Burnard’s description of the three ‘broad classes’ (compositional features, contextual features, and interpretive features) of information that should be included in text markup is sound. It seems remarkably prescient when, writing over twenty years ago, Burnard suggested that all digital markup information could be included within a ‘single encoding scheme’; this vision seems to have been borne out in the attempts to standardize digital markups using a common syntax (XML) and syntax guidelines from TEI, as described by Gailey. However, Gailey’s criticism of the available tools (e.g. the difficulty in annotating meaningful omissions and visual humor, and the difficulty encoding commentary in overlapping passages of text) is important in reminding us that the system is still imperfect and may call for some ‘creative’ problem-solving.

In addition to the digital encoding projects mentioned by Gailey, the Dickinson College Commentaries provide an interesting example of the benefits and difficulties of digital markups. For example, information about certain contextual features are lacking – we don’t have images of the manuscripts from which the critical edition has been developed, so we miss a lot of visual information (areas where a second hand has corrected mistakes, potential damage to the manuscript rendering the text unreadable, etc.). It is, however, an incredibly convenient resource for those who need an free, accessible text with commentary and vocabulary aid. The ‘About DCC’ page (http://dcc.dickinson.edu/about-dcc) engages with some of the issues brought up in Gailey – see especially the ‘Philosophy and Approach’ section for advantages and disadvantages to digital encoding.

In “Visualizing the Archive,” Whitley notes that “While digital visualization tools are poised to deal with a similar set of issues as those faced by our colleagues in the sciences and social sciences, some of the assumptions about reading expressed in the scholarship on information visualization tend not to sit well with scholars and teachers of literature” (192). Whitley observes that such a disparity arises from the differing natures of the documents that are the traditional objects of study in their respective fields. The gap is of course very marked across the scientific-literary divide, but I wonder about the differing sets of assumptions and challenges that exist across different literary subfields. The projects presented in the excerpts from “The American Literary Scholar in the Digital Age” that we read chiefly (and naturally) focus on American documents from the 19th and 20th centuries. While Burnard does briefly discuss the challenges of treating a text such as Beowulf, I would love to learn more extensively about how the use of the same digital technology is translated across the study of, say, a medieval manuscript fragment and Herman Melville’s draft of Typee.  In “A Case for Heavy Editing,” Gailey mentions TEI’s “recommended vocabulary for the treatment of humanities texts” (131)–I wonder how this standardization (or the process thereof) accounts for the different sorts of document format, circulation, authorship, and readership that occur across the humanities.

The central tension in Gailey’s article between close reading as a traditional scholarly practice and ‘searching’ as a new, oddly detached one was an informative one. I was especially struck by how Joel Chandler Harris’ work required coding in both an original and regularized form to avoid the possibility that it would simply be erased if one was searching for regular spellings of words. I found it equally fascinating that, as far as I can see, no suggestion was made for how the assumption of the phrase “naked as a jaybird” in the illustration made by E.W. Kemble could be anything other than erased by an approach that only searches through textual information rather than paying attention to the text’s material context.

In the case of Burnard, I was fascinated by the fact that he emphasized the inescapability of canonicity. I did wonder whether the same pressures necessarily applied to the modern interest in the construction of canons as to its earlier iterations. After all, the importance of the canon in earlier cultures was as a standard against which one could model one’s own work or as the essential knowledge required for membership of the elite; in the modern sense it often seems to be born out of a sense that there is endless amounts of material that needs to be organized into the most representative of a certain genre or the highest aesthetic quality so people do not waste their time consuming products that are sub-standard or eccentric.