewise, Tamsyn MahoneySteel’s chapter notes that, even when a single manuscript exists “the loss of information in the translation from parchment to page or screen, is still great.” 2 If the philosophy behind the modern notion of “content” is true— that it luidly its whatever space we wish it to in whatever manner we want— then surely the medieval manuscript and its print editions should be able to do so as well. As MahoneySteel’s cogent statement on the loss of information points out, however, this is not the case. The reality is that any action taken to inscribe text— whether the initial act of creation, an act of interpretation, or an act of presentation in a manuscript, printed book, or on an online display— is inherently an act of editorial interpretation at best and intervention at worst. The tools, infrastructures, and methods we use— and, increasingly, the standards we attempt to enfold all texts within under the banner of interoperability— have certain expectations and goals in mind, often built around the metadata ontologies used to allow text to be read by a machine and the needs of the software development cycle. Those goals may or may not correspond to the researcher’s goals in developing a virtual archive or those of the original authors, scribes, and editors of the manuscripts the tool is working with. Instead, these tools and methods are largely a black box, de ined here as anything that receives input and generates output but does not allow the observer to discern its underlying workings.