What Counts as the Text?
What is a text? We often refer to a book as a text because it represents a wholeness, a complete story or a scientific report, for example. Texts are also often the start and completion of an argument. Since the focus of this work is on argumentation, I would like to pay special attention to text in terms of argument, and view text as the entity through which arguments are made, the means of presentation for the argument, if you will.
What, then, counts as text? We would likely not call this passage quoted from Shakespeare as the text of Hamlet:
There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.(V, ii, 208-211)
We would refer to the quoted passage as part of the text of Hamlet. But once it's included in another work, it becomes part of the new work. In essence, then, the same passage is part of two different texts. Further, since this is hypertext on the World Wide Web, I have included a link to a site that allows you to see the entirety of Hamlet. You can easily jump back and forth between the two Web documents, looking at various parts of this text and of the text of Hamlet. And if you're viewing the frames version, you really haven't left this work. So which text is which? Such issues dealing with text obviously have implications for argumentation on the Web.
There is also issue of the types of "text" on the Web.
Redefine Text?
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