College and Research Libraries


Book Reviews 
The Digital Word: Text-Based Comput-

ing in the Humanities. Ed. by George 
P. Landow and Paul Delany. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Pr., 1993. 362p. 
(ISBN 0-262-12176-X). 
The computer-aided analysis of text, 

an area of the humanities that is by no 
means new and that has, in fact, seen 
several decades of activity, is now ex-
periencing a new surge of interest 
among scholars. The Text Encoding Ini-
tiative promises to provide all areas of 
textual study with thorough and practi-
cal guidelines for the electronic encod-
ing of text; scholarly publishers such as 
Chadwyck-Healey and Oxford Univer-
sity Press have embarked on substantial 
electronic text publishing projects; promi-
nent scholars in editorial theory have held 
out great hope for a reconceiving of the 
''Edition" through electronic texts; and in 
many places around the United States and 
Canada we see the introduction and 
growth of electronic text centers in librar-
ies. At a time when interest in these matters 
is growing rapidly in both the mainstream 
of many academic disciplines and in li-
braries, there is a compelling need for 
books that bring together a body of 
thought that touches on a broad spec-
trum of issues. Rosanne Potter's Literary 
Computing and Literary Criticism (1989) is 
one such work and serves admirably to 
bring the researcher or librarian into 
contact with a variety of literary and 
computational perspectives. 

The Digital Word, edited by George 
Landow and Paul Delany, is a welcome 
addition, as it likewise speaks to a broad 
audience about issues and ideas related 
to the computerization of text. Like Pot-
ter's work, it is a collection of essays, 
many of which have been previously 
published. That one of the essays is more 
than six years old emphasizes the con-

tinuum of work and ideas that exists in 
this area. Still, there are many aspects of 
The Digital Word that are fundamentally 
unsatisfying. 

Delany and Landow set out to show 
how a broadly conceived sense of textual 
computing is redefining the "traditional 
activities of humanities scholars." To 
that end, they offer essays that illustrate 
three facets of textual computing: it rede-
fines the form of the traditional text; it 
produces a text with qualities unique to 
the electronic format; and it melds 
aspects of creation, transmission, and 
analysis. Exploring all of this in a single 
volume would seem to be a difficult task, 
and perhaps such ambitiousness is at the 
root of this work's problems. Reading it, 
one feels that the editors have not used 
the space of the book well; the selection 
of the essays lacks focus, making The 
Digital Word often seem disjointed, 
lurching from one essay to the next 
without apparent connection. One is left 
with an impression of very uneven qu-
ality, with a mixture of significant, intel-
lectually challenging essays, functional 
though ordinary guides, obsolete and 
sometimes inaccurate assessments of the 
current state of the technology, and 
works better left out altogether. 

Although this book makes significant 
contributions to issues of textual analy-
sis, many other areas of text-based com-
puting are barely treated, or treated in 
such a way that the book is already 
dated. The editors throw together such 
diverse computational and analytical 
areas as Internet-accessible catalogs, 
document retrieval, text management 
software, textual analysis, and critical 
editions, making it difficult to find one's 
way in a sea of irrelevant noise. 

With all of that said, it may come as a 
surprise that this book is energetically 

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84 College & Research Libraries 

recommended. The Digital Word brings 
together some of the best thinking about 
textual analysis and the state of scholarly 
communication. 
• There is probably no better statement 

on the relevance and conceptual foun-
dations for descriptive markup 
schemes for textual computing than 
the essay by James H. Coombs, Allen 
H. Renear, and Steven J. DeRose. Its 
republication in this volume is cer-
tainly welcome and needed. 

• Allen Renear and Geoffrey Bilder 
make an excellent contribution to cur-
rent thinking on scholarly com-
munication. Their discussion of both 
current and future use of the medium 
goes to the heart of the nature of the 
digital word in our increasingly net-
worked world, making clear that most 
frequently the electronic medium is . 
used for something other than scholar-
ship or scholarly communication. 

• Peter Robinson's essay on the critical 
edition will be an important point of 
reference for the growing number of 
discussions in this area. His argument 
brings together many of the ideas ar-
ticulated in recent editorial theory and 
computer-aided analysis. The com-
puter promises to offer to the critical 
edition the flexibility and, through the 
ways it documents its decisions, the 
credibility it may have previously 
lacked. 

• Jeremy Clear offers an excellent report 
on the British National Corpus Project. 
His detailed description of the most 
important tool in the history of corpus 
linguistics will satisfy both the unini-
tiated and the more knowledgeable. 

• Nancy Kaplan and Stuart Moulthrop 
are not the first scholars to have cri-
tiqued Marcia Peoples Halio, who 
suggests that the composition skills of 
students may be negatively in-
fluenced by their choice of an operat-
ing system, but they use their analysis 
as the foundation of a more interesting 
argument concerning the relationship 
between the way we perceive and the 
way we write. 

• Jacques Vir bel provides interesting in-
sight into the development of the new 

January 1994 

Bibliotheque de France with his de-
scription of their scholar's worksta-
tion project, a project both visionary 
and functional. While criticisms of the 
workstation will abound, it is clear its 
designers worked with rather than in 
isolation from researchers in under-
standing issues of research in an elec-
tronic environment. · 
There is far more that is excellent in 

The Digital Word than there is that is bad. 
It is a shame, however, to have included 
those essays that are so disappointing, 
and that the editors did not use an or-
ganizing principle less ambitious and 
more coherent.-John Price- Wilkin, Uni-
versity of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia . 

Dordick, Herbert S., and Georgette 
Wang. The Infonnation Society: A Retro-
spective View. Newbury Park, Calif.: 
Sage, 1993. 168p. (ISBN 0-8039-4186-
2); paper (ISBN 0-8039-4187-0). 
To paraphrase a cliche, inside this 

slender volume there is a book strug-
gling to emerge. Perhaps it is more accu-
rate to say that this is a book in embryo. 
Embryo, that is, as Groucho Marx de-
fined it in a letter: "My plans are still in 
embryo. In case you've never been there, 
this is a small town on the outskirts of 
wishful thinking." 

The authors set out to examine "to 
what extent an information society has 
emerged, and whether the promises of 
the past 30 or more years have been 
met." They also aim to explore the con-
sequences of "informatization" on na-
tions either newly industrialized or 
yet-to-be-industrialized. Both Dordick 
and Wang are experienced researchers 
and commentators on the social and cul-
tural aspects of information technology 
applications. Following a brief review of 
the premises and assumptions, hopes 
and expectations expressed by the infor-
mation society forecasters in the 1970s 
and 1980s, the authors describe three 
scales for measuring the informatization 
of a country. The infrastructure scale is 
measured by the density of telephone 
lines, television sets, newspaper circula-
tion and the amount of data terminal 
equipment on public telephone and telex