McGann begins by stating that Radiant Textuality is organized around two ideas about humanities-based digital instruments:

1: "that understanding the structure of digital space requires a disciplined aesthetic intelligence," and that texts are our best models of said intelligence in a highly developed form (RT, xi) .

Or, restated, that we need to take a greater interest in the ways that poems are formed and mean when we try to think about what to do with them in a digital space.

2: that "digital technology used by humanities scholars has focused almost exclusively on menthods of sorting, accessing and disseminating large bodies of materials, and on certain specialized problems in computational style and linguistics" -- and thus, humanities scholars have been much less engaged with questions about interpretation and self-aware reflection in digital spaces.

McGann uses his work developing the Rossetti Archive in connection with IATH as a way of exploring these two ideas further, with the overarching goal of "imagining what we don't know." Radiant Textuality describes McGann's progress -- but more importantly (by his own admission), the varied failures of the Rossetti Archive, and the importance of these failures to the ongoing work of digital textuality.

His point, however, is not that scholars should be basking in the glow of their computer screens in order to imagine what they don't know, with the digital anarchy newly refreshed each morning -- but rather that we need to be able to imagine what we don't know in a "disciplined and deliberated fashion" (18). This is tied into a prediction that "the next generation of literary and aesthetic theorists who will most matter are people who will be at least as involved with making things as with writing text" (19). Throughout the entire work, the emphasis is on performativity -- on how it affects receptions of poems in print, and
on how best to encourage performative receptions of texts in digital spaces.

In discussions, we have returned repeatedly to the importance of accuracy; to editorial choices and the responsibility placed on the one who makes them. One of the benefits that we seem to see in electronic editions (and this is more true of internet, rather than CD-ROM editions) is that they could be easily updated to reflect corrections. This is a fairly typical view point. But McGann suggests, as an alternative, pursuing editing as a theoretical pursuit, falling somewhere between three exemplars.

The first is the Kane-Donaldson edition of Piers Plowman, in which all editorial choices have been governed by a larger complex hypothesis about the work -- so that all the readings are connected with each other, and, by implication, all are correct. But the edition is admittedly created based on Kane and Donaldson's hypothesis of the work.

The second type is the "definitive" editing style that has been prevalent throughout the 20th century.

At the other end of the spectrum, in contrast to both of these, is the "un-editing" style promoted by Randall McLeod.

It is the first and third of these that are most important for the direction that McGann wants to take in his editing pursuits -- to combine McLeod's emphasis on the original materials with Kane and Donaldson's emphasis on developing complex hypotheses about a work. The benefit of technology is that it allows an edition to be designed in order to go through complex interactive transformations (81), not just at the hands of the supposed editors, but at the hands of all users and viewers -- and it is in the processes of transformation and mutability that any edition might be able to "undertake as an essential part of its work a regular and disciplined analysis and critique of itself" (RT 81).

These are not the goals that were in place at the beginning of the construction of the Rossetti Archive, which was begun in the context of the then-new SGML technology, and interest in tagging and linking between words. According to McGann, tagging and linking will eventually become a central act in text reception, as important as reading or writing (RT 68). But this (as well as the general principles of the TEI) treat all texts as "ordered hierarchies of content objects" (139), i.e., traditionally logical informational structures. And this principle "violates some of the most basic reading practices of the humanities community, scholarly as well as popular." We do not read this way. And this does not even address the problem of how to integrate images and visual content, which cannot be searched the way that verbal content can.

The Rossetti Archive "failed" in its original incarnation because of the conflict between trying to produce an edition with all the benefits of both the "critical edition" and "facsimile edition" styles -- and to deal appropriately with the verbal and visual components of Rossetti's work -- AND the pull towards theoretical editing -- imagining what you don't know.

This leads into McGann's ideas on deformance, which provide the thrust for the rest of the work.

To explain, first, consider Rossetti's painting, The Blessed Damozel,".

Here is a close-up facsimile of the original.

McGann and a colleague began playing with the image with a filtering program, and produced this distortion.

And then, using a larger area of the picture, produced this distortion. And finally, this one, which allow a new emphasis on the formal relations of color between the flesh of the damozel, the stars in her crown, and the world behind the embracing lovers.

But according to McGann, you can take this even further:







In these images, you can continue to look for formal colour ties highlighted by the filter, but in McGann's view, they also exhibit potential for rethinking the value of subjective aesthetic engagement: "They came to being through a series of obscure intuitive operations, a series of transformations and transformations of transformations. The series ended when the image proved satisfying."

Deformance, then, is the work of transforming an aesthetic work in order to learn/imagine what you don't know.

And in the time period of Radiant Textuality, the ultimate version of that arrives in the format of the Ivanhoe Game.

Rules for the game are here, but the six ground rules are as follows:

Ground Rules
1) Give each of your posted moves a title.
2) Indicate how your move is to be connected to other moves or to the source text. Example: "This move replaces paragraph 3 and is linked to Guildenstern's "Still Waiting" move."
3) Keep to the time limit for this game, midnight August 17th to midnight August 25th, but make as many moves as you like in that period.
4) You must adopt a role and keep a private role journal outside of the blog system.
5) Conceal your identity during play by editing your Blogger profile to provide a false "nickname."
6) You must have a high tolerance for unimaginative and infelicitous interfaces. The point here is just to store the content of our moves. Don't get hung up on Blogger.

A history of the moves in one of the early sessions of the game is here. The appendix in Radiant Textuality also includes a set of moves, and the accompanying player file, in which McGann chose to play the role of scholar, collector, bibliographer, and forger Thomas James Wise.

The idea is that the taking on of another role allows one a certain distance from one's actions -- and therefore, better ability to be self-critical. One also, therefore, has more freedom -- and less reluctance -- about self-amending later on.