Editing (Journals?) in the Late Age of Print Byron Hawk
From this vantage point, the role of the online journal is a crucial step for the development of scholarship in the new realm of textuality. Since the electronic book is (at this point in time at least) merely a replication of book technology, the first front of remediation—the shift from one medium to another via a transitional period of replicating the old medium in the new—appears to be the online journal. While it more often than not replicates the print article, electronic journals are among the first places in academia that are experimenting with newer forms of textuality. Without doubt the academy is too entrenched in (print) literacy as its foundation to dispense with it altogether. But, electronic journals provide a space for literate practices to engage other textual practices. So, even though Reimagining Textuality does not address electronic journals directly, its discussion of textual studies in terms of electronic textualities does provide a frame for thinking about the future of electronic journal publication. Editors of online journals are constantly negotiating print notions of textuality and newer forms of re/production. The fact that the book remains as the touchstone of tenure and promotion opens a space for the "article" to become a genre for experimentation, which in the long run could be the hinge for a larger transformation of textual practices.
While I hated to slight the visual and cultural elements of this
collection in my review—there are some great articles by Drucker,
Hunt, Schwarz, Moulthrop, and Ulmer that deserve more detailed
attention than I gave them here—I was most interested in what the
volume says about editing bodies, about the material bodies that edit
and the textual bodies that are edited, about the social bodies that
influence editions and about the additions we make or the deletions
that ensue. Editing is a process of cut and paste, copy and repeat,
rewrite and recontextualize. There is no perfect or ideal text, and
certainly, no perfect or ideal hypertext given the current state of the
tools we have at our disposal. Whether the grafter is editing a
scholarly edition or an electronic journal, the new digital tools allow
combinations and permutations in ever-increasing numbers. Any editorial
foray into a text only creates more such possibilities. And the ever-increasing
production of new digital tools provides the conditions of
possibility for further interventions. In such an editorial context,
editors should respect the perspectives of authors just as authors have
to respect the varied perspectives of reviewers and editors that prompt
their interventions. For some reason, this recognition seems to be made
more often in the world of electronic journals than print publications.
Perhaps it is the medium and its tools that force us to recognize the
innumerable possible arrangements for a text.
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