The Role of Scholars in the Era of Digital Texts Essay -- Education Me

In her introduction to electronic schoolbook Investigations in Method and Theory, Kathryn Sutherland asks if there is a real danger that the student-worker, toiling for years in the remote regions of the library stacks in the hope of becoming dependable in sensation small field, will be transformed by the computer into the technician, the nerdy navigator able to locate, transfer, and appropriate at an ever faster rate expert entries from a larger set of development that he/she no agelong needs or desires to understand (Sutherland 10). Her inquiry is based on an outcome that still plagues many scholars with quick access to so much digitized information, how do we evaluate what we still need and desire to understand? Of course, her question implies that evaluating printed information is an evaluation based on less access and therefore a smaller set of information, and evaluating printed information is not an uncomplicated issue it is superstar which scholars reconsider constan tly. One such groupliterary scholar-workersmay die years toiling over kindred versions of a printed text in order to produce a singe representative reading. In the drive of Christopher Marlowes The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus, for example, there is no extant manuscript, nine versions were printed between 1604 and 1631, and the prototypic appeared almost nine years after Marlowes death. Those that appeared in 1604, 1609, and 1611 are uniform and are collectively known as the A-text. The 1616, 1619, 1620, 1624, 1628, and 1631 versions are also similar and known as the B-text. Which one should a reader or scholar consult?Remarkably different, the A- and B- texts have inspired an extensive amount of slender commentary and scholarly editors since W.W. Greg appear to agree on one ... ... 2. Binda, Hillary. An Overview of this Electronic Doctor Faustus. Accessed October 2004.. 3. Greg, W.W., ed. Marlowes Doctor Faustus 1604-1616 Parallel Texts. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1950. 4. Lavagnino, John. Completeness and adequacy in text encoding. The literary Text in the Digital Age. Finneran, Richard J. (Ed.), Ann Arbor The University of Michigan Press, 1996. 5. Schreibman, Susan. Computer-mediated Texts and Textuality Theory and Practice. In Siemens (Ed.). A New Computer-Assisted Literary Criticism? Special edition of Computers and the Humanities, 36283-293, (2002). 6. --The Versioning Machine. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 181 (2003). 7. Sutherland, Kathryn (Ed.). Introduction. Electronic Text Investigations in Method and Theory. Clarendon Press Oxford, 1997.