Beyond Accessibility:
Textual Studies in the 21st Century
University of Victoria
June 8 - 10, 2012

Biography: Dr. Adriaan van der Weel is a member of the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University, where he works in the Institute for Cultural Disciplines, and is Bohn professor of modern Dutch book history. His research interests are in the history of textual transmission, with a special focus on scholarly communication, and digital reading and literacy.

The title of Dr. van der Weel's talk, to be delivered Friday afternoon at 1:15, is

Feeding our Reading Machines

Biography: Dr. Sydney Shep is a member of the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington, where she teaches, among other things, courses in Print and Book Culture. Dr. Shep also teaches courses in social science research methods, resources for New Zealand studies, and media studies. She is cross-appointed with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and is the Printer who runs Wai-te-ata Press, which was founded in 1962 by D.F. McKenzie.

At 4:00 PM Saturday, Dr. Shep will offer a talk entitled

Fascinating Rhythms: Typographical journals & Global Communication
Networks in the Nineteenth Century

Feeding our Reading Machines

Digitisation has resulted in ready access to sheer limitless quantities of text. Just as in the case of printing, the same technology that has been instrumental in causing the threat of information overload will need to help us channel, if not curb it. Beyond the ready accessibility of those vast quantities of text therefore lies the challenge of harnessing the computer to help us deal with them. To do justice to the fundamentally different nature of the digital medium we may need to divest ourselves of more our typographic heritage than we have done so far.

Turning the Page: Rethinking Design for Digital Editions

Bogged down by attributes and elements, drowning in schemas and document type definitions, we forget that we love to read. This paper suggests that textual scholarship and digital edition design would benefit from a radical departure from web-based XML editions, and shows how, with the ubiquity of tablets and mobile reading platforms, the book as an object of study can yield exciting new modes of interpretation. I build on Craig Mod’s assertion in “Books in the Age of the iPad” that “[w]ith the iPad we finally have a platform for consuming rich-content in digital form,” and argue that that we are experiencing a paradigm shift in textual studies. Through an examination of book history, textual artifacts, editorial theory, and current digital book design patterns (including cutting-edge textbooks produced by Inkling and Kno.com), I posit that the scholarly literary edition needs to embrace mobile platforms, and that editions built for these platforms allow readers to encounter and interact with texts that move beyond the two- dimensional space of the web browser. Given that many scholarly editions are now being produced for the electronic medium, it is time rethink our outmoded architectures of the digital book. While XML allows us to understand (and analyse) the “constraints of digital representation” (Galey), mobile platforms show us the possibilities. In designing and building digital scholarly editions, we should embrace forward thinking; we should be experimental, not conservative. We should leverage the mobile platform, re-envision the interface, and follow empathy-driven design principles that combine the simple pleasure of reading with complex scholarly editorial practices. We have the opportunity to create beautiful and usable digital editions to be read and analysed by scholars, students, and bibliophiles, editions that move beyond the constraints of TEI and metadata, and offer us a compelling glimpse of the future of the book.

Works cited:

Bogost, Ian. “Reading Online Sucks.” Ian Bogost 7 Mar 2008. Web.

Bosak, Jon. “XML Ubiquity and the Scholarly Community.” Computers and the Humanities 33.1 (1999): 199-206.

Coover, Robert. “The End of Books.” The New York Times Book Review 1 (21 Jun 1992): 23-25. Web.

Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65-83.

Hochuli, Jost. Designing Books: Practice and Theory. London: Hyphen P, 2004.

Drucker, Johanna. “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Susan Schreibman & Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 216-32.

Galey, Alan. “Information Workshop: Architectures of the Book. Syllabus” INF 1005/6. University of Toronto. Web. 14 Dec 2011.

McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Mod, Craig. “Books in the Age of the iPad.” @craigmod. Web. 18 Nov. 2011.

Norman, D. A. “Emotion and Design: Attractive Things Work Better.” Interactions Magazine 9.4 (2002): 36-42.

Duguid, Paul. “Material Matters: the Past and Futurology of the Book” The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: University of California P, 1996.

Lynch, Clifford. “The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in a Digital World.” First Monday 6.6 (2001). Web.

Saville, Laura, et. al. “Chapter 10: Designing Books.” 365 Habits of Successful Graphic Designers. Insider Secrets from Top Designers on Working Smart and Staying Creative. Minneapolis: Rockport, 2005. 344-377.

Sigal, Mark. “Anatomy of an Ebook App: Lessons Learned while Building a Top 20 Ebook for the iPad.” O’Reilly Radar. Web. 17 November 2010.

Modular Thinking: A Model for Small-Scale Social-Text Digital Editions

Jerome McGann argues in The Rationale of Hypertext that the production of scholarly editions could and should be revolutionized by turning to the digital, as the electronic edition “can be built to organize, access, and analyze…not only more quickly and easily, but at depths no paper-based edition could hope to achieve” (28), and can better foreground the reading process in the important social and material contexts of textual production, reception, and transmission. McGann’s vision for the future of scholarly editing, first articulated nearly twenty years ago, has led not to the proliferation of digital scholarly editions, but of digital archives (like the Rossetti, Blake, and Whitman projects) charged with presenting “an undigested chaos of material in which everyone must become an editor before proceeding” (Shillingsburg, Scholarly 165). Where, then, does the still-emergent genre of the digital scholarly edition stand? What model for their design and production will encourage their responsibly-edited, timely, and cost-effective proliferation?

