| Sumario: | Within the digital humanities, text is often privileged. The core concern of digital humanities research and studies tends to focus on text and textual analyses. The materiality of text is often overlooked. Text, however, does not exist outside of the physical support instantiating it. The materiality of digital text should be foregrounded within the digital humanities to illuminate its fundamental role in transforming text into diverse physical instantiations that are used for diverse purposes, needs, and tasks. This article therefore calls for greater documentary analyses of text, with a specific emphasis on exploring the documentation of digital text. Revisiting and employing Beatrice Warde's metaphor of the crystal goblet as a framing device to structure its discussion, this article argues that documentation is necessary for the materialization of text into material instantiations that can be interacted with, engaged, and used. Documentation, further, determines the kinds, forms, and formats of text that can be inscribed into or displayed on a specific medium that, in turn, shapes the affordances of and practices with that text, including reading, writing, annotating, commenting, viewing, and/or hearing. Authors and creators of text write or construct texts to become instantiated into/as material objects, from manuscripts, books, and e-books, to film and music, to databases, websites, and computer files. By drawing attention to the importance of documentation and its associated affordances and practices, the object status of digital texts is foregrounded by documentary analyses. Foregrounding documentation within the digital humanities is further necessary as digital technologies continue to alter the ways in which text is documented; that is, the way text is created, deployed, and used. Digital text is not ephemeral data points floating in the virtual either but instantiated in and as digital documents. This article presents a tripartite model of digital documentation to uncloak the complex material constitution of digital documents and, thus, digital text. This model helps demonstrate the extent to which digital text exists in and as digital documents. The virtual world of the digital humanities, and its respective texts and documentation, is indeed a material world.
|
|---|