Katherine Halyes tells us that the digital medium can inhibit critical reading rather than cater to it; hyperlinks, short forms, habitual actions, and endless content are just some of the features of the web that “make it a powerful practice for rewiring the brain” but also elements that may “tend to degrade comprehension rather than enhance it” (“How We Read” 67). Upon first reading, I wondered if these digital impediments might have negatively affected The Canterbury Tales Project, which sought to turn collation into an automated process. The Project has churned out only a few collations, including The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, The Miller’s Tale, and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, available first on CD but now by yearly subscription (because the software used on the CDs became incompatible with both Macintosh and Windows OS updates by October 2017). Computer-assisted collation certainly seemed to be the most efficient future for technical editors, but the Project has not gained the kind of attention I assume its editors pursued. The reason why? Hyperlinks.
(I planned to provide images to prove my point here, but the site is down: http://www.canterburytalesproject.org/.)
Not only is the amount of information on one page startling, but hyperlinks—the avenue through which all collational information is accessed—offer endless information, even more information than what is available in the average Variorum edition. While the Project contributors certainly must have seen this output as the ultimate scholar’s reference guide, I would suggest that the digital medium actually hindered the Project’s practical use. Technical editors, the very limited audience of The Canterbury Tales Project, have developed reading skills adapted to the technical editing field, namely understanding lemma construction, edition sigils, and manuscript families in order to comprehend the impact of a given manuscript or print variation. When the Project adopted a digital medium for describing collation results, it assumed that its audience could and would adjust their print reading skills to the web. In other words, scholars would have to shift from the “deep attention characteristic of humanistic inquiry to the hyperattention characteristic of someone scanning Web pages” (Hayles 72). For a more successful Project, the contributors will have to bridge the gap between deep and hyperreading as Hayles suggests, so that “deep attention and close reading...interact synergistically with...Web and hyperreading” (72).
But how can the medieval scholars behind the Project intertwine close reading and hyperreading? How can scholars be motivated to shift from deep attention to hyperattention and back again? Hayles hopes to teach her students to engage in this multi-literacy by placing print and digital media in conversation with one another. More importantly, the students in question need to switch from hyperreading to close reading, while Chaucerians must do the opposite. Here, I worry that the demands placed on working memory by web reading are too much; the digital format increases “the cognitive load on working memory” and reduces “the amount of new material it can hold.” Print reading minimizes the cognitive load, allowing more efficient transfer to long-term memory (Hayles 68). Scholars will have to devote more time to understanding digital collation results, which are hard enough to decipher in print. Even if automated collation is the most efficient tool for technical editors, it’s hard to see a future for The Canterbury Tales Project—unless it is published in print.
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