Textual Addressability and the Future of Editing

Michael Witmore, in a blog posting entitled "Text: A Massively Addressable Object," argues that a text is a "text because it is massively addressable at different levels of scale," as part of the total population of texts, say, or of an individual text. Addressability enables one to query a position within the text at a certain level of abstraction, whether at the level of a genre, a book, an individual line, or all the verbs in a particular chapter. Each level of abstraction, including the book, is its "own provisional unity, stable for the purposes of address, but also: stable because it is the object of address." The textual edition by its very nature both theorizes and embodies massive addressability at every level of its protocols and affordances, and nowhere more so than in digital editions. My essay addresses the significance of massive addressability for the future of editing.