Methods of Web Philology
Computer Metadata and Web Archiving in the Primary Source Documents of Contemporary Esotericism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsnr.v7i1.26074Keywords:
methodology, web philology, textual scholarship, digital forensics, contemporary esotericismAbstract
This article explores the issues surrounding the critical analysis of first generation electronic objects within the context of the study of contemporary esoteric discourse. This is achieved through a detailed case study of Benjamin Rowe’s work, A Short Course in Scrying, which is solely exemplified by digital witnesses. This article demonstrates that the critical analysis of these witnesses is only possible by adapting the general methods of textual scholarship to the specific techniques of digital forensics—particularly the analysis of computer metadata and web archives. The resulting method, here termed web philology, is applicable to the critical analysis by the scholar of religion of any primary source documents originating on the web as electronic objects.
References
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Beagrie, Neil. 2006. “Digital curation for science, digital libraries, and individuals.” The International Journal of Digital Curation 1(1): 3–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v1i1.2
Berger, Helen A. and Douglas Ezzy. 2004. “The Internet as virtual spiritual community: Teen witches in the United States and Australia.” In Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan (eds.), Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, 175–188. London: Routledge.
Borgman, Christine L. 2007. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.
Brügger, Niels. 2008. The archived website and website philology: A new type of historical document? Nordicom Review 29 (2): 155–175.
2013. “Web archiving: Between past, present, and future.” In The Handbook of Internet Studies, edited by Robert Burnett, Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess, 24–42. Handbooks in Communication and Media. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Buckland, Michael. 2011. “Data management as bibliography.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 37(6): 34–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bult.2011.1720370611
Burnard, Lou, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and John Unsworth. 2006. Electronic Textual Editing. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
Campbell, Heide. 2013. “Internet and religion.” In The Handbook of Internet Studies, edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess. Handbooks in Communication and Media. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Carvey, Harlan. 2014. Windows Forensic Analysis Toolkit: Advanced Analysis Techniques for Windows 8. 4th edition. Waltham: Elsevier.
Castro, Elizabeth. 2003. HTML For the World Wide Web, Fifth Edition, with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide. 5th edition. Berkeley: Peachpit Press.
Chassanoff, Alexandra. 2013. “Historians and the use of primary source materials in the digital age.” The American Archivist 76(2): 458–480. http://dx.doi.org/10.17723/aarc.76.2.lh76217m2m376n28
Cowan, Douglas E. 2005. Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet. New York and London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203313459
2015. “The occult on the internet.” In The Occult World, edited by Christopher Partridge, 531–538. The Routledge Worlds. Oxon: Routledge.
Crow, John L. 2013. “Accessing the astral with a monitor and mouse: Esoteric religion and the astral located in three-dimensional virtual realms.” In Contemporary Esotericism, edited by Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm, 159–180. Gnostica: Texts and Interpretations. Sheffield: Equinox.
Dawson, Lorne L. and Jenna Hennebry. 2004. “New religions and the internet: Recruiting in a new public space.” In Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, edited by Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan,151–174. London: Routledge.
Eggert, Paul. 2005. “Text-encoding, theories of the text, and the ‘work-site’.” Literacy and Linguistic Computing 20(4): 425–435. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqi050
Fitzgerald, Brian and Damien O’Brien. 2005. “Digital sampling and culture jamming in a remix world: What does the law allow?” Media and Arts Law Review 10(4): 279–298.
Gabler, Hans Walter. 2010. “Theorizing the digital scholarly edition.” Literature Compass 7(2): 43–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00675.x
Gill, Tony. 2008. “Metadata and the web.” In Introduction to Metadata, edited by Murtha Baca, 20–37. 2nd edition. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute.
Gilliland, Anne J. 2008. “Setting the stage.” In Introduction to Metadata, edited by Murtha Baca, 1–19. 2nd edition. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute.
Greetham, D.C. 1994. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1417. New York and London: Garland Publishing.
Griffin, Wendy. 2004. “The goddess net.” In Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, edited by Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan,189–203. London: Routledge.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 2012. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Higgins, Sarah. 2011. “Digital curation: The emergence of a new discipline.” The International Journal of Digital Curation 2(6): 78–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v6i2.191
Howsam. Leslie. 2013. “New directions for research and pedagogy in book history.” Knygotyra 60: 7–18.
Hughes, Jerald and Karl Reiner Lang. 2006. “Transmutability: Digital decontextualization, manipulation, and recontextualization as a new source of value in the production and consumption of culture products.” Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 9: 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2006.511
Jones, Robert. 2005. Internet Forensics: Using Digital Evidence to Solve Computer Crime. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2001. “Materiality and matter and stuff: What electronic texts are made of.” Electronic Book Review. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/sited. Accessed 2 November 2014.