Using three recent digital editions—those produced by John Bryant, Tanya Clement, and Peter Shillingsburg—as examples, I assess the current state of hypertext editing and its success at creating useful and user-friendly alternatives to print social-text editions. I then use my own project in process—an EMiC-funded digital social-text edition of Anne Wilkinson’s poetry collection Counterpoint to Sleep (1951)—in order to propose a modular model for the creation of small-scale digital scholarly editions. I argue that modular thinking—designing individual editions and collections of editions as interlocking but independent modular elements—can lead to the creation of digital editions that are highly adaptable to quickly-evolving digital humanities and editorial theory best-practice, sooner available to readers, foregrounded in the sociality and materiality of texts, cost and labour-efficient, and effectively combinable into larger digital collections. The modular edition, I argue, has the potential to make reality McGann’s vision of digital scholarly texts that are capacious, user-friendly, data-rich, and designed to encourage deeper and more nuanced textual engagement, analysis, and understanding—the ultimate goal of all critical editing, and one that digital scholarly editions are uniquely positioned to achieve.

Works cited:

Bryant, John L., ed. Herman Melville’s Typee: A Fluid-Text Edition. Charlottesville: Rotunda P, 2006. Web. 12 Sept 2011.

---. The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. Print.

Clement, Tanya, ed. In Transition: Selected Poems by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. College Park: U of Maryland Libraries Digital Collections, 2008. Web. 12 Sept 2011.

---. “Knowledge Representation and Digital Scholarly Editions in Theory and Practice.” Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative 1.1 (June 2011): n.p. Web.

Coldwell, Joan. “Walking the Tightrope with Anne Wilkinson.” Editing Women: Papers Given at the Thirty-First Annual Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, 3-4 November 1995. Ed. Ann M. Hutchison and Margaret Anne Doody. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. 3-25. Print.

Eaves, Morris, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, eds. The William Blake Archive. Lib. of Cong., 13 Sept. 2010. Web. 12 Sept 2011.

Folsom, Ed and Kenneth M. Price, eds. The Walt Whitman Archive. U of Nebraska-Lincoln, 1995. Web. 12 Sept 2011.

Irvine, Dean. “Editing Archives ] Archiving Editions.” Journal of Canadian Studies 40.2 (Spring 2006): 183-211. Print.

---, ed. Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson. Ed. Dean Irvine. Montreal: Signal Editions, 2003. Print.

McGann, Jerome. “From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text.” Romanticism on the Net 41.2 (February-May 2006): n.p. Web. 12 Sept 2011.

---, ed. The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Archive. Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, 2000. Web. 12 Sept 2011.

---. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World-Wide Web. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Print.

---. “The Rationale of Hypertext.” Text 9 (1996): 11-32. Print.

---. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Print.

Pollock, Zailig and Emily Ballantyne. “Respect des Fonds and The Digital Page.” Forthcoming in Archival Narratives for Canada: Re-Telling Stories in a Changing Landscape. Ed. Kathleen Garay and Christyl Verduyn. Halifax: Fernwood P, 2011. Print.

Price, Kenneth M. “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research Collection: What’s in a Name?” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.3 (2009): n.p. Web. 12 Sept 2011.

Shillingsburg, Peter L. Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, Third Ed. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Print.

---, and Julia Briggs, eds. Woolf Online: An Electronic Edition and Commentary on Virginia Woolf’s ‘Time Passes’. NJH, 2008. Web. 12 Sept 2011.

Vetter, Laura, Jarom McDonald et. al. “Documentation.” VM 4.0 Versioning Machine: A Tool for Displaying & Comparing Different Versions of Literary Texts. Susan Shriebman: 19 May 2011. Web. 12 Sept 2011.

Wilkinson, Anne. The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir. Ed. A.J.M. Smith. Toronto: Macmillan, 1968. Print.

---. Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson. Ed. Dean Irvine. Montreal: Signal Editions, 2003. Print.

---. The Poetry of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir. Ed. Joan Coldwell. Toronto: Exile Editions, 1990. Print.

Evaluating Digital Remediations of Women’s Manuscripts

This paper will ask whether digital media provides a solution to longstanding efforts to inexpensively and accurately reproduce rare manuscripts. Over the last 150 years, technologies that seemed to offer great promise—lithography at the turn of the nineteenth century, photography at mid-century, and later microfilm in the twentieth century—have all failed for reasons pertaining at least in part to cost and image quality. Digitizing manuscripts for publication on the web, however, does seem to allow what has hitherto been unachievable: a high-quality reproduction that is also available for low-cost distribution. Nevertheless, in sharp contrast to the number of digital editions of printed material that have appeared in the past decade, the web has not been flooded with digital editions of manuscript material.

Not only are there fewer editions of digitized manuscript material, but theorization of the content and design of these resources is scant, particularly when compared to the robust scholarly work that investigates digital editions of printed material. (Examples of discussions mostly devoted to digital surrogates of print objects, or that don’t distinguish clearly between the different types of material being digitized, include the edited collections, Electronic Textual Editing and Text editing, print and the digital world, and essays by Price and Shillingsburg.) If for some time digital editions of printed works have been accused of being too print-centric (Hayles, 2003), what might be the problems associated with digital editions of manuscript material? Are scholars and non-experts likely to use these resources the same way as digital versions of printed texts are used? And finally, what particular problems present themselves when the objects being digitized are manuscripts produced in the post-Gutenberg age, that is, an age in which manuscript writers were inevitably influenced by the conventions of print?

