Week 3: On representation and the dichotomy between scholarly and pleasure reading

While working on an essay about Virginia Woolf’s The Waves last year I came across a digital archive dedicated to another of Woolf’s famous works, To the Lighthouse. Despite the large collection of books by and about Virginia Woolf you’ll find in my apartment, for some reason I have never been able to get father than 30 pages in to To the Lighthouse (a fact I usually keep a secret). Still, the Woolf Online archive (which can be accessed at: www.woolfonline.com) caught my attention and I spent much too long exploring it and thinking about To the Lighthouse when I should have been thinking about The Waves.

One thing that struck me as I explored the archive was that it defines its audience. Woolf Online is meant for Woolf scholars, and not for those looking to enjoy a literary experience.

The content and purpose of the digital archive is described as follows:

“The site is intended to serve as a resource for research and study of Woolf's modernist classic. On this site you will find images and transcriptions of the holograph drafts (in three notebooks housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library), the typescripts, the proofs, and various early editions of the novel, including the first British and American editions and their variants. Also included is a wealth of contextual materials, such as diary entries and letters pertaining to the novel, early reviews of the novel, selected essays Woolf wrote during the two- year period during which she worked on To the Lighthouse, and photographs of the Stephen family, Cornwall, and Talland House, all of which inform the setting and characters of the novel.” 

Kind of like the book wheel we looked at in class, this archive has a highly defined use case. Thinking about this in relation to our class I asked myself, how does presenting these texts and supporting material in the context of scholarship and not the context of reading for pleasure affect both how the materials are represented and how users then interpret these materials?

Looking specifically at the US first edition of To the Lighthouse, the manner in which the text has been digitized and the access routes provided to the reader clearly indicate that the text is for study, not for pleasure reading.

One of the first signs that this representation of To the Lighthouse is designed for scholarly use is that the interface privileges the page as a distinct unit of study. Each page is given its own unique name identifier and description and then is provided as both an image and as a text transcription. Navigating between a page image and a page transcription proves to be an easier task than trying to navigate forward or backwards in the text like you might do when reading the book to take in the story. Indeed, even when looking at a page image, the full page is never in view (unless you have a much larger screen than myself, or you use your browser’s zoom out function), and despite the page already being enlarged, the interface also provides a magnifying function which brings your attention to small details such as typography, paper texture and any small defect on the page. In this way the interface privileges the study of page construction, which, though important, may not be the main focus of those reading the text from start to finish.

Another interesting representational choice is the ability to “layer” a page transcription over a page image (see image below). This layering effect serves to separate the “text” of the page from the page itself by making them two distinct units.  For me, the layering effect also draws attention to the shape of the words on the page and the typography (seeing as the transcription is always in the same basic san serif font). On a more (or maybe less) obvious note, this representational feature also makes the page extremely hard to read, drawing the user’s focus again to the details of the page instead of the story as a whole.

 

Woolf Online screenshot - showing transcript layering over page image and magnifying feature

In our reading this week I think Sperberg-McQueen captured the essence of how these kinds of scholarly textual representations can affect the actions and interpretations of the user’s that access them:

 “As scholars work more intimately with computers, the electronic texts they use ought to help them in their work, making easy the kinds of work scholars want to do with them. But tools always shape the hand that wields them; technology always shapes the minds that use it” (pg. 34).

Does this site allow scholars to do the kinds of work they are interested in doing with To the Lighthouse? It certainly provides a wealth of materials for scholars to look at and contextualize the production, dissemination and reception of the text. However, I think it is the way these materials are represented, and the ways in which the user can interact with them that Sperberg-McQueen is highlighting. And so, though the textual representation of materials related to To the Lighthouse (specifically the first US edition that I looked at in depth) allow the user to investigate the details of the text at a more granular level which is certainly useful to scholars, they also make it more difficult to view the text at a distance, and consider the text as whole. I wonder then, is there a way to represent a text online that allows the user to approach the text for either scholarship OR pleasure? Surely each kind of reading can inform the other.

References:

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts." Literary and Linguistic Computing 6, no. 1 (1991): 34-46.

Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1927. Woolf Online. Ed. Pamela L. Caughie, Nick Hayward, Mark Hussey, Peter Shillingsburg, and George K. Thiruvathukal. Web. 27 January 2016. <http://www.woolfonline.com>.