2002. “Editing the interface: Textual studies and first generation electronic objects.” TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 14: 15–51.
2012. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., Richard Ovenden and Gabriela Redwine. 2010. Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections. CLIR Publication No. 149. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources.
Knight, Gareth. 2012. “The forensics curator: Digital forensics as a solution to addressing the curatorial challenges posed by personal digital archives.” The International Journal of Digital Curation 7(2): 40–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v7i2.228
Krough, Marilyn C. and Brooke Ashley Pillifant. 2004. The house of Netjer: A new religious community online. In Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, edited by Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan, 205–219. London: Routledge.
Losey, Ralph C. 2008. E-Discovery: Current Trends and Cases. Chicago, IL: American Bar Association.
Marotti, Arthur F. 2010. “Editing manuscripts in print and digital forms.” Literature Compass 7(2): 89–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00680.x
Maras, Marie-Helen. 2014. Computer Forensics: Cybercriminals, Laws, and Evidence. Burlington, VT: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Mason, Dean. 2001. “Jobbing systems in a digital supply train.” In Digital Book Production and Supply Chain Management, edited by Bill Cope and Dean Mason, 111–126. Altona: Common Ground Publishing.
Masters, David L. 2008. The Lawyer’s Guide to Adobe Acrobat. 3rd edition. Chicago, IL: American Bar Association.
McGann, Jerome. 1998. “Textual scholarship, textual theory, and the uses of electronic tools: A brief report on current undertakings.” Victorian Studies 41(4): 609–618.
2010. “Electronic archives and critical editing.” Literature Compass 7(2): 37–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00674.x
Murray, Simone. 2010. “‘Remix my lit’: Towards an open access literary culture.” Convergence 16(1): 23–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354856509347704
National Security Agency Enterprise Application Division of the Systems and Network Analysis Center (SNAC) Information Assurance Directorate. 2008. “Hidden data and metadata in Adobe PDF files: Publication risks and countermeasures.” National Security Agency/Central Security Service. https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/app/pdf_risks.pdf. Accessed 13 November 2014.
Padova, Ted. 2007. Adobe Acrobat 8 PDF Bible. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publications.
Pasi, Marco and Philippe Rabaté. 1999. “Langue angélique, langue magique l’énochien.” In Politica Hermetica, N° 13, 1999: Les Langues Secrètes, edited by Jean-Pierre Branch, 94–123. Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme.
Petersen, Jesper Aaagaard. 2013. “From book to bit: Enacting Satanism online.” In Contemporary Esotericism, edited by Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm, 134–158. Gnostica: Texts and Interpretations. Sheffield: Equinox.
Pittman, Ryan D. and Dave Shaver. 2010. “Windows forensic analysis.” In Handbook of Digital Forensics and Investigation, edited by Eoghan Casey, 209–300. London: Elsevier Academic Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-374267-4.00005-7
Raghavan, Sriram and S.V. Raghavan. 2013. “Determining the origin of downloaded files using metadata associations.” Journal of Communications 8(12): 902–910. http://dx.doi.org/10.12720/jcm.8.12.902-910
Robinson, Peter. 2009. “What scholarly editors need to help us make sense together in the digital age.” Journal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 1(1): 1–6.
Salama, Usama, Vijay Varadharajan, and Michael Hitchens. 2012. “Metadata based forensic analysis of digital information in the web.” Annual Symposium on Information Assurance & Secure Knowledge Management 7: 9–15.
Sammons, John. 2012. The Basics of Digital Forensics: The Primer for Getting Started in Digital Forensics. Waltham, MA: Elsevier.
Shillingsburg, Peter L. 1996. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd edition. Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Tennis, Joseph T. 2011. “Is there a new bibliography?” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 49(2): 121–126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2011.544020
Thomassen, Einar. 2011. “Philology.” In The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, 346–354. London: Routledge.
