In a May posting to her blog, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Lisa Spiro addresses one of the most obvious questions to strike anyone who's interested in learning more about digital technology and texts. Why the fuss about machine-readable texts? Isn't it enough to circulate high-quality human-readable reproductions of texts, and make them more available to scholars? What can you do with machine-readable text (think XML, mark-up etc.) that can't be done with human-readable text?

I’ve had a longstanding, friendly debate with a colleague about whether it is sufficient to provide page images of books, or whether text should be converted to a machine- and human-readable format such as XML. She argues that converting scanned books to text is expensive and that the primary goal should be to provide access to more material. True, but converting books into a textual format makes them much more accessible, allowing users to search, manipulate, organize, and analyze them. Here’s my summary of what you can do with an electronic text. Most of these advantages are pretty obvious, but worth articulating.

Read Lisa Spiro's full post, "What can you do with texts that are in a digital format"