John Bryant, "Revision, Culture, and the Machine: How Digital Makes Us Human"
b'In revising their own texts, or other people\\u2019s texts, writers erase the past, remodel it, or reinvent it. They create versions of themselves, and those versions are recorded in the textual identities they create through revision. By studying revision, we are able to see not only how a single writer evolves but also how a culture insists upon certain evolutions, with or without the writer\\u2019s consent.\\n\\nTherefore, the dynamics of revision can take us to the heart of identity formation both in its expressive and repressive strains. What compels a culture to rewrite its texts? How do we track revision in order to \\u201csee\\u201d or rather \\u201cgive witness to\\u201d revisionary processes? In addressing these problems, digital scholarship can offer far more access to the fluid texts that expose the dynamics of revision and help us confront the necessity of revision in our culture.\\n\\nJohn Bryant draws upon examples from revision studies, adaptation, and translation in order to highlight the elements of creativity, appropriation, and cultural difference that are at stake in dealing with the ethics and editing of revision. Along the way, he demonstratse TextLab, the Melville Electronic Library\\u2019s revision editing tool, and discusses the ethical as well as editorial dimensions of other imagined tools, such as Melville Remix and How Billy [Budd] Grew.\\n\\nBryant is Professor of English at Hofstra University and received his BA. MA, and PhD from the University of Chicago. He has written on Melville, related writers of the nineteenth-century, and textual scholarship. He is also editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. His recent book, Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee (Michigan 2008), is based on his online fluid-text edition Herman Melville\\u2019s Typee. He is currently working on a critical biography, Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life (Wiley) and the NEH-funded Melville Electronic Library (MEL), an online critical archive and \\u201cWe the People\\u201d project.'