The materiality of text

Pierazzo, Elena. Modelling (Digital) Texts, in Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods. London: Routledge, 2016, p.37-64

Of the two natures of texts – materiality and immateriality – it is the latter that allows for their transmission: texts can be transmitted (that is, transcribed and therefore made material) because they are also immaterial.p. 50

The maximum immateriality is offered by the category ‘Unclaimed texts on the Web’, which refers to those texts which are presented without any reference to the material editions from which they are presumably drawn: no reference to editor, source edition or original document. While presenting a very complex reality of theoretical positions in a perhaps over-simplistic way, these graphs have the advantage of showing the path between (immaterial) text and (material) document as a continuum, with no clearly defined boundaries, as well as the relative positioning and therefore distance and vicinity of different theoretical approaches. p.52.

[…] a text is a model that, among the facts selected by the reader, includes the verbal content of the document […] p. 44

In this sense the work is not a physical object, but a combination of the immaterial dimensions of all the documents and all the texts that derive from them that have enough in common (‘closely related bibliographically’) to be defined as the same ‘thing’. p. 46

In fact, no edition will ever be able to account for all possible facts of a work; as Shillingsburg maintained: ‘[n]o edition is a full representation of that which it attempts to edit. No edition was ever or will ever represent a work adequately. Full stop. The positive. The hopeful. The perfection. The adequacy. The triumph of scholarship. They will not occur.’ (Shillingsburg, 2006, p. 154). p. 47-48

Bohr’s argument for the indeterminable nature of measurement interactions is based on his insight that concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement. That is, theoretical concepts are not ideational in character; they are specific physical arrangements. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe halfway, p. 109

The “same text” in a set of documents is the material set of rules which allows, starting from any document to produce the same text.

• no difference between meaning and presentation
• no given hierarchy between approaches
• formal ways to specify methodologies (what is this text?)
• possibility of multiplicity and plurality but avoiding the n’importe quoi effect