Rewriting Moby-Dick: Politics, Textual Identity, and the Revision Narrative

The study of textual evolution, or revision as a textual phenomenon, requires a form of fluid-text editing that not only gives readers access to the textual identities that constitute the versions of a work but also makes the revision process witnessable by generating revision sequences and revision narratives for every revision event. Traditional editorial approaches that mix versions in the editing of a work compromise the integrity of textual identities, and the problem of mixing versions is demonstrated in three examples of the way editors and critics (in the context of orientalist and colonialist discourses) have changed the text of, or rewritten, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: Edward Said's mistaking John Huston and Ray Bradbury's film ending for Melville's, the British expurgations that modulate Queequeg's homosexuality to preclude the idea of homosexual domesticity and marriage, and the British editors' conversion of Queequeg's Christianity (and modern editors' perpetuation of the unwanted conversion). These historical and modern cases show that readers, sometimes despite themselves, revise texts materially in ways that mirror their desire and the ways of power. Editing the rewriting of a text like Moby-Dick in a digital critical archive would preserve all versions and generate revision narratives that textualize the otherwise invisible dynamics of revision in a culture. With its capacity to edit fluid texts, digital humanities scholarship is well situated to expand the discourse on the dynamics of textual evolution into the literary and cultural criticism of the twenty-first century.

On revision operators

We look at various notions of a class of definability operations that generalise inductive operations, and are characterised as “revision operations”. More particularly we: (i) characterise the revision theoretically definable subsets of a countable acceptable structure; (ii) show that the categorical truth set of Belnap and Gupta's theory of truth over arithmetic using fully varied revision sequences yields a complete Σ31 set of integers; (iii) the set of stably categorical sentences using their revision operator Ψ is similarly Σ31 and which is complete in GÖdel's universe of constructive sets L; (iv) give an alternative account of a theory of truth—realistic variance that simplifies full variance, whilst at the same time arriving at Kripkean fixed points.

On Gupta-Belnap Revision Theories of Truth, Kripkean Fixed Points, and The Next Stable Set

We consider various concepts associated with the revision theory of truth of Gupta and Belnap. We categorize the notions definable using their theory of circular definitions as those notions universally definable over the next stable set. We give a simplified (in terms of definitional complexity) account of varied revision sequences—as a generalised algorithmic theory of truth. This enables something of a unification with the Kripkean theory of truth using supervaluation schemes.