“Critical Hipereditions” and the new challenges for text-critique
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Maria Clara Paixão de Sousa
Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil mariaclara.ps@gmail.com
Caixa Postal 6693, CEP 13084-970 Campinas, SP, Brazil
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Summary
The upsurge of text production and circulation in digital environments has brought renewed relevance to some of the tasks traditionally carried out in the field of text-critique – in particular, the tasks of establishing the original form of texts, tracing back their subsequent cycles of transformations/alterations, and certifying the autenticity or authorship of texts. Yet “hipertext” is an object still to be fully explored, conceptually and methodologically, in this field. This exploration can start with a basic question: what makes digital texts singular in relation to other forms of writing as regards the material process of their production; the conditions for their reception; the potential cycles of alteration they may endure along the chain of transmission; and the implications of this processing cycle, as a whole, in the nature of the texts? This presentation will explore some lines for this conceptual debate, arguing that digital text production is a breaking point in the history of texts as cultural objects, rather than an incremental point in the evolution of text-production techniques. Digital processing is not a new instrument, but a new process of information codification. With manuscript or printed texts, information codification is processed directly by producers-receivers, given their command of a writing system (albeit with the support of mechanical instruments, such as pens or presses). With digital texts, information codification processing is mediated by artificial intelligence (apart from the support of an instrument, the computer). This mediation poses methodological challenges for text-critique. The field´s scope of action must expand to include this intermediate cycle of procedures (ie.: artificial codification) when considering endogenous or exogenous text alterations. I will present here an experience towards approaching this challenge: the “Critical Hiperedition”, which allows us to control processing marks in digital texts, via hipertext markup languages (more precisely, XML).
