Electronic Texts: A Promise for Humanities Research

Abstract

Scholars in the humanities often create and work with electronic texts, and have come to appreciate many of the possibilities inherent in machine-readable text. But the impact of these possibilities has largely been restricted to what I would call the "procedural" side of the humanist's labor: · The mutability of electronic texts (e-texts) is utilized only in editing and recycling texts. · The reproducibility of machine-readable texts is used mainly to transform them into print format. · The ease of transmission of e-texts across electronic networks is used for only minimal dissemination. The wide array of search possibilities has been limited mainly to citation and lookup queries. This reductionist, procedural, model has retarded the use of machine-readable texts in the "creative" or "intellectual" realm -- the humanist's ultimate domain of textual analysis and interpretation.