Portal (2007) presents an unusually complex example for the study of video game paratexts. This article uses the case of the game’s promotional website ApertureScience.com to consider how paratextuality and the associated concepts of ephemerality and materiality may be further refined to open up new dimensions of video games as objects of interpretation and play. The article draws from the field of textual studies, which specializes in the particularities of media, and in the entanglement of technical detail with interpretation and meaning. The first part re-evaluates the nature of the book as an analogy for the materiality of video games, and critiques Gérard Genette’s conception of bookish paratexts and its applicability to video games. The article then offers a detailed analysis of ApertureScience.com as a paratext, including its satirical critiques of positivism and corporate research, and concludes with a discussion of the materiality of digital paratexts. Keywords paratext , Portal, materiality , textual studies , Aperture Science , cake , ephemerality

Portal (2007) presents an unusually complex example for the study of video game paratexts. This article uses the case of the game's promotional website ApertureScience.com to consider how paratextuality and the associated concepts of ephemerality and materiality may be further refined to open up new dimensions of video games as objects of interpretation and play. The article draws from the field of textual studies, which specializes in the particularities of media, and in the entanglement of technical detail with interpretation and meaning. The first part re-evaluates the nature of the book as an analogy for the materiality of video games, and critiques Gérard Genette's conception of bookish paratexts and its applicability to video games. The article then offers a detailed analysis of ApertureScience.com as a paratext, including its satirical critiques of positivism and corporate research, and concludes with a discussion of the materiality of digital paratexts.

It is now 40 years since Gérard Genette's work introduced the term paratexts into literary studies, giving a unifying name to the many kinds of texts that serve as thresholds to other texts. The term and concept have migrated into the study of several other media forms, including video game studies, thanks principally to Mia Consalvo in Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games (2007) and Steven Jones in The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Strategies (2008). The term's meaning expanded in the process, which has been the subject of much debate since then. Over a decade later, the timing seems apt to take stock of the concept of paratextuality and consider new ways of adapting it. This introduction to a special issue titled "Video Games and Paratextuality" reconsiders Genette's reception in video game studies, and introduces a set of articles that together look beyond Genette.

Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies offers an important perspective on the value of the work-concept in textual scholarship. This response to his book, written for a seminar at the 2021 Society for Textual Scholarship conference, takes up threads leading outward from his argument, and in three sections considers the potential of bibliography beyond books, textual scholarship beyond editing, and archives beyond metaphor.

Was Marshall McLuhan's greatest work not his published writing but his reading? This article examines McLuhan's annotation practices in his copies of James Joyce's Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and asks what kinds of evidence a prolific annotator like McLuhan might have left if he had done his reading digitally. The first half profiles McLuhan's annotation practices, illustrated by examples from books from McLuhan's personal library. The second half describes an informal experiment, in which the author tests McLuhan's annotation techniques against the capabilities of digital book platforms and formats, specifically PDF (using the Apple Preview app) and EPUB (using the Apple Books app). Overall, the article works through two questions that are relevant to book history, marginalia studies, and digital archiving. How will we understand the evidence left behind by readers when that evidence is in born-digital forms, as archived digital files? And what can we learn about digital reading and annotation from someone like McLuhan, who did those things exceptionally well in another medium? The conclusion reflects on prospects for the study of born-digital marginalia, and on the role of encyclopedism in understanding both McLuhan's and Joyce's media theory.

Background Marshall McLuhan was not only a prolific reader but also an expert annotator of his own books. Taking as a case study McLuhan's copies of James Joyce's Ulysses in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, this article asks what we can learn about McLuhan's reading from close analysis of his own books. Analysis The article begins with a discussion of McLuhan's media theory as "applied Joyce," with particular reference to Ulysses, and then turns to an overview of the annotation techniques and strategies visible in McLuhan's copies of the novel. Conclusion and implications The conclusion considers McLuhan's own books as hybrid artifacts that challenge us to rethink rigid distinctions between print and manuscript cultures.

