Textual Assemblages and Transmission: Unified models for (Digital) Scholarly Editions and Text Digitisation

Scholarly editing and textual digitisation are typically seen as two distinct, though related, fields. Scholarly editing is replete with traditions and codified practices, while the digitisation of text-bearing material is a recent enterprise, governed more by practice than theory. From the perspective of scholarly editing, the mere digitisation of text is a world away from the intellectual engagement and rigour on which textual scholarship is founded. Recent developments have led to a more open-minded perspective. As scholarly editing has made increasing use of the digital medium, and textual digitisation begins to make use of scholarly editing tools and techniques, the more obvious distinctions dissolve. Such criteria as ‘critical engagement’ become insufficient grounds on which to base a clear distinction. However, this perspective is not without its risks either. It perpetuates the idea that a (digital) scholarly edition and a digitised text are interchangeable. This thesis argues that a real distinction can be drawn. It starts by considering scholarly editing and textual digitisation as textual transmissions. Starting from the ontological perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, it builds a framework capable for considering the processes behind scholarly editing and digitisation. In doing so, it uncovers a number of critical distinction. Scholarly editing creates a regime of representation that is self-consistent and self-validating. Textual digitisation does not. In the final chapters, this thesis uses the crowd-sourced Letters of 1916 project as a test-case for a new conceptualisation of a scholarly edition: one that is neither globally self-consistent nor self-validating, but which provides a conceptual model in which these absences might be mitigated against and the function of a scholarly edition fulfilled

CTRL SHIFT

CTRL SHIFT makes a case for design under contemporary computation. The abstractions of reading, writing, metaphors, mythology, code, cryptography, interfaces, and other such symbolic languages are leveraged as tools for understanding. Alternative modes of knowledge become access points through which users can subvert the control structures of software. By challenging the singular expertise of programmers, the work presented within advocates for the examination of internalized beliefs, the redistribution of networked power, and the collective sabotage of computational authority

JPEG: the quadruple object

The thesis, together with its practice-research works, presents an object-oriented perspective on the JPEG standard. Using the object-oriented philosophy of Graham Harman as a theoretical and also practical starting point, the thesis looks to provide an account of the JPEG digital object and its enfolding within the governmental scopic regime. The thesis looks to move beyond accounts of digital objects and protocols within software studies that position the object in terms of issues of relationality, processuality and potentiality. From an object-oriented point of view, the digital object must be seen as exceeding its relations, as actual, present and holding nothing in reserve. The thesis presents an account of JPEG starting from that position as well as an object-oriented account of JPEG’s position within the distributed, governmental scopic regime via an analysis of Facebook’s Timeline, tagging and Haystack systems. As part of a practice-research project, the author looked to use that perspective within photographic and broader imaging practices as a spur to new work and also as a “laboratory” to explore Harman’s framework. The thesis presents the findings of those “experiments” in the form of a report alongside practice-research eBooks. These works were not designed to be illustrations of the theory, nor works to be “analysed”. Rather, following the lead of Ian Bogost and Mark Amerika, they were designed to be “philosophical works” in the sense of works that “did” philosophy