Penseldrag i marginalen : Elektronisk publicering av japanskspråkiga texter och deras textualitet

The omnipresence of electronic texts in our time warrants questions about the power to define what text really is, now held by technology — the textuality and representational qualities of digitized texts are undoubtedly influenced by the technological frameworks that decide their possible content and form, making the issue a point of interest for LIS and the digital humanities. This thesis explores the effects of commonly applied technology and practices in electronic publishing of Japanese language texts. Special attention has been paid to the possible issues concerning gaiji characters, ruby annotations and kana orthography. The predominant approach taken is a comparative analysis of two literary texts extracted from the corpora of the digital libraries Aozora Bunko and Japanese Text Initiative, accomplished by a comparison of the electronic editions with print. The findings include issues and weak points related to character encoding and the handling of annotations as well as other aspects of textuality being affected by the digitization process. The resulting discussion explores these findings as well as possible workarounds and solutions offered by developments in technology and methodology. The main conclusions of this thesis are that the textuality and the bibliographic codes of Japanese language texts may be hampered by the representational limitations of technology and digitization practices, but that the application of text encoding using contextual markup, as well as developments in character representation, may prove to be beneficial for the preservation of Japanese language textuality.