Van der Weel, Adriaan. 2005. “Bibliography for the new media.” Quærendo 35(1–2): 96–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1570069054094208
Vanhoutte, Edward. 2010. “Defining electronic editions: A historical and functional perspective. In Text and Genre in Reconstruction: Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions, edited by Willard McCarty, 119–144. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0008.05
Williams, William Proctor and Craig S. Abbott. 2009. An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. 4th edition. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
Winslade, J. Lawton. 2000. “Techno-Kabbalah: The performative language of magick and the production of occult knowledge.” TDR 44(2): 84–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/10542040051058717
Asprem, Egil. 2012. Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture. SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Barwell, Graham. 2005. “Original, authentic, copy: Conceptual issues in digital texts.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 20(4): 415–424. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqi046
Beagrie, Neil. 2006. “Digital curation for science, digital libraries, and individuals.” The International Journal of Digital Curation 1(1): 3–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v1i1.2
Berger, Helen A. and Douglas Ezzy. 2004. “The Internet as virtual spiritual community: Teen witches in the United States and Australia.” In Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan (eds.), Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, 175–188. London: Routledge.
Borgman, Christine L. 2007. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.
Brügger, Niels. 2008. The archived website and website philology: A new type of historical document? Nordicom Review 29 (2): 155–175.
2013. “Web archiving: Between past, present, and future.” In The Handbook of Internet Studies, edited by Robert Burnett, Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess, 24–42. Handbooks in Communication and Media. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Buckland, Michael. 2011. “Data management as bibliography.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 37(6): 34–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bult.2011.1720370611
Burnard, Lou, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe and John Unsworth. 2006. Electronic Textual Editing. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
Campbell, Heide. 2013. “Internet and religion.” In The Handbook of Internet Studies, edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess. Handbooks in Communication and Media. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Carvey, Harlan. 2014. Windows Forensic Analysis Toolkit: Advanced Analysis Techniques for Windows 8. 4th edition. Waltham: Elsevier.
Castro, Elizabeth. 2003. HTML For the World Wide Web, Fifth Edition, with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide. 5th edition. Berkeley: Peachpit Press.
Chassanoff, Alexandra. 2013. “Historians and the use of primary source materials in the digital age.” The American Archivist 76(2): 458–480. http://dx.doi.org/10.17723/aarc.76.2.lh76217m2m376n28
Cowan, Douglas E. 2005. Cyberhenge: Modern Pagans on the Internet. New York and London: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203313459
2015. “The occult on the internet.” In The Occult World, edited by Christopher Partridge, 531–538. The Routledge Worlds. Oxon: Routledge.
Crow, John L. 2013. “Accessing the astral with a monitor and mouse: Esoteric religion and the astral located in three-dimensional virtual realms.” In Contemporary Esotericism, edited by Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm, 159–180. Gnostica: Texts and Interpretations. Sheffield: Equinox.
Dawson, Lorne L. and Jenna Hennebry. 2004. “New religions and the internet: Recruiting in a new public space.” In Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, edited by Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan,151–174. London: Routledge.
Eggert, Paul. 2005. “Text-encoding, theories of the text, and the ‘work-site’.” Literacy and Linguistic Computing 20(4): 425–435. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqi050
Fitzgerald, Brian and Damien O’Brien. 2005. “Digital sampling and culture jamming in a remix world: What does the law allow?” Media and Arts Law Review 10(4): 279–298.
Gabler, Hans Walter. 2010. “Theorizing the digital scholarly edition.” Literature Compass 7(2): 43–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00675.x
Gill, Tony. 2008. “Metadata and the web.” In Introduction to Metadata, edited by Murtha Baca, 20–37. 2nd edition. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute.
Gilliland, Anne J. 2008. “Setting the stage.” In Introduction to Metadata, edited by Murtha Baca, 1–19. 2nd edition. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute.
Greetham, D.C. 1994. Textual Scholarship: An Introduction. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 1417. New York and London: Garland Publishing.
Griffin, Wendy. 2004. “The goddess net.” In Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, edited by Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan,189–203. London: Routledge.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. 2012. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Higgins, Sarah. 2011. “Digital curation: The emergence of a new discipline.” The International Journal of Digital Curation 2(6): 78–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v6i2.191
Howsam. Leslie. 2013. “New directions for research and pedagogy in book history.” Knygotyra 60: 7–18.
Hughes, Jerald and Karl Reiner Lang. 2006. “Transmutability: Digital decontextualization, manipulation, and recontextualization as a new source of value in the production and consumption of culture products.” Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 9: 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2006.511
Jones, Robert. 2005. Internet Forensics: Using Digital Evidence to Solve Computer Crime. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. 2001. “Materiality and matter and stuff: What electronic texts are made of.” Electronic Book Review. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/sited. Accessed 2 November 2014.
2002. “Editing the interface: Textual studies and first generation electronic objects.” TEXT: An Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies 14: 15–51.
2012. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., Richard Ovenden and Gabriela Redwine. 2010. Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections. CLIR Publication No. 149. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources.
