# Marking Texts of Many Dimensions
Jerome McGann, in *A Companion to Digital Humanities*, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. page 
Although "text" has been a "Keyword" in clerical and even popular discourse for more than fifty years, it did not find a place in Raymond Williams's important (1976) book Keywords.
This strange omission may perhaps be explained by the word's cultural ubiquity and power. In that lexicon of modernity Williams called the "Vocabulary of Culture and Society", "text" has been the "one word to rule them all." Indeed, the word "text" became so shape-shifting and meaning-malleable that we should probably label it with Tolkien's full rubrication: "text" has been, and still is, the "one word to rule them all and in the darkness bind them."
We want to keep in mind that general context when we address the issues of digitized texts, text Markup, and electronic editing, which are our specialized concerns here. As we lay foundations for translating our inherited archive of cultural materials, including vast corpora of paper-based materials, into digital depositories and Forms, we are called to a clarity of thought about textuality that most people, even most scholars, rarely undertake. Consider the phrase "marked text", for instance. How many recognize it as a redundancy? All text is marked text, as you may see by reflecting on the very text you are now reading. As you follow this conceptual exposition, watch the physical embodiments that shape the ideas and the process of thought. Do you see the typeface, do you recognize it? Does it mean anything to you, and if not, why not? Now scan away (as you keep reading) and take a quick measure of the general page layout: the font sizes, the characters per line, the lines per page, the leading, the headers, footers, margins. And there is so much more to be seen, registered, understood simply at the documentary level of your reading: paper, ink, book design, or the markup that controls not the documentary status of the text but its linguistic status. What would you be seeing and reading if I were addressing you in Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew – even Spanish or German? What would you be seeing and reading if this text had been printed, like Shakespeare's sonnets, in 1609?
We all know the ideal reader of these kinds of traditional documents. She is an actual person, like the texts this person reads and studies. He writes about her readings and studies under different names, including Randall McLeod, Randy Clod, Random Cloud, etc. She is the Dupin of the textual mysteries of our exquisite and sophisticated bibliographical age.
Most important to realize, for this book's present purposes, is that digital markup schemes do not easily – perhaps do not even naturally - map to the markup that pervades paper-based texts. Certainly this is the case for every kind of electronic markup currently in use: from simple ASCII, to any inline SGML derivative, to the recent approaches of Stand-off Markup (see Berrie website; Thompson and McKelvie 1997). The symptoms of this discrepancy are exemplified in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) community's struggles to simulate the complex processes of natural language and communicative exchange. Stymied of success in achieving that goal, these efforts have nonetheless been singularly fruitful for giving us a clearer view of the richness and flexibility of traditional textual machineries.
How, then, are traditional texts marked? If we could give an exhaustive answer to that question we would be able to simulate them in digital forms. We cannot complete an answer for two related reasons: first, the answer would have to be framed from within the discourse field of textuality itself; and second, that framework is dynamic, a continually emerging function of its own operations, including its explicitly self-reflexive operations. This is not to say that markup and theories of markup must be "subjective." (It is also not to say – see below – that they must not be subjective.) It is to say that they are and must be social, historical, and dialectical, and that some forms have greater range and power than others, and that some are useful exactly because they seek to limit and restrict their range for certain special purposes.