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From the point of view of scholarship,
digitization has changed everything.
It's changed the way that we work and access
these materials.
It has raised the stakes in terms of an appreciation
of our cultural heritage.
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Text technologies on Stanford campus
is situated in the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.
It is a very open project dealing with manuscripts
and early printed books particularly,
but also human communication from the earliest
times to the present day in all languages.
Within the text technology's sort
of MANTO Project, which has a number of smaller
projects underneath it, initially
were driven by the interests of individual faculty and students
and by the receipt of external funding from the NEH,
for example.
I also work with Professor Egan on campus
and other medievalists and then medievalists
and text technologists from around the world.
What is really important for text technologies
is the development of digital tools
that allow us to use new approaches
and methods to create new knowledge effectively.
So, for example, I could do a quantitative codicological
study of the letter E and its positioning.
And that sounds like a bizarre thing to do.
But in other words, one would analyze digitally
and count the numbers of different forms of E
to determine how the very beginnings of script changes
happened in the 12th century.
My own research is on premodern Chinese literature.
The interest that I have is in everything
from the actual writing systems to book production
to manuscript production and transmission and preservation.
All of this counts as text technologies.
You would also use digital tools to begin to calculate something
about the numbers and places of production of books
in the great age of paper, so in the 15th and 16th centuries
when paper and print came together for the first time.
Digital tools allow us to map or to visualize how print spread
or how paper was disseminated throughout northern Europe.
For those of us working in Chinese,
digitization, first of all, means the creation
of huge databases of texts that now, of course,
are manipulable and searchable.
We're looking at non-canonical, very ephemeral kinds
of materials that in the past only
were accessible in rare book collections.
The canonical text or the canonical person
that we had been working on now appears in a new light.
This is the first container of the great Chinese novel
Dream of Red Mansion.
This is only the first half of this great novel.
It's 120 chapters.
There are many scholars now who rely
upon digitized versions of this text for quick searching
and for manipulations of the text that previously weren't
possible.
People will search for terminology,
terms that are used.
You want to know the way language is used and applied
to particular characters in the novel, changes between Chapter
13 and Chapter 113.
One of the interesting things that we discover now
with the advantage of digitized texts and images
is that all sorts of features of transcribed texts
that we had assumed are accurate replicas
of the original in fact are lost.
And that when we can go back and see
the image of the original page, we
find all sorts of features of the original.
These features all, of course, convey meaning.
In the East-West Text Technologies Conference
that we initiated as part of a three-year project between East
Asian Studies Department on Stanford campus
and the medievalists, we sought to bring together,
for really the first time, groups
of scholars who work on medieval and Renaissance manuscripts
produced in the West and produced principally
in China but also Japan.
We thought that doing this in the New Stanford Center
on the campus of Peking University
was an appropriate place to do this.
The advantages of having digitalized materials
were very profound and very evident
in all aspects of this conference.
One of the most interesting things
that came to light at the conference
was the discovery that the actual physical form
of the manuscripts, and even the physical form
of the scripts written on the page,
has such an important effect upon the way
we read, whether we're talking about the visual appearance
of the Chinese calligraphy on the page
or the visual appearance of the illuminated European
manuscript.
I think this was a point that really hit home to all of us
there.
During the conference, I was the interpreter
for the presentations and discussion part.
I was quite impressed by the fact
that we share a lot of common grounds,
although we are working in different countries,
different language, different time periods.
We anticipate on both sides, on both the European side
and the Chinese side, we would like
to move ahead chronologically into the period when
printing, the technology of printing,
first becomes available.
To be able to examine these early imprints,
to have digital images of the pages
and other features of the books, is absolutely essential
as we proceed.
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