Compte rendu existant : BOYD, Jason, « In his discussion of digital textuality, van der Weel starts by reminding us that, despite the invention of computers as machines to perform numerical calculations (and which were never intended to process text), in today’s computers, text has a central and predominant place, from what computers are used for (e.g., email) to how they function (e.g., markup, programming languages). As a counterpart to the “Order of the Book,” the networked digital computer has created a “new kind of information space,” which van der Weel, borrowing a term coined by Ted Nelson, calls the “docuverse.” Van der Weel discusses the changes that the “docuverse” is making to our textual practices, from the “websurfing’” consumption of texts, to the instability of digital texts due to disappearance, invisibility of alteration, and technological degradation and obsolescence, and to the manipulability of digital interfaces on which we read text: “The conclusion seems inescapable that not only the technological characteristics of books and the digital medium but also their social consequences are indeed very different” (p. 192). Changing our textual minds is valuable for encapsulating the long history of textual transmission, from writing to digital text, and also for synthesizing the scholarship on this history and its social effects. While those well-versed in this history will perhaps find in the book nothing particularly new or ground-breaking, its admirable breadth and citations and references make it useful as a comprehensive introduction to the subject of what text has been, is, and may become. Thankfully, van der Weel eschews fevered pronouncements that the computer is creating either a heaven or a hell on earth. Pointing out that recurring predictions that new mediums will extinguish existing mediums are “never fulfilled” (p. 103), he cautiously offers in his conclusion some possible scenarios as to what the future might hold for the book and digital text and how this might change textual practices, while admitting that, while it is clear that significant medial change is occurring, it is impossible to predict where that change will lead. », trouvé sur
http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/89/221, le 27 février 2017.