I don’t know about you guys, but this morning’s TEI class was so useful for me because we began to see the ways in which digital projects can give us new ways of visually conceptualizing relationships between authors / publishers more generally and editions / edits on the level of text. For me, the key line was that such projects “allow the reader to set up their ideal reading environment” by choosing the elements they wanted to see and use in the documents. Giving such power to the reader challenges all our established ideas about author/reader/editor configurations and I truly believe that these shifting power dynamics are exactly the self same ones that our modernist writers (let’s say Wilfred Watson’s grid poetry, for example) were striving towards.
I think such tools and technologies, if we can think creatively enough about them, are going to offer us some very powerful ways to take the EMiC project to groundbreaking places in terms of our own conceptualizations of Canadian modernism. What sorts of projects can we imagine? Bart noted that being able to visualize the relationships between publishers, presses, and authors would be an invaluable tool for us. What about being able to compare editorial practices between our authors? How do F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith’s styles compare? Are there gender breakdowns between editorial practices? Et cetera, ad infinitum, yadda yadda yadda.
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I completely agree that visualising the relationships between actors, institutions, vehicles for publication etc would be a brilliant use of our data. I hadn’t even considered comparing editorial practices, but what a great idea.
I sometimes wonder whether the kind of excitement we feel when we notice the way the web is reconfiguring our lives – both scholarly & otherwise – is similar to what the modernists themselves felt at things like mass communications technologies & aeroplanes (I’m thinking of that moment in *Orlando* where she steps out of the miasma of the Victorian era and is caught up in the whirl of a 20th-century street) …