In March I had the pleasure of presenting a paper at the Society for Textual Scholarship’s annual conference, held this year at Loyola University in Chicago. Along with fellow Northwestern graduate students Seth Swanner and Simon Nyi, I organized a panel focused on textual editing and the relationship between material textuality and embodiment in early modern England. My own paper, entitled “Editorial Touches: Text-use and Tactile Relations in Renaissance England,” examined the sense of touch, which I argue was central to reading practices and discourses in the period, despite our general inclination to think of reading primarily as a visual activity. Although my presentation concerned itself with the historicizing the ways in which reading practices and textuality were imbricated with the sense of touch in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and did not “touch” on the digital-age modes of reading with which we are generally concerned in NUDHL, considering the sensory experiences of reading in the Renaissance does point to important questions that digital humanists might take up today: where do the “lower” senses—touch, smell, and taste—stand in the realm of the digital? Do we need to engage them more effectively? How?
In the Renaissance, I discovered, touch was central to reading practice because it was considered to be the key to learning: impressing one’s body upon the page allowed the text to impress itself upon the reader’s mind. Geffrey Whitney’s 1586 Choice of Emblemes, for example, pairs a poem with an engraving of two kinds of readers surrounded by books. On the left stands a reader holding a book passively, touching its cover but not digitally engaging with it. On the right, another reader leans over a lectern, his fingers actively touching the recto page of a folio volume.[1] Accompanying the emblem is a poem that urges readers to touch their books actively:
Geffrey Whitney, A choice of emblems (Imprinted at Leyden: In the house of Christopher Plantyn, by Francis Raphelengius, M.D.LXXXVI [1586]), STC 25438 (Huntington Library copy), p. 171.
Whitney was not alone in advising tactile textual engagement. It was a commonplace among Renaissance humanists that “making one’s mark” on a text, as William Sherman puts it,[2] was an effective reading method and imperative for learning. I can’t help but think these early humanists were right. When we read with our whole bodies, it seems, we learn better—or at least I do. It seems my students do, too, even though they are second-generation digital natives. What, then, do we lose when we “go digital” and the material text with which we interact is abstracted into code and ethereal, digitized data? What is the status of the body in digital humanism?
Of course, advances in technology bring us ever closer to using our whole bodies to do digital work and interact with digital texts. The iPad affords the possibility of tactically manipulating the visual field of the text in ways not possible with paper works: we can zoom in and out, stretch, and shift the screen. The digital is thus increasingly digital—that is, something we consume with our fingers. Nonetheless, computer technologies integrate new levels of mediation between user and text that remove us further from our objects of study. The shape of our relationship to texts changes, and so does the way we learn.
Touch is—and was understood in the Renaissance as—a radically reciprocal sense. It dissolves the distinctions between subject and object, since the touched is always also touching the toucher. Accordingly, the relationship between reader and text was, I argued in my paper, fluid and unfixed. The reader impressed herself upon the text in order to impress the text more effectively in her mind; as the text “touched” the reader, the reader touched back. In this way, the reader’s manipulation of the text, her contribution to its construction (through material marking or annotating, or through her figurative manipulations of its material) effected her learning. Figuratively and physically merging with the text allowed “wisedome” to “ensue” “euermoore.”
Digital texts, however, require a reimagining of the relationship between text and user to accommodate a new constellation: text, user, technology. This is not to say, of course, that the codex book is not a mediating technology. But for many Renaissance humanists, the book was the text; though texts could exist in the abstract—temporally surpassing, as Shakespeare’s sonnet persona writes, “gilded monuments” or “unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time”—the text, at least when it came to learning, was something a reader “vse[d]” physically. When we “use” a digital text, however, the technology on which it is manifested claims a greater and more independent role. Instead of the mutual interaction of text and reader, a reciprocal relationship develops among text, user, and technology. This is in some ways a function of the vast capacity of digital technology; an iPad contains a legion of texts, rather than a single text.[3] We necessarily must recalibrate how we touch a text when subject and object dissolve not into each other, but into their medium.
Although my instinct is to think of what is lost physically and intellectually when we “go digital,” it is more effective—and more interesting—to reimagine entirely our relation to texts. We neither lose nor gain when we touch a screen rather than a page. We simply do it differently. Although we can and should draw on other modes of text-use, the digital advent sees us creating a whole new method of learning. This may require us to teach ourselves new ways of embodying our reading practice. Books smell; (most) iPads don’t. If we can’t smell our digital technologies, we may need to rethink the ways we use them. For even if we are coming to inhabit texts in entirely new ways, we still inhabit bodies, and should, I think, vigorously insist that our bodies and not just our minds take part in the educational process. This demands the conscientious and careful use of our digital media, and a reconceptualization of our relationships to them.
[1] See Bradin Cormack and Carla Mazzio, Book Use, Book Theory 1500-1700 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 1-4, on text-use and Whitney’s emblem.
[2] William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, 3.
[3] For simplicity’s sake, I will decline here to discuss the Barthesian plurality of any given text; that is a conversation for another day!
Excellent post, and thanks so much for not only sharing your research but taking the time to connect it to the digital.
