Vika’s detailed critique of Hillesund’s article deserves praise and a comment or two. I thought the article was interesting precisely for its shortcomings (or what Vika sees as its shortcomings). However, I do not want to turn this in a debate about the merits or demerits of Hillesund, but I see it as an opportunity for us to clarify a few (important) aspects of our own work.

Since in her comment to my original posting Vika asks for a clarification of my short and intentionally “open” comment appended to the two quotes I originally selected from the article, I’ll go back to that in this new posting. If you are interested in debating Hillesund’s positions, you should probably post a comment to Vika’s posting (ah, the intricate, branching nature of blog dialogues!). As far as I’m concerned, I’ll keep this new post as short as possible.

I’ll rephrase my original comment as a question: Is our work in the VHL to be seen as a contribution to the “workflow” of a “digital cycle”? Or is it simply a translation and re-production onto a digital platform of reading practices, born and developed within a non-digital cycle (dominated by printing)? My conviction (or wishful thinking) clearly is that we are indeed contributing to the emancipation of our intellectual “workflow” from the constraints inherited from the printing age, with its highly but “transparently” codified “objects” and the institutionalized ways we “exchange” them. At the same time, we are trying to preserve and adapt to the digital cycle practices and methodologies that were developed in trading with written/printed texts.

True, as Vika says, “any text (in his semiotic sense) that is represented digitally is “written” in ones and zeroes.” This is the fundamental “ontology” of digital “text” (any digital text). However, I am not interested in discussing a general theory of digital text, but rather the specific types of written/printed text we are working on. Or better, what I’m truly interested in is the possible “expansion” or “extension” of those texts from their original representation in written/printed form (inherited from our technological past) into new forms, specific to the “digital cycle,” our technological present and future. This, I believe, is “where our research emphasis lies.”

In other words, I do not think we are using digital tools in order to produce better, or different, printed editions of our texts (though printed editions may be one outcome of some of our projects, as is the case of Pico’s Oratio). Yet, is this clear to all of us?

The “expansion” or “extension” of existing texts directly affects (and in turn is generated by) the way we read them, where “reading” is conceived as the “last” (and “first”) stage in the “workflow” of any textual cycle (digital or non-digital, aimed at printing or not). The question is: how does reading and its possibilities change in the digital cycle? How and how much are we allowed to expand or extend our reading of texts that we inherit from our technological past?

As the acronym says, XML is conceived as a tool for a flexible extension and expansion, potentially encompassing all kinds of “texts,” including new genres and typologies. If I understand correctly, Hillesund however questions the capability of XML to provide a flexible enough framework for accomodating new genres and forms, those “new innovative digital text genres” that he leaves (in this article) unspecified.

In short, my question is: what kind of “expansion” do WE have in mind when WE approach the (semantic) encoding of texts such as the Esposizioni, or Pico’s Conclusiones - texts “written” or “composed” as tools for oral delivery and discussion? What kind of “reading” do we perform as we encode them? For example, are semantic encoding and collaborative annotating (made possibile by encoding etc.) to be kept separate in the intellectual “workflow” made possible by the digital cycle? Or should they tend to eventually become one?

These are some of the immediate questions that Hillesund’s article suggested to me.