This paper will offer a preliminary examination of some of the special problems posed by the unique qualities of manuscript artifacts, and the distinct ways in which they are used, by focusing its attention on two recently released collections of digital material devoted to women writers. The first resource is Perdita Manuscripts, 1500-1700, a commercial product of Adam Matthew Digital containing more than 230 digitized entries by women writers of the early modern period; and the second reproduces the fictional manuscripts of arguably the most beloved female author in history—Jane Austen’s Fictional Manuscripts offers an open-access, scholarly-edited resource containing over 1100 pages of fiction written in the author’s own hand. Taken together, these resources offer excellent source material to begin an evaluation of the current state of manuscript digital editions

Works cited:

Electronic textual editing. (Ed.) Lou Burnard, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, and John Unsworth. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2006.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality” The Yale Journal of Criticism. 16:2 (Fall 2003): 263-290.

Jane Austen’s Fictional Manuscripts, http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html Perdita Manuscripts, 1500-1700, http://www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/Perdita.aspx

Price, Kenneth M. “Electronic Scholarly Editions,” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Susan Schriebman and Ray Siemens. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

Shillingsburg, Peter. “How Literary Works Exist: Convenient Scholarly Editions,” Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present and Future ed. Maura Ives, a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, 3 (Summer 2009).
http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000054.html

Text editing, print and the digital world. (Ed.) Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland. Farnham, England ; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2009.

P.R.I.M.E.: Developing Concepts Inherited From Printed Materials

Vannevar Bush’s “As we May Think” marked a starting point for the transition from printed to digital collections. [1]. As a result from Bush’s essay, the digital collections in use today incorporate methods to enhance the organization and retrieval of digital objects [2, 3], and use features to manipulate documents according to their specific purpose and application. However, digital media presents a challenge by changing the notion of documents [4], which further obstructs the already complex transition of interacting from printed to digital media.

We conducted a study where we interviewed scholars who interact with digital collections daily. Our purpose was to analyze how user-generated media can be used to explore different abstractions and metaphors in digital collections [5]. However, our findings took us into a different direction. We found that in many cases scholarly research is bound to the abstractions and characteristics inherited from printed media, which can hinder the affordances and interactivity of digital documents. We arrived at the conclusion that the understanding of digital documents needs to change.

To illustrate our point, we identified five ways that digital media further develops some of the concepts inherited from printed materials. These points are identified by the “P.R.I.M.E.” acronym and are derived from the advantages of employing user-generated media as an interface between digital collections: 1) Provide a different method to browse collections; 2) Restructure the user-interface; 3) Improve the discoverability of documents; 4) Modify the level of granularity of results; 5) Enhance the differences in culture, perception and background from different users.

Our research illustrates how the methodology needs to change when analyzing digital documents. As results, we will elaborate on how print-based analysis misses important characteristics of digital documents. More specifically, we will discuss how the methods of analysis need to change when taking into account the fluid nature of digital media [6] and multiple authorship issues derived from user collaboration [7, 8]. In the end, our research aims to bring forth and emphasize the dynamic characteristics of digital collections by taking into account the technological background of the printed medium.

REFERENCES

[1] V. Bush, "As we may think," Interactions, vol. 3, pp. 35-46, 1996.

[2] D. M. Levy and C. C. Marshall, "Going digital: a look at assumptions underlying digital libraries," Communications of the ACM, vol. 38, pp. 77-84, 1995.

[3] A. T. McCray and M. E. Gallagher, "Principles for digital library development," Communications of the ACM, vol. 44, pp. 48-54, 2001.

[4] M. K. Buckland, "What is a document??," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 48, pp. 804-809, 1997.

[5] L. Meneses, C. Monroy, R. Furuta, and E. Mallen, "Computational Approaches to a Catalogue Raisonne of Pablo Picasso's Works," Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis.

[6] D. M. Levy, "Fixed or fluid?: document stability and new media," presented at the Proceedings of the 1994 ACM European conference on Hypermedia technology, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1994.

[7] F. B. Vi, gas, M. Wattenberg, and K. Dave, "Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations," presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vienna, Austria, 2004.

[8] A. Kittur, B. Suh, B. A. Pendleton, and E. H. Chi, "He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia," presented at the Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, San Jose, California, USA, 2007.

Shared Features in the Production, Use, and Criticism of Print and Digital Editions

My paper develops work that I am currently engaged in as a research assistant, working with Prof. Brent Nelson at the University of Saskatchewan, with the Textual Studies team of INKE. In my paper, I highlight and criticize what I see as a troubling trend in studies of the relationship of print and digital scholarly editions, namely, the tendency of scholars to allow their excitement with digital projects to obscure their appreciation of the traditional successes of print publications. Such scholarship invariably falls into the trap of overlooking the common features of print and digital editions, usually to make arguments premised on the supposed superiority of digital projects. For example, in his recent essay “Electronic Scholarly Editions,” Kenneth Price misrepresents editors of print editions, pejoratively, as “the solitary scholar who churns out articles and books behind the closed doors of his office.” By contrast, he remarks that digital editions cannot be undertaken alone but are instead collaborative projects that mobilize and invigorate broad sections of the academy. In his move to distinguish and separate the work of producing print and digital editions, Price commits the fallacy of initiating a critical project to analyze digital editions without recourse to older, existing scholarship on print editions; he endeavours to reinvent the wheel.

My paper addresses three problems with such an approach. First, I argue, many aspects of producing editions, such as collaboration, remain largely consistent regardless of the editor’s chosen medium. In my paper I compare traditional editing practices with those used by editors to produce editions of so-called “born-digital” texts. Second, in Price’s argument, collaboration in digital editing is linked to the supposed accessibility and, ultimately, added scholarly value of digital editions in relation to print; my paper evaluates this point with an eye to key commonalities in the use of print and digital editions by readers. And third, the move to separate print and digital editions in scholarly criticism alienates digital humanities research from existing and ongoing work that takes print as its subject and medium. Clearly this is undesirable, particularly as digital editions seek to achieve and maintain widespread relevance in contemporary scholarship. My paper thus rejects a counterproductive trend in digital humanities studies by connecting print and digital editions on three fronts: production, use, and criticism.

