Irish Studies in the Informatics Age :: Irish Culture European Research

Irish Studies in the Informatics Age [†¦] and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. Finnegans Wake (London: Faber & Faber 1939), p.20. Television kills telephony in brothers' brawl. Ibid., p.52. This essay aims to trace the history and development of the electronic book in Ireland with some consideration of wider cultural issues involved in the very notion of digitising literature for the computer-based reader. In regard to digitising, the Irish book is subject to precisely the same conditions as any other literary product, so considered; that is to say, the processes applied by computers are precisely the same, be the books Irish or otherwise. In consequence the subject of this essay properly concerns textual archives and collections rather than discrete texts, whether held on national servers or linked together in cyberspace in such a way as to constitute a definite cultural topography for the internet user. The electronic Irish book is, then, less the name for a new way of producing literature than a new medium for the 'Irish anthology'—that is, a library of digital texts, however extensive, which has been created to represent (in sample or totality) the Irish lite rary tradition. In prevailing cultural conditions, each item in such a library is likely to be a digital copy of a formerly printed work of the kind in question rather than a new cultural entity generated ab initio within a new cultural medium. As to whether we call our subject the 'electronic Irish book' or the 'Irish electronic book', the difference is roughly analogous to that between 'smoked Irish salmon' and 'Irish smoked salmon'—a significant consideration for shoppers since the former implies a greater authenticity of actual contents than the latter, though not necessarily a superior dining experience. For practical purposes, it is Irish texts that concern us here, whether digitised in Ireland or elsewhere. Texts of other national provenance, whether in English or in another language, are the equivalent to 'Irish smoked salmon' in the foregoing culinary comparison; these may well abound to the degree of greatly outnumbering the others (as they do in any sizeable bookshop), but they are not the subject of this essay.