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kestrellAuthored by Andrew Zurcher, Fellow and Director of Studies at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge
http://oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/2012/01/10/antiquity-and-newfangleness-re-editing-the-renaissance-text-in-the-digital-age/
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One of the most exciting aspects of the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) project is that it, like Spenser’s Calender, gets to ask these questions
at a crisis moment in the history of reading and writing. Spenser produced his eclogues in the first century of print, at a time when this technology was
reaching a new height of bibliographical experimentation and complexity. He wanted his readers to ask themselves about the experience of reading, the authority
(even identity) of the author and of the text, the importance of layout, the materiality of the reading experience. These are questions that we, too, must
ask ourselves. In the year when the Kindle caught Fire, and in a freak historical recursiveness we all began to read and write (like Romans) on tablets,
we are all ourselves assisting in the invention of a new praxis of reading. Words on the page are now, in many uncomplicated contexts, simply words on
a screen. But what happens when we take the material complexity of a text like The Shepheardes Calender, or Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries, or Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, and present it not as a book, but rather as a menu of options which the individual user controls? As we digitise Oxford University Press’s scholarly
editions, readying them for release on OSEO, we are not simply taking pictures of old books, and shoving them into cyberspace. We are trying to imagine
the future of reading. And we are trying to take care of works that, like The Shepheardes Calender, already seem to be self-conscious about, even resistant
to, the changes we are making to them.
block quote end
http://oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/2012/01/10/antiquity-and-newfangleness-re-editing-the-renaissance-text-in-the-digital-age/
block quote start
One of the most exciting aspects of the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO) project is that it, like Spenser’s Calender, gets to ask these questions
at a crisis moment in the history of reading and writing. Spenser produced his eclogues in the first century of print, at a time when this technology was
reaching a new height of bibliographical experimentation and complexity. He wanted his readers to ask themselves about the experience of reading, the authority
(even identity) of the author and of the text, the importance of layout, the materiality of the reading experience. These are questions that we, too, must
ask ourselves. In the year when the Kindle caught Fire, and in a freak historical recursiveness we all began to read and write (like Romans) on tablets,
we are all ourselves assisting in the invention of a new praxis of reading. Words on the page are now, in many uncomplicated contexts, simply words on
a screen. But what happens when we take the material complexity of a text like The Shepheardes Calender, or Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries, or Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, and present it not as a book, but rather as a menu of options which the individual user controls? As we digitise Oxford University Press’s scholarly
editions, readying them for release on OSEO, we are not simply taking pictures of old books, and shoving them into cyberspace. We are trying to imagine
the future of reading. And we are trying to take care of works that, like The Shepheardes Calender, already seem to be self-conscious about, even resistant
to, the changes we are making to them.
block quote end