Works cited:

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).

The Textual Habitat: Environmentalism for a Better Textual World

This paper seeks to elaborate the environmental element in the MCRI-funded programme of research titled INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments. Much of our work as text-based scholars has traditionally been on ecology, the textual wildlife that inhabit the textual environment. The turn to materiality in textual studies has brought attention to the habitat in which texts are found, not just the space between the covers, but the space of the shelf, the desk, the library, and now, the World Wide Web. The electronic environment (i.e. interface) has been the subject of research since at least the early 1990's (William and Wellner, 1992). This research has had in mind such knowledge domains as architecture, engineering, and medicine (Elliott and Hearst, 2002; Krüger et all, 1995), but the traditional text-based domains of the humanities have received little if any consideration in computer science. The work of the Textual Studies team of INKE is premised on the conviction that the development of reading technologies in complex and demanding knowledge domains can teach us much about the development and implementation of new knowledge environments for the reading, study, and manipulation of electronic texts. The focus of the present study will be the development of the reading environment of the Christian bible. It will briefly contextualize the Bible reading environment by illustrating the textual functions and page architectures that developed early in the hermeutical tradition of biblical scholarship in the ages of Origen and Eusebius with the introduction of the polyglot Bible (Grafton and Williams). The focus of this paper will be the modern development of the study bible, a complex environment of text, peritext, and paratext (Macksey, 1997). Two examples will illustrate early attempts to bring into one space a variety of tools and aids for linking, visualizing, and navigating biblical texts, peritexts, and paratexts: Brian Walton’s Biblia Sacara Polyglot (1657) and the Frank Charles Thompson’s Chain Reference Bible (1908).

Works cited:

Elliott, Ame, and Marti A. Hearst. “A Comparison of the Affordances of a Digital Desk and Tablet for Architectural Image Tasks.” International Journal of Human-computer Studies 56, No. 2 (February 2002): 173-197.

Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Forward by Richard Macksey. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge, Eng.: CUP, 1997.

Grafton, Anthony, and Megan Williams. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008.

Grafton, Krüger, W., C. Bohn, B. Frohlich, H. Schuth, W. Strauss, and G. Wesche. “The Responsive Workbench: a Virtual Work Environment.” Computer 28, No. 7 (1995): 42-48.

Newman, William, and Pierre Wellner. “A Desk Supporting Computer-based Interaction with Paper Documents.” in Proceedings of the Sigchi Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 587-592. Monterey, California, United States: Acm, 1992.

A Big Catch in our Net: Vesalius’ Fabrica (1543, 1555), a case study for editorial mediations

Suddenly, with the mass-digitization of entire libraries, here come on the net large, dense, reference books written in Latin that one hitherto had to consult in library and would rather browse than read because of their size and their inaccessibility. But these original editions, printed in uneven lines, often in columns, with some Greek and some ligatures, are most of the time accessible only in image files, non searchable, even less OCRable. Now, how accessible is a 700 pages long in folio best-seller in pdf format? Let’s praise the subdivisions and navigation bars! But then, the model for reading is close to the consultation of an index, with hierarchy and changeable order. The distance between the original mode of reading and this new “accessibility” process seems at first negligeable for works already structured as indexes, trees, lexiques etc. Even, the hyper-reading seems to be a super-reading of paths already inscribed in the original. Now, the first consequence of the hyper-indexation is the adequation of the textual unit (the chapter, the entry) with the reading unit: the screen, even though this de-contextualization is tempered by more hyper-links.

Its full effect is made apparent in the case of the mythical treatise of anatomy published by Andreas Vesalius in Basel (1543 and 1555). The De Fabrica Corporis Humani Libri Septem alludes to the freedom of its reader regarding the order of reading and proposes many subdivisions and indexes. The catch is the use of illustrations: explicitly inserted for epistemological reasons, they become, in the on-screen editions, the punctuation of the new object as constituting one of the consultation indexes, but also the structure of the chapters’ index. The cornucopia could very well be reduced to its salliant pages: the images, which present the advantage of an original formattage to the full page, from image files to images... This paper presents a detailed comparison of the indications for reading given by Vesalius with the paths proposed on line, as the first step of a larger study on the tabularization of scholarship on line.

Noah Webster, Authorship, and the Vagaries of Nationalism

This proposal is in response to the questions “ How have authorship attribution studies been transformed by access to so many more searchable texts?” and “What is the future of, for example, the study of readership and letter writing, genetic editing, and reception history?”

In 1785, Noah Webster published the first reader written by a person living in North America. Coincidentally, he published his reader just two years after the Articles of Confederation took effect, so he also published the first American reader, as well. Webster’s role in creating his reader challenges notions of a simple model of authorship; Webster wrote some selections, extracted some selections from works of literature, and re-printed public documents within the text. To make matters more interesting, Webster’s reader was republished at least 40 times up to 1815, when it abruptly stops being reprinted. Due to the mass digitization of Webster’s textbooks, I’ve been able to examine an example of almost every edition up to 1804. Through this period of publication and re-publication, Webster revised the contents of his reader no less than 4 times. I’ve examined a majority of the extant editions of Webster’s text and established these facts as a means of coming to a deeper understanding of Webster’s changing relationship—as author, editor, compiler—with the text he was involved with for over three decades. From an examination of the Webster’s alterations to the preface explaining the purpose of the work and a tracking and analysis of the changing contents of the reader, I argue that each of Webster’s revisions of his textbooks represents a different moment in his developing awareness of the complex relations between education, American nationalism, market demand, and his own ability to impact and guide these forces. Specifically, Webster becomes increasingly ambivalent about the power of his textbook to effect real political and moral change and to establish a unique American identity.

