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

Irish Studies in the Informatics mature and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is in that location no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, make of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the friend of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. Finnegans Wake (London Faber & Faber 1939), p.20.Television kills telephone set in brothers brawl. Ibid., p.52.This essay aims to trace the history and development of the electronic prevail in Ireland with some experimental condition of wider cultural issues involved in the precise notion of digitising writings for the computer-based reader. In regard to digitising, the Irish book is discipline 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 story and collections rather than discrete texts, whether held on national servers or linked in concert 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 naked as a jaybird way of producing literature than a new medium for the Irish anthologythat is, a subroutine library of digital texts, thus far extensive, which has been created to represent (in sample or totality) the Irish literary tradition. In public 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 virtually analogous to that between smoke-cured Irish salmon and Irish smoked salmona 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 bristle to the degree of greatly outnumbering the others (as they do in any sizeable bookshop), except they are not the subject of this essay.