Transcendentally transmitting human experience ?

The encoding challenge requires that groups create an electronic facsimile of a book to serve scholarly purposes. In order to translate the analogue page to a digital one, I thought we would first need to know what information the book contained and how it was conveyed to original audiences. After all, form and content function in a copacetic fashion in the communicative process. Thus, I attempted to find a group project of sufficient complexity, that is, a book with various levels of text, to satisfy the assignment criteria, but that was also comprehensible to my partners in order to handle its content. That is, I was looking for an English-language rare book that was annotated. My top choice was John Elliot’s The Medical Pocket-book, first printed in the eighteenth century. It is an alphabetically organized quick reference guide to illnesses, medical technique and medicines. The Fisher Rare Book library holds a nicely annotated copy. I would have chosen to encode the final table in the book which provides recommended quantities for mixing medicinal solutions of certain substances, such as “Tincture of opium”, better known as the highly addictive laudanum which was given for pain relief to fussy babies or women to treat menstrual cramps or “Ointment of nitrated quicksilver”, a mercury compound long used for treating syphilis. If you have ever seen an episode of the TV show, The Knick, you’ll understand the gruesome appeal of this book. The particular challenges of this book would be to encode the relationships between the printed text and the annotations, which seem to have been added at different times. In representing those relationships, I would have hoped to be able to show how the book was used by its owner/reader. Very mundane, of this world kind of stuff.  

However, as noted elsewhere on this blog, my encoding partners have chosen a Latin early astronomical text for the assignment, John of Sacrobosco’s Sphaera Mundi, printed in Venice in 1490. The book is also held by the Fisher Rare Book library. Their copy is heavily annotated, although the annotations have been damaged when the pages were recut for rebinding at an unknown date. Considering the symbiotic relationship between form and content, one that Alan Liu claims is under threat of being misrepresented by postindustrial discourse, I’m concerned. While one of my partners is familiar with the early study of astronomy, neither of them read Latin. Even though I do, I am unexperienced in deciphering the humanistic script of the marginal annotations. Further, I have never studied early scientific texts and do not know how their particular structure and format (diagrams, mode of discussion, etc.) influenced the delivery of information. Both of this week’s readings have discussed the importance of interface design in the creation of new meanings in the electronic presentation of text. But in our case, I think it is more important that we first work to understand the cultural context of this book. Only knowing how this book originally functioned, can we hope to exploit the discursive properties of digital encoding and the electronic interface.    

Best, Laura