Works cited:

Ford, Emily Ellsworth Fowler. Notes on the Life of Noah Webster. Ed. Emily Ellsworth Ford Skeel. Vol. 1. New York: Burt Franklin, 1912. Print.

Kendall, Joshua C. The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010. Print.

Micklethwait, David. Noah Webster and the American Dictionary. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000. Print.

Monaghan, E. Jennifer. A Common Heritage: Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983. Print.

Warfel, Henry. Noah Webster, Schoolmaster to America. New York: Octagon Books, 1966. Print.

Webster, Noah. Letters of Noah Webster. Ed. Henry Warfel. New York: Library Publishers, 1953. Print.

Webster, Noah. A Grammatical Institute of the English Language ... Part 3. 1st ed. Hartford, CT: Barlow & Babcock, 1785. Print.

---. An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking. 10th ed. Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1796. Print.

---. An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking Calculated to Improve the Minds and Refine the Taste of Youth. 3rd ed. Philadelphia: Young and M’Culloch. Print.

---. An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking NEW ED. A New Edition. New-Haven, CT, 1804. Print.

A Wilde Goose Chase: Google-ing the Greats and Investigating Literary Plagiarism

Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, Samuel Taylor Coleridge—these undoubtedly great authors have all been accused of plagiarism and fairly well proven to have committed at least some literary “borrowing.” However, until the digital age, it took quite a bit of sleuthing, highlighting, and double-column comparisons to confirm textual copying and, even then, one couldn’t be sure to have found all the unattributed sources the authors may have used. This tedious process has, in some ways, obscured the extent of plagiarism of these authors. Now, with the help of Google books and text comparison programs, scholars can easily access and compare the works of several authors, and see exactly where plagiarized passages occur.

This paper will present my process of locating the sources for Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray as a case study in what sort of text matching is accessible to all scholars and students and how a fuller picture of the author’s sources can be constructed. A Picture of Dorian Gray contains a mosaic of verbatim-copied text from various lesser-known works, and with databanks of books, seeing how Wilde fits these pieces together in a coherent Chapter is now possible. In the course of my paper, I use the example of Wilde to theorize on how the ease of source attribution and sheer mass of written work available online has already affected our perception of plagiarism and influence as increasingly acceptable.

Works cited:

Amerika, Mark. Meta/Data: A Digital Poetics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. Print.

Anonymous (“G”) “The Long Arm of Conscience.” The Scots Observer September 1890: 410-11. Print.

Danson, Lawrence. Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. Print.

Frankel, Nicholas. “General Introduction.” The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition. Ed. Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.

Guy, Josephine, and Ian Small. The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Howard, Rebecca Moore. Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, and Collaborators. Stamford: Ablex, 1999. Print.

Jones, William. History and Mystery of Precious Stones. London: Richard Bentley, 1880. Print.

Lefébure, Ernest. Embroidery and Lace: Their Manufacture and History from the Remotest Antiquity to the Present Day. A Handbook for Amateurs, Collectors, and General Readers. Trans. Alan S. Cole. London: H. Grevel, 1888. Print.

Mallon, Thomas. Stolen Words. New York: Harcourt, 2001. Print.

Ricks, Christopher. Allusion to the Poets. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

Tufescu, Florina. Oscar Wilde’s Plagiarism: The Triumph of Art Over Ego. Dublin: Irish Academic P, 2008. Print.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition. Ed. Nicholas Frankel. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.

--. Examination by Sir Edward Clarke and Prosecution by Charles Gill. “Testimony of Oscar Wilde.” April 26, 1895. UMKC School of Law. Web. 6 December 2011.

--. “The Decay of Lying.” (1908). The Victorian Web. 21 April 2008. Web. 7 December 2011.

--. “The 1891 Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition. Ed. Nicholas Frankel.Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.

--. “Phrases and Philosophies for Use of the Young” Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde: Miscellanies. Philadelphia: Nottingham Society, 1909. Print.

From a print to a digital edition: the case of a Latin handbook.

When the editor of a beginning Latin handbook (Bakhouche, 2000) decided to stop the print edition of it, the author decided to converse the handbook into a digital edition. In partnership with the UOH (Open University in Humanities)¹ in France, the University of Montpellier carried out a one year project focusing on the transposition of the print handbook to a digital edition of the handbook. The project group is composed of professors of university and computer engineers.

Three questions emerged from this project:

-First of all, the question of the accessibility: this point appears as a challenge for the professor of university who wrote the paper book. The paper book was already used and referenced by teachers of who le France. The digital edition on the web makes it more available to a different “Community of Practice” (Wenger, 1998).

-Indeed, the availability of the digital edition implies to think about the interoperability of the digital tools used for the project. The possibility to integrate a diversity of resources (use of audio: Latin text reading) appears as an advantage in the digital edition

-Last, the transposition’s pedagogical choices. The paper handbook is seen as a n introduction to the textual studies in classics. The pedagogical purpose of the Latin is that the student could read the Latin texts and then, analyze, interpret and translate. Exercises are proposed in order to get the methods for this analysis. The transfer to the online edition implies the integration of a “non linear interaction” (Siemens et al., 2011) in the design of the exercises (Schwier R. A . & Misanchuk E. R., 1993). Therefore, it involves thinking again on the pedagogical purpose of the exercises in the paper edition. Even if the content was known before the project, the handbook needed to be re-designed.