I was at your STS presentation and was instantly struck by how many of the questions you raised continue to apply in the digital age. For instance, I think touch and gesture, if anything, are growing more important than ever in large part due to our interactions with digital technologies, many of which are driven by touch in expansive new ways. I also think, going past McLuhan who saw media as extensions of ourselves, these technologies greatly affect us (and us in turn them; repeat), something that is being hidden from most people due (among other things) to the (usually profitable) drive to re-present the book in digital form, skeuomorphism, and the drive for the most “readable,” “user-friendly” interface. In other words, the materiality of the digital is hard for most to uncover, let alone interact with in any conscious way.
Lots of people far smarter than me thinking about this, so I’ll just reference some stuff: N. Katherine Hayles on hyperattentive reading, Nick Montfort and Matthew Kirschenbaum on screen essentialism, Fuller and Joffey’s “evil media studies” into gray media, Whitney Trettien’s book history and experimental digital projects, Stephen Ramsay on reading machines and computational creativity, etc.
Becky —
What a fabulous post. Thanks so much for taking the time to offer such a sophisticated, well-written account of your recent research and your presentation. My favorite line is: “The digital is thus increasingly digital—that is, something we consume with our fingers.” Hah!
At a humorous level, your post reminded me of the April Fool’s Day gag by Google: Google Nose Beta, http://www.google.com/landing/nose/.
But more seriously, your post made me think about the tactility of both older manuscripts and books and, in its own strange way, the persistent materiality of the digital even though it does seem, at first, er, touch, to dematerialize everything in sight (I mean touch), churning it all down from stuff into electronic pulsations, ones and zeroes, bits and bytes, ons and offs. Yet the digital has its own developing sensorium beyond the optic too, as you suggest by bringing its emerging tactile qualities into conversation (in touch, ugh!) with the Renaissance England world of words on pages of various sorts.
Your post also made me think about annotation as a developing digital humanities tactic. There is something precisely about the mutability of the digital object, its ductility, that seems to call upon us to mark it up, to “deeply tag” it (in Martin Mueller terms), to write upon it digitally.
I also thought at a more theoretical level about reading words as a kind of tactile experience, the sound of someone’s voice embedded in ink and paper (or now in code and screens) then re-sounded, as it were, in the mind’s eye. Is that a kind of touch, if not literally perhaps literaturistically? Hmm…I think of sound here because I always do. But also because we might understand sound as really an extension of touch. After all, what is sound but vibrations that touch the strange mechanisms of our ears. Perhaps there is an way to think more deeply about touch and text through the medium of digital sound?
I’d love to get you and Whitney Trettien in conversation here about books, tactility, sound, and related topics if possible. Whitney are you out there?
Thanks again for this marvelous post and for your generosity in sharing it.
Michael
Hi Becky — Great post! I regret missing your panel at STS, so thank you for sharing your work here. And thanks for pinging me, Michael.
I continue to be fascinated by the wide range of haptic interactivity found in Renaissance books — not just page turning, but lifting flaps, spinning volvelles and dials, “dissecting” paper bodies in anatomical fugitive sheets. Printed books today feel (ahem) impoverished by comparison!
You point out that the relationship between reader and text is shifting into a relationship between reader, text and technology. This is such an important point. Somewhere in the vague tangle of ideas we call the Enlightenment, our sense of what constitutes a text split from its instantiations; now, most digital texts seem almost to *assume* this conceptual divorce. Materially, the digital text is always something other than “the text” you see.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about this constant material deferral. In the Renaissance, you lift a paper organ in an anatomical flapbook, you get the next paper organ. If I call up a digital representation of this same flapbook and click an organ to virtually lift it, I’m sending instructions to servers far, far away from me to bring me the next image. While we’re not talking about a series of tubes, these actions do engage physical, though spatially distant, networks. How are these deferrals of a material (rather than visual) effect (affect?) altering or remediating our sense of the past?
I said “in the Renaissance” above, but really, many of these objects still exist today. The temporal palimpsests (to borrow a concept from Jonathan Gil Harris, whose book *Untimely Matter* is fascinating on this topic) created by the continued material existence of Renaissance objects alongside their re-presentations is also such a rich and fascinating topic.
Anyway, thanks for the opportunity to mull some of this over, Becky!
Thanks Whitney. I always learn a lot from literary scholars who think carefully about these matters. Makes me think a lot about sound recordings and their similarities and differences from texts in these respects of mediation and remediation. Michael
Thanks for this response, Josh! I really appreciate this list of resources and will make sure to check them out.
Thanks, Michael! I love the idea of thinking about sound as a haptic sense, given the vibrations that produce the things we hear–Bruce Smith talks about that a little bit, if I recall correctly, in _Phenomenal Shakespeare_. Very interesting stuff. I look forward to talking it over in more depth with you.
This is a wonderful response, Whitney! I saw your presentation at STS and was struck by the ways you related the Little Gidding Bibles with digital marking/cutting. It makes perfect “sense” (har) to think about sensation, cutting and marking up, and those anatomical pop-up books–very interesting stuff. Thanks for reading and sharing your insights!