In the Philosophy Room: Australian Realism and the Digital Content Object

The recent digitisation of the papers and lecture notes of
the Australian realist philosopher, Challis Professor of
Philosophy John Anderson, has given us cause to reflect upon,
on the one hand, the suitability of the TEI model for encoding
digital documents and, on the other, the possibility that
Anderson's philosophy itself may be relevant to some of the
issues and debates in contemporary markup theory and
practice.1 The claim here is not that Anderson himself
addressed, much less solved, the challenges we face in the
construction of digital content, but that in our current situation
reflection on ontological matters in this way may enlighten our
thinking about the nature of the digital object and its descriptive
encoding. We have come to think that the philosophical issues
to be explored through this inquiry have a bearing on many of
the more immediate empirical questions that we have previously
raised. In this paper we seek to bring the philosophical debate
to the fore. In an earlier presentation opening our case for the
use of TEI in the description of digital library materials (Scifleet
et al.), we argued that the collection and evaluation of
information relating to actual markup practice from various
institutions and research projects over time would further our
understanding of difficult theoretical issues relating to the digital
content object. The current paper extends this project to
questions implicit in the TEI encoder’s task of representing the
text, which is increasingly seen to be a surprisingly problematic
ambition. Our paper aims to contribute to philosophical debates
of TEI encoding that have appeared in the work of a number
of the leading theorists and practitioners in the field over the
past decade.
Our study includes a brief review of debates on TEI ranging
from McGann to Renear.2 The trajectory of these debates
suggests we may no longer be in the “progressive research
program” that we had imagined. Many of the criticisms made
of the ordered hierarchical model for encoding humanities texts
have made an impression. On the other hand, criticisms from
literary scholars of the descriptive encoding model are not warranted in asserting the purely interpretive or constitutive
nature of the encoder’s task. Although the notion of representing
the text in digital form is unclear, descriptive encoding is not
interpretation all the way down. Textual features identified by
our markup practices do have a reality independent of our
thinking so and we do seem to be recording real and significant
features in our assignment of tags to the digital content
object. Nonetheless, there are real problems in practice in
digitising materials such as the Anderson lecture notes and our
project is driven by a desire to work some conceptual confusions
through in a theoretically satisfying manner. Encoding is not
a simple matter of reading off or copying textual features
waiting to be recorded in digital form, for determinations about
the nature of an object must be made. There seems to us to be
a clear need for more information and guidance based on
analysis and evaluation of actual markup practices over time. In
place of this kind of guidance and engagement with real models,
TEI proponents are left to gauge the extent to which they have
failed to represent some ideal abstract object through resort to
“tag abuse" and other coping mechanisms.
John Anderson is generally recognised as the most original and
important philosopher to have worked in Australia. Between
1927 and 1958 he lectured in the Philosophy Room at the
University of Sydney. His lecture notes in the Archives are
acknowledged to be amongst our most important records of his
philosophical thinking. Anderson developed a systematic
realism which fostered a tradition of thinking about properties,
qualities and relations which would seem to us to have some
relevance to the encoder’s world of elements, attributes and
structural relations. Many of the recent debates on TEI and the
descriptive encoding model have centred on our understanding
of these seemingly intuitive concepts and the hierarchical
structures they commit us to. We think that Anderson's
insistence upon ontological seriousness and objective inquiry
may help to illuminate many of the assertions about TEI's role
in representing the text and that our problems may be clarified
by establishing more clearly the ontological commitments of
the various disputants. It would not surprise us to find that much
of our conceptual thinking about these issues has been
insufficiently critical in Anderson's sense.
In this paper we examine many of the current debates in the
light of our understanding of Anderson’s work: issues relating
to the reality of the text; the descriptive and prescriptive
distinction manifest in markup; whether identifying textual
features is really an imposition upon the text and what this view
might commit us to; whether TEI's acceptance of the markup
language model leaves it unable to adequately represent
imaginative, materially inscribed documents, as opposed to
purely informational manuals and so forth. It is easy to take a
distanced view of these issues and assume they don't directly
affect the practice of encoding either in the digital library or
the scholarly editing environments. However, the peculiar
nature of the TEI use of markup does seem to consistently raise
issues we thought had been resolved, or which seemed to
present no real constraint on practice. There is evidently some
room for conceptual clarification here and it is possible that we
have something to learn by adopting an attitude of "ontological
seriousness" in relation to how we think about our markup
practices. In that case, there may be some value in considering
the lessons of an older philosophical tradition as practiced in
John Anderson’s Philosophy Room.
1. The John Anderson Papers at the University of Sydney Library
<http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/oztexts/a
nderson.html/>
2. Renear; Buzzetti; Caton; McGann; Huitfeldt; De Rose et al.; and
Barwell et al.
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