Knight, Gareth. 2012. “The forensics curator: Digital forensics as a solution to addressing the curatorial challenges posed by personal digital archives.” The International Journal of Digital Curation 7(2): 40–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v7i2.228
Krough, Marilyn C. and Brooke Ashley Pillifant. 2004. The house of Netjer: A new religious community online. In Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet, edited by Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan, 205–219. London: Routledge.
Losey, Ralph C. 2008. E-Discovery: Current Trends and Cases. Chicago, IL: American Bar Association.
Marotti, Arthur F. 2010. “Editing manuscripts in print and digital forms.” Literature Compass 7(2): 89–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00680.x
Maras, Marie-Helen. 2014. Computer Forensics: Cybercriminals, Laws, and Evidence. Burlington, VT: Jones & Bartlett Learning.
Mason, Dean. 2001. “Jobbing systems in a digital supply train.” In Digital Book Production and Supply Chain Management, edited by Bill Cope and Dean Mason, 111–126. Altona: Common Ground Publishing.
Masters, David L. 2008. The Lawyer’s Guide to Adobe Acrobat. 3rd edition. Chicago, IL: American Bar Association.
McGann, Jerome. 1998. “Textual scholarship, textual theory, and the uses of electronic tools: A brief report on current undertakings.” Victorian Studies 41(4): 609–618.
2010. “Electronic archives and critical editing.” Literature Compass 7(2): 37–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2009.00674.x
Murray, Simone. 2010. “‘Remix my lit’: Towards an open access literary culture.” Convergence 16(1): 23–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354856509347704
National Security Agency Enterprise Application Division of the Systems and Network Analysis Center (SNAC) Information Assurance Directorate. 2008. “Hidden data and metadata in Adobe PDF files: Publication risks and countermeasures.” National Security Agency/Central Security Service. https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/app/pdf_risks.pdf. Accessed 13 November 2014.
Padova, Ted. 2007. Adobe Acrobat 8 PDF Bible. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publications.
Pasi, Marco and Philippe Rabaté. 1999. “Langue angélique, langue magique l’énochien.” In Politica Hermetica, N° 13, 1999: Les Langues Secrètes, edited by Jean-Pierre Branch, 94–123. Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme.
Petersen, Jesper Aaagaard. 2013. “From book to bit: Enacting Satanism online.” In Contemporary Esotericism, edited by Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm, 134–158. Gnostica: Texts and Interpretations. Sheffield: Equinox.
Pittman, Ryan D. and Dave Shaver. 2010. “Windows forensic analysis.” In Handbook of Digital Forensics and Investigation, edited by Eoghan Casey, 209–300. London: Elsevier Academic Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-374267-4.00005-7
Raghavan, Sriram and S.V. Raghavan. 2013. “Determining the origin of downloaded files using metadata associations.” Journal of Communications 8(12): 902–910. http://dx.doi.org/10.12720/jcm.8.12.902-910
Robinson, Peter. 2009. “What scholarly editors need to help us make sense together in the digital age.” Journal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 1(1): 1–6.
Salama, Usama, Vijay Varadharajan, and Michael Hitchens. 2012. “Metadata based forensic analysis of digital information in the web.” Annual Symposium on Information Assurance & Secure Knowledge Management 7: 9–15.
Sammons, John. 2012. The Basics of Digital Forensics: The Primer for Getting Started in Digital Forensics. Waltham, MA: Elsevier.
Shillingsburg, Peter L. 1996. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice. 3rd edition. Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Tennis, Joseph T. 2011. “Is there a new bibliography?” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 49(2): 121–126. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2011.544020
Thomassen, Einar. 2011. “Philology.” In The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion, edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, 346–354. London: Routledge.
Van der Weel, Adriaan. 2005. “Bibliography for the new media.” Quærendo 35(1–2): 96–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1570069054094208
Vanhoutte, Edward. 2010. “Defining electronic editions: A historical and functional perspective. In Text and Genre in Reconstruction: Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions, edited by Willard McCarty, 119–144. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0008.05
Williams, William Proctor and Craig S. Abbott. 2009. An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. 4th edition. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
Winslade, J. Lawton. 2000. “Techno-Kabbalah: The performative language of magick and the production of occult knowledge.” TDR 44(2): 84–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/10542040051058717
Published
2016-07-05
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Plaisance, C. (2016). Methods of Web Philology: Computer Metadata and Web Archiving in the Primary Source Documents of Contemporary Esotericism. International Journal for the Study of New Religions, 7(1), 43-68. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsnr.v7i1.26074