This article takes the Canadian band the Tragically Hip as a case study in pro-amateur digital music archiving and also considers the larger place of the band’s music within the context of cultural memory. After lead singer and lyricist Gord Downie’s cancer diagnosis in 2016, the band made the remarkable decision to undertake a Canadian tour, which became one of the most obsessively documented rock tours in Canadian history. Drawing on close readings of the band’s performances and some of the digital records that capture them, the article argues for the importance of considering questions of evidence and memory together, especially in the context of archiving popular music. The article begins with a discussion of the Tragically Hip’s value as an archival case study, which is based on the band’s linking of composition and live improvisation. It then turns to the engagement of the band’s songs with the materials of Canadian collective memory, the work of bootleg collectors and pro-am archivists in the documentation of performance history, and the documentation of the band’s final Canadian tour in 2016. Throughout, the article examines how professional and pro-am archiving can complement each other in the case of a band like the Hip, whose music is so closely linked to the idea of Canadian collective memory. RESUME Cet article utilise le groupe canadien The Tragically Hip comme etude de cas de l’archivage de musique numerique pro-amateur et aborde aussi la place plus large qu’occupe la musique de ce groupe dans le contexte de la memoire culturelle. Apres le diagnostic de cancer du chanteur principal et parolier Gord Downie en 2016, le groupe a pris la remarquable decision d’entreprendre une tournee canadienne qui est devenue la tournee rock la plus hyper-documentee de l’histoire canadienne. En effectuant une lecture attentive des prestations du groupe et de quelques documents numeriques qui les ont captees, cet article plaide pour l’importance de considerer ensemble les questions de preuve et de memoire, surtout dans le contexte de l’archivage de la musique populaire. Cet article debute avec une discussion sur la valeur de The Tragically Hip comme etude de cas archivistique, qui est basee sur le lien que le groupe entretient entre la composition et l’improvisation en direct. Il explore ensuite l’engagement des chansons de ce groupe envers le materiel de la memoire canadienne collective, le travail des collectionneurs d’enregistrement pirate et des archivistes pro-amateurs dans la creation d’une documentation relative a l’histoire de leurs prestations, et la documentation relative a la derniere tournee canadienne du groupe en 2016. A travers l’article, l’auteur examine comment l’archivage professionnel et pro-amateur peuvent se completer dans un cas comme celui du groupe The Tragically Hip, dont la musique est si etroitement liee a l’idee de memoire collective canadienne.

Abstract:This essay asks what bibliographical and book-history perspectives can reveal when applied to digital editions themselves as artifacts in the long continuum of Shakespeare editing. What is the history of Shakespearean information architecture, digital and otherwise, and how does it take material form in the working practices of editors? To what extent does available infrastructure determine editorial theory, or vice versa? What does a basic editorial concept like precision mean in the context of technologies like XML that allow us, paradoxically, to make rigorously formal models of textual ambiguity? We approach these questions via the concept of modeling as it has developed in the digital humanities. A digital model is not merely a static representation of something but rather, in the words of computing historian Michael Mahoney, an "operative representation" with moving parts—literal and figurative—that calls for manipulation, conjecture, and play. The essay begins by considering data modeling in relation to the dramaturgical modeling practices of scenic designer Edward Gordon Craig, and then turns to the data-modeling practices evident in the working papers of three predigital Shakespeare editors (Howard Staunton, Horace Howard Furness, and Edward Capell). Like digital editors today, these precursors were forced to confront an existing model of the text; through their struggles with paper-based information architectures, they illuminate the sometimes invisible infrastructures in which editorial work takes place. The essay concludes with an examination of textual scaffolding in digital editions and considers how the information architecture of the text, while invisible to the reader, impacts how the texts can be read, analyzed, and modeled.

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E-books are human artifacts and bear the traces of their making no less for being digital, though they bear those traces in ways bibliographers have yet to explain thoroughly. The bibliographic consideration of e-books is a dual challenge in that it must reckon not only with unfamiliar forms of textuality but also with a pervasive cultural discourse about e-books that tends to mystify the textual condition itself. This article explores the dual nature of that challenge and outlines some principles toward the bibliographical study of e-books, taking the Canadian novel The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau Press, 2009) as a test case.

Over the last 20 years, humanities and archival scholars have theorized the ways in which archives imbue records with meaning. However, archival scholars have not sufficiently examined how users understand the meaning of the records they find. Building on the premise that how users come to make meaning from records is greatly in need of examination, this paper reports on a pilot study of four book history students and their processes of archival meaning-making. We focus in particular on behaviors of an interpretive rather than forensic nature. This article includes a discussion of the theoretical concepts and scholarly literature that shaped our goals for this paper. It then discusses the methodology and our interpretations of the research findings, before turning to a discussion of the findings’ implications and directions for future work.