(Download) "Thoughts on the Future of Bibliographical Analysis." by Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free

July 24, 2021

eBook details

Title: Thoughts on the Future of Bibliographical Analysis.
Author : Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada
Release Date : January 22, 2008
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 214 KB

Description

I have been asked to talk today about the future of analytical bibliography in the computer age. Almost every noun in that mandate poses a challenge. First of all, it would seem far easier to speak instead about the past, and contemplating the past probably would also be more productive for understanding both the present and the future. This is the wise approach that David Foxon incorporated in a talk from whose title I borrow, Thoughts on the History and Future of Bibliographical Description. (1) On the other hand, knowing the past is extremely difficult too, though one of the points I want to make today is that bibliographical analysis gives us a means of tackling that problem. Analytical bibliography is the next difficult term. It is a familiar one and indeed appears in the first objective of the constitution of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, whose goal is "To promote the study and practice of bibliography: enumerative, historical, descriptive, analytical, and textual." (2) This Society has in fact been the beneficiary of a full lecture on that taxonomy, for in 1971 Fredson Bowers addressed its Colloquium on Nineteenth-Century Canadian Bibliography at Massey College on the topic "Four Faces of Bibliography." (3) Noting that these areas are, as he said, "in fact, interdependent, and [that] each merges--sometimes almost imperceptibly--into the other," he also emphasized the need for scholars to recognize the distinctiveness of these approaches and, when working in them, "always [to] be conscious of ... [one's] place in the whole spectrum" (94-95). Although "Accurate and meaningful description cannot be written unless the books have first been subjected to analytical examination" (95), analysis is not always directed at preparing a record of physical features. Ultimately analytical bibliography seeks to use physical details as a way of determining something about the history of the book, usually its manufacturing history. Just as bibliographical description could have a number of purposes (among them, to serve as a guide to collecting, a source book for pursuing various historical interests, or a basis for tracing the textual history of a work), so could the findings of bibliographical analysis be directed to different ends. In Bowers's own case, a logical but not exclusive application of insights into the manufacturing history of a book was of course to the study of the text of that book, and then in turn to its editing.