This communication aims to describe the project and the design of the digital edition of a Latin handbook for the textual analysis: the choices as well as the limits.

Notes

http://www.uoh.fr/

Works cited:

Bakhouche Béatrice, Le Latin en DEUG, Paris, Nathan Université, 2000, 192 p.

Schwier R. A., & Misanchuk E. R., (1993). Interactive multimedia instruction, Englewood.

Siemens, R., Timney M ., Leitch , C., & Koolen, C . (2011)"Toward Modeling the Social Edition: An Approach to Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New and Emerging Social Media ," with the ETCL, INKE, and PKP Research Groups. Accepted for publication in Literary and Linguistic Computing. 70 pp.

Wenger E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press.

Ark-iving and Enciphering Markup in the Early Modern Collection

This paper explores the relationship of markup to poiesi by questioning how, in the marking-up of a text, notions and narratives are resisted and re-inscribed through the actions of the editor. A detailed examination of MS Sloane 3961, a seventeenth-century catalogue of purchases by collector William Courten, and explanation of the challenges encountered in preparing it for digital presentation must focus on the idiomatic cipher used by Courten to inscribe metadata related to the artifacts in his collection. The system, which employs non-standard characters, is used by Courten with a yet-misunderstood rationale.

The presence of the cipher forces the editor to reconsider the idea of markup, in part because the editor must somehow account for and represent the cipher characters which signify an absent meaning. The extensibility of XML allows the editor to define multiple transformations of each character, supplying deciphered meanings, but in the cases of unintelligible deciphering one must question the editor's task. What does it mean to represent the presence of absent meaning? How is this representation effectively accomplished? Does the change of medium, from inscribed MS to prepared digital text, change the cipher from obscured meaning to unmeaning? This paper addresses these issues, arguing, based upon Courten's own method, that resolution is found in the play of concealment and disclosure implicit in the notion of cipher.

The scope of the analysis is furthered broadened to question the place of the Courten MS in the Digital Ark, the larger project of which it is a part. The narratives of collection are told in such catalogues, whether related to natural history, colonization, or exploration. The Digital Ark, then, may re-inscribe these narratives in its design and markup, archiving notions of collection that conceal and disclose (encipher and decipher) the actions and motivations of the collector. The Ark, however, as arca (Latin root of 'ark', meaning box) and not necessarily arkhē (Greek root of 'archive', suggesting structure and authority), can strive to resist the validation of these narratives that is otherwise accomplished by the museum.

Works cited:

Breaknall, Sue. “Perspectives: Negotiating the Archive.” Tate Papers 9 (Spring 2008). Web. 19 Nov. 2011.

Courten, William. MS Sloane 3961. British Library, London.

---. “Cipher Key.” MS Sloane 4019 f.79. British Library, London.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.

---. Of Grammatology (Corrected Edition). Trans Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Print.

Jackson, B. D. “William [alias Charleton] Courten.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001. Print.

McGann, Jerome. “Marking Texts of Many Dimensions.” A Companion to the Digital Humanities. ed. Susan Schreibman et. al. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Web. 19 Nov. 2011.

---. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Print.

O’Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print.

ModLabs

This paper is titled "ModLabs," which is a larger project on the history of modernist laboratories (avant garde, scientific, and corporate) and their relationship to the institutional formation of digital humanities laboratories, collaboratories, and observatories. The segment of the larger project that I'll present is a study of the Speculative Computing Laboratory at the University of Virginia (SpecLab), the Stanford Literary Lab, the Harvard Cultural Observatory, and the Modernist Journals Project Laboratory at Brown University and the University of Tulsa. This study will investigate the phenomenon of new-media modernism, namely the discursive and institutional formations that correlate the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century with contemporary experimentation in digital media. While part of my argument will consist of a critique of the transhistorical leap from the historical avant garde to the twenty-first century, I will simultaneously explore the productive correlation of the laboratory research of early-twentieth century modernists (e.g., the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow, the Bureau de recherches Surréalistes in Paris, the Bauhaus in Germany, the British Mass Observation movement, and the Design Laboratory in New York) and Lev Manovich's call to reactivate the concept of laboratory experimentation in digital media design and research. That movement toward laboratory experimentation can be seen Johanna Drucker, Jerome McGann, and Bethany Nowviskie's 'patacritical speculative computing, in Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden's collaboration with Google Labs on the "culturomics" project and the Ngram Viewer, in Franco Moretti and Matthew Jockers's amalgams of network theory, genomics, and macroeconomics in their distant readings and macroanalytic visualizations, and in Sean Latham, Jeff Drouin, and Mark Galpa's visualizations of the ergodic structures of modernist periodicals. As a sampling of the larger ModLabs project, the historical trajectory of this paper will trace the modularity principle from its historical contexts in early twentieth-century industrial design and aesthetic practice, to the implementation of modular architecture in the design of mid-century corporate science labs, through the modularization of textual data in text mining and visualization techniques and the modular digital tools employed by these researchers and their digital-humanities laboratories, collaboratories, and observatories.

The State of the Scholarly Edition in the Nordic Countries and the Concept of the Text

Within the Nordic countries there is a general agreement that the large scale scholarly editions of the 21st century can be divided into at least two, but perhaps even three generations as done by Johnny Kondrup in “Store tekstkritiske udgaver i Norden. Et overblik” (“Large Scholarly Editions in the Nordic Countries. An Overview”). In this article he divides the editions into the following three generations: First generation, “Retro-digitizations”, were originally designed for the printed media only later to be digitized. Second generation editions are “hybrid-editions” designed for both print and digital distribution, often wanting to provide all variants of the edited work within the digital edition, which however seems impossible due to lack of funding and technical difficulties. The editions now being prepared and started on all belong to the third generation – editions that are primarily electronic.

