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Errors creep in. Even in electronic transmission.

Here are some errors Greetham pointed out in 1992. Mostly from his own experience!

• Corrections to a printout could be made to an old file “representing an earlier state of the text”. “The result would be a mixture of the latest version of the pre-publication text with the earliest.” (Greetham 289)
• An earlier version can be sent to press instead of the final, corrected version—a likely mistake when filenames are similar.

• Photocopies can cut off lines of a text—even changing its meaning.

As I read down to the end of the first page of the copy on letter-size paper, all looked well, for there was an apparently perfect syntactic link between the end of page 1 and the beginning of page 2. It all seemed to make sense, except that the argument in the sentence appeared to be the opposite of what I knew to be Taylor’s general position on Shakespearean revision. Suspicious, I retrieved the A4 version to discover that the photocopying had neatly cut off the bottom line of the A4 in transferring to letter-size, and that this excised line (which syntactically could be omitted from the sentence without structural harm) contained a verbal negative which completely reversed the remnant of meaning in the photocopy. Lines can, of course, be omitted in any copying, but this particular omission, and the resulting inversion of meaning, was caused only by technological means (and, admittedly a little human fallibility in the selection of the wrong-size paper). (Greetham 290)

• Typesetting codes can wreak havoc with formatting. (Sometimes, I’d add, with meaning.)

Other types of error peculiar to electronic transmission include improper changes in typesetting commands caused by embedded codes. For example, some of the alt commands entered by a graduate assistant to access special symbols (e.g., ü) in early versions of the bibliography for this book where read by my typesetting program as commands to switch on or off such features as italic or boldface, so that titles of books and their authors would slip back and forth from italic to roman without any apparent logic. Of course, the combination of a visual check of the print-out with an investigation of these hidden codes identified and then removed the problem (or, at least, I hope so), but the introduction of a new type of error demonstrates that the challenge of textual bibliography has not disappeared just because of the move from print to electronic transmission. (Greetham 289)

• Corrections can leave remnants of earlier states.

In fact, electronic transmission can even have identifying typographic symptoms: thus, an article in the New York Times after the failed Soviet coup in August, 1991, invented a new ethnic/religious group when it claimed “the loss of its [Ukraine’s] 52 million Slavs would tilt the ethnic balance of the remaining union toward the Muslim oslems of Central Asia,” (August 26,1991: A10). These mysterious “oslems” were presumably created with a Times stylist noticed the form “Moslems” (rather than the preferred Times sytle “Muslims”), but instead of striking out the entire word left the initial “M” in place and inserted “uslims,” without, however, remembering to delete the offending “oslems.” The sequence of error would be impossible in a non-electronic medium. (Greetham 290-291)

“Every act of copying introduces new errors” and every technology “carries with it the possibility of determined or accidental variation” (289). 16 years later, I wonder, what new sorts of errors do find on the Web?

• Copycat spam sites (determined variation there!)
• Print stylesheet errors

More?

Greetham, D. C. 1992. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Garland reference library of the humanities vol. 1417. New York: Garland.