Dino Buzzetti

Digital Representation and the Text Model

ID oes the digital representation of the text demand the definition of a model? In and of itself, every representation and, consequently, every form of text representation entails the implicit or explicit assumption of a model, at least if we accept the postulate that the “map is not the territory.” 1 So, the conventional image of a text, handwritten or typed, is itself a text model. The same thing can be said, then, of its digital representation or, to be more precise, of every form of its digital representation, regardless of its specific kind. The problem of the model presents itself, therefore, as a problem of adequacy with respect to the conventional model and representation. With respect to the conventional representation, an adequate digital representation should in no way impoverish the informative content of the text. If the digital text representation is not original, that is, if we consider a reproduction as opposed to a text produced directly in digital form, the first fundamental criterion for adequacy is constituted by the exhaustivity of the representation. In order to obtain the exhaustivity of the representation, markup is usually resorted to. In fact, textual information in machine-readable form is represented primarily by way of the binary coding of the characters: in this way, the “text” is conceived, from a computational point of view, as a type of data and the treatment of the text, that is, the “storage and processing of textual material,” comes to consist in the treatment of “information coded as characters or sequences of characters.” 2 It is evident, however, that the computational notion of the text as a type of data does not coincide with the notion of the text as a product of literary activity. The pure and simple character sequence is not adequate enough to represent all of the information contained in the “literary material as originally written by an author” (TP 1). Hence the need to furnish additional information by way of embedding markers defined by a given markup language.

Defining the Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities is currently undergoing a reconfiguration at McGill. The Digital Humanities Initiative is bringing together digital humanists from across a number of faculties for the first time. Yet it is not clear what Digital Humanities actual are: this central problem arises from the vast potential the digital age presents for humanities scholarship. Key to the dilemma is whether Digital Humanities itself is something distinct from analog humanities, or whether it is merely the reconfiguration of humanities itself using digital technologies and media. At the same time, for many Digital Humanities also offers important opportunities for reconsidering the place of the humanities within society itself. Not only are digital technologies, media, and social models reconfiguring public life, they are also offering new avenues for intellectual engagement and the ways in which humanistic studies as well as artistic creation enters into, and becomes active in, the public realm. Moving forward with Digital Humanities at McGill requires rigorous consideration of the potentials presented by digitization, and the problems presented by the inability to satisfactorily define or categorize what it is the Digital Humanities does or seeks to do – and the implications of both. And so, this lack of definition is our overarching heuristic.

Current issues in eighteenth-century linguistic historiography

1. For about twenty years the history of the sciences of language, by which expression we mean all theoretical practices having language as their object, has become an active field, cultivated by specialized scholars. This fact is undoubtedly due to the present day development of the linguistic disciplines. Within this field, the eighteenth century, in particular, has been studied, as is shown by the bibliography given at the end, which includes only recent books and does not take into account the more than two hundre6 articles which have also appeared (see Aarsleff, 1975, 1979; Auroux et al., 1982, pp. 146-171; Porset in Joly and Stefanini, 1977, pp. 11-95; Schlieben-Lange, 1983, pp. 127-141, and also Droixhe, 1978, pp. 417430). This activity has produced a certain number of results and aroused several specific discussions. The themes dealt with in the articles presented here have been chosen on the grounds of these recent developments and of their interest for philosophical discussion. In this introduction we intend to place them within the context of these discussions and somehow to give a brief survey of the research

The Digital Humanities Role and the Liberal Disciplines

The subject proposed for discussion during this panel consisted in evaluating the role of digital humanities from the point of view of specific disciplinary research practices. The first analyzed discipline, involved in the digital humanities practices and theories, is Knowledge Organization (section 2); the second is Archaeological Computing (section 3).

Where Do Humanities Computing and Digital Libraries Meet

It is in libraries that humanists have always found their basic and essential instrumentation. Libraries can be described as the humanist’s lab. Obviously this applies also to digital humanists, who deal with digital objects for research purposes, and to digital libraries that store collections in digital form. But digital objects produced for research purposes are not just inactive artefacts and ‘digital library objects are more than collections of bits,’ for ‘the content of even the most basic digital object has some structure’ and to enable access and transactions additional information or ‘metadata’ is required. [1] So ‘if, unlike print,’ digital editions ‘are also open-ended and collaborative work-sites rather than static closed electronic objects’ (p. 77), [2] it can be legitimately asked how a digital repository for objects of this kind can enable effective access to the interactive functionalities they provide. In a digital research context, the issue of how the architecture of a digital library could meet the needs of the working practices increasingly adopted by digital humanists seems therefore of primary importance.

Reviews : Tullio Maranhão, Therapeutic Discourse and Socratic Dialogue: a cultural critique, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986,

How can a close scrutiny of Socratic dialogue bear upon the controversy about the nature of therapeutic discourse waged within the professional community of therapists? Therapeutic discourse is a ’cultural subsystem’ (26) akin to philosophy, religion, science and politics. It affects our outlook on life and the world by and large and provides us with ’principles for action’. As an attempt to integrate, in discourse, ’theory and practice’ (xii), it embodies a recurring theme of ’the Western cultural tradition’. In ancient Greek culture and society, Socratic dialogue was a significant endeavour to preserve, in discourse, the unity of ’representation and action’ (xiv) throughout historical change; in our society, the transformation of therapeutic discourse, in the spirit of either modernist ’conservatism’ or postmodernist ’revisionism’ (xii), faces very much the same problems. For, in its quest for unity, therapeutic discourse meets an ’epistemological puzzle’ (xiv), bestowed by Socrates’ philosophy, which originated ’one of the essential tensions of the Western cultural heritage’ (230), the tearing dilemma between ’fragmentation’ and ’integration’ of a ’trinity’ constituted by ’knowledge, power, and rhetoric’ (236). As it happens, ’the struggle to integrate knowledge, power, and rhetoric into a unity is as frustrating as the struggle to delete one or two members of this trinity and arrive at a consistent wholeness’