This paper will provide an overview of the large-scale scholarly editions from all three generations within the Nordic countries. While providing this overview and discussing the current state of the scholarly edition within this region, the presentation will also investigate the hypothesis that the transition from print to print and digital and also the development from first to third generation demonstrates a change in the concept of the text. Whereas a text traditionally, that is in the 20th century, is conceived of as something unstable that could be stabilized within a print edition, scholarly editors now regard the instability of texts as an essential element worth representing. On the one hand most editions offer either list of variants or full variant editions other than the copy-text, on the other hand the emended copy-text is itself accessible in different versions, such as the source file and its markup, PDF, facsimiles, various sorts of e-books and last but not least the edited text as it appears on screen for the reader. Thus, the textual condition of electronic editions is twofold: they constitute and represent unstable texts.

Works cited:

Kondrup, Johnny. “Store tekstkritiske udgaver i Norden. Et overblik” in Fund og Forskning, vol. 49, The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen 2010.

Scholarly Edition or Readerly Edition: Towards a Digital Dunciad

The now nearly three-hundred-year tradition of learned or scholarly editions of English literary texts, strongly influenced as it has been by the practices of editions of classical texts has naturally been conditioned by the constraints of the printed book, by the limitations of the page and the costs of production. Both factors are strikingly exemplified in the standard edition of Alexander Pope's satire on the besetting "dullness" of his age, The Dunciad, James Sutherland's volume in the Twickenham Edition of Pope's poetry. First published in 1943, when wartime economy reinforced the ordinary publisher's reluctance to add more pages, this edition is a masterly performance within the limitations of its medium. Sutherland recognizes two Dunciads, the Dunciad, Variorum of 1729 (A) and the four-book Dunciad of 1743 (B), and presents them in chronological order. Thorough collations record variants in the text of A from the publication of the poetic text alone in 1728 through 1742; and in the text of B from the preliminary publication of Book IV in 1742 to the appearance of Warburton's edition of Pope's works in 1751. The normal practice of the Twickenham Edition is to place text at the top of the page, with relevant collation printed below; then, below that, editorial annotations in smaller type. In the case of the Dunciad, the copious notes in which Pope extended his satire to misplaced learning and verbal scholarship are combined with Sutherland's own notes explaining the many things that require explanation in Pope's text and notes. Sometimes the mass of annotation becomes so great that no lines of verse appear on the page. In the interest of economy, material published in A and repeated in B appears only once, so the reader of B must constantly turn back to A for a note. Some information is not given in notes, but in a biographical appendix (turn to the back of the book for these), and there are numerous references to the biographical appendix of another volume in the series. Sutherland's contribution to the study of the poem is probably unsurpassable, but the result does not facilitate the literary experience reading the poem.

A digital Dunciad, such as that currently projected, can ignore the restraints of the printed book and restore the experience of reading the poem. The reader can chose which version of the poem to read (1728, 1729, or 1743), and can open all at once if desired. Each page is presented as it appeared in print, preserving the layout that was so important to Pope; explanatory annotation will be available by clicking on items, and all relevant information will be available on the spot. The problem that the projectors have not yet resolved is that of variant readings in the text. How important are these? Are they a necessary component of an edition that seeks to enhance the literary experience of the reader?

Works cited:

Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad. Edited by James Sutherland. (The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, volume 5.) Third edition, revised. London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale UP, 1963.

Complete works and beyond:
The heritage of Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans in the 21st Century

Scholarly editing is rapidly changing in the 21st century. What better way to assess the state of the art of this division of textual scholarship than talking about a long-running edition project that started at the beginning of this century (2001) and that tries to keep up with the pace of technical and methodological developments.

After a preparation of four years, in November 2005 the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, The Willem Frederik Hermans Estate and the leading Dutch literary publisher De Bezige Bij published the 1st volume of the Complete Works of the prolific Dutch author Willem Frederik Hermans (1921-1995). So far, 9 volumes of the book edition – aimed at researchers as well as at the general reading public – have appeared; by the end of 2018 all 24 volumes (of about a 1000 pages each) will have been published. In the edition, definitive texts (based on last authorized versions) are accompanied by editorial commentaries, and scholarly documentation on the textual history is published on the dedicated website www.wfhermansvolledigewerken.nl.

In view of the working method of Willem Frederik Hermans, presenting the ‘definitive’ text as an ‘ultima manus’ edition seems an obvious choice. Hermans himself wanted only the last editions of his works to be available to readers: ‘I wish that all previous editions of books which have been reprinted in an improved version would crumble to dust as if by magic, even if the change only involves a comma.’ But changes by Hermans involve much more, and the ongoing process of revising and rewriting is relevant for the interpretation of his novels, among them the internationally acclaimed The Darkroom of Damocles (1958, English translation 2007) and Beyond Sleep (1966, English translation 2006). Nobel Prize Laureate J.M. Coetzee described Beyond Sleep as ‘A comedy of worldly disengagement trembling on the edge of tragedy, all the more hilarious for being related in Hermans’ best poker-faced manner.’

To do justice to the complex textual history, all text versions are collated (using Peter Robinson’s COLLATE and its successor COLLATE X ) and stored in a full-text XML-TEI encoded format. The textual laboratory created in that way (cf. Kegel and Van Elsacker 2007) not only serves as an important basis for establishing the texts for the edition, but also enables the realization of a digital edition, giving researchers full digital access to all versions of the texts. A digital pilot edition was created for one of Hermans’ short stories, by converting the XML-TEI data to a web based digital edition presented in eLaborate, the Huygens-ING web application that provides text editors and academic researchers with a collaborative tool for access to rich text structures containing variants, coupled facsimile, notes and annotations. The digital edition not only facilitates access to earlier versions, but also presents an inline variant edition in which users themselves can choose which version of the text they want to use as a starting point for analyses, and whether or not they want to make use of editorial information (cf. Siemens 2010). Next to that, it is our aim to integrate manuscript and contextual sources into the digital edition. For example, an early manuscript of The Darkroom of Damocles gives much more insight in the initial impetus out of which this novel, striking for its narrative experimentation, was created. In general, genetic material like early manuscripts give a better insight into the understanding of the evolution of Hermans’ writings and the interpretation of the work (Cf. Sutherland 2010), and therefore should be available for analysis.

However, not only scholars should benefit from all this. In a time with scarce funding and much debate about the dissemination of the highly specialized work we are doing, it’s extremely important to reach a wider audience. Therefore, in order to ensure the heritage of Willem Frederik Hermans for future generations, Huygens ING and its partners spend much time and effort to reach a younger generation of readers. At this moment, in close cooperation with IBM and Dutch literature educationalists, a new model of social reading is being developed at Huygens ING, making full use of the opportunities brought about by the emerging infrastructure of social media. In this newly created reading environment, the advantages of social media are combined with tailored, high quality data stemming from the editorial research for the Complete Works.

In our paper we will elaborate on the many challenges and possibilities we face. We fully agree with Peter Robinson’s statement: ‘As editors, we don’t just have to stand back [...] We have the power, as the people who know the most about the texts we edit, to shape this process. We can guide the building of an infrastructure, so that the pieces can fit together. We can provide examples of good practice, and provide key parts of these editions ourselves, and key tools for their making.’ (Robinson 2010)

Works cited:

Peter Kegel and Bert Van Elsacker 2007: ‘“A collection, an enormous accumulation of movements and ideas”. Research documentation for the digital edition of the Volledige Werken (Complete Works) of Willem Frederik Hermans’, in: Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie February 2007. (http://computerphilologie.tu-darmstadt.de/jg06/kegelel.html)

Peter Robinson 2010: ‘Editing without walls’ in: Regenia Gagnier, Literature Compass, Special Issue: ‘Scholarly editing in the Twenty-First Century’, February 2010, p. 57-61.

Ray Siemens 2010: ‘Underpinnings of the Social Edition’, in: Jerome McGann, Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come. May 8 2010. (http://cnx.org/content/m34335/1.2/)

Kathryn Sutherland 2010 (ed.), Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: A Digital Edition. (http://www.janeausten.ac.uk.)

Will our children have the chance to do research on today´s digital books

For periods after the onset of the transition to digital processes and later also digital products in book economy and book culture, the history of the book (as a medium to be defined here without reference to its materiality, but rather to text features as e.g. length, argumentative complexity, aesthetic pretention) will of course have to cover printed as well as digital books, among the latter in particular eBooks in a narrower sense. Moreover, book historians will have to take into account that the material available to find out about the production and distribution of (printed and) digital books is at least partly of a different nature, too: documents on servers (instead of records containing letters, minutes, specifications, contracts etc.), emails (approximately likewise), documented transactions of enterprise resource planning systems (instead of physical quotes, orders, invoices etc.) etc.

This paper will explore, what can be said with respect to the access to digital books (especially ones not on stock any longer) published between the 1990s and 2010 as well as to documents revealing the production and distribution conditions of those digital books at the moment – and how we can expect it to be in e.g. 2030, when the early stages of the diffusion of digital forms of the book will be truly history. For the product part, it will evaluate current intentional and unintentional content sustainability measures by publishers, (also online, also eBook) booksellers, ICT companies as well as (especially national) libraries. Attention will also be given to digital forms of books (partly) bypassing the traditional book value chain, as this is the case e.g. with web cyber fiction, web fan fiction or self-publishing eBooks. For the process part, it will take a closer look into a publishing house known for its digital products (F. A. Brockhaus) to specify, what (types of) documents are available and accessible on production and distribution matters of digital books from the 1990s on; it will also evaluate, to which extent and using which (new) methods those documents can be made use of. Finally, the paper will propose measures that are to serve a better future historiography of the digital book of the turn of the millennium (and also textual research based on digital books of this period !) – potentially also beyond 2030.

Works cited:

Bläsi, Christoph: Verlagsarchivalische Materialien und die Geschichte des ´Elektronischen´ Publizierens – ein exemplarischer Vorstoß. To appear in: Norrick, Corinna / Schneider, Ute: Verlagsgeschichte. Festschrift für Stephan Füssel. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2012. – “Materials in publishing house archives and the history of “electronic” publishing – an exemplary move forward”

Bläsi, Christoph: Multimedia publishing in the 1990s in Germany – the big picture and a drill-down. To appear in: Garvey, Nathan / Carter, David: The long twentieth century. Proceedings of the SHARP conference, Brisbane, May, 28-30, 2011. 2012.

Borghoff, Uwe M. et al: Long-Term Preservation of Digital Documents: Principles and Practices. Heidelberg [u.a.]: Springer 2006

Gladney, Henry: Preserving Digital Information. Heidelberg [u.a.]: Springer 2010.

Janello, Christoph: Wertschöpfung im digitalisierten Buchmarkt, Wiesbaden: Gabler 2010. – „The creation of value in the digitized book market“

Riehm, Ulrich: Elektronisches Publizieren revisited! Anmerkungen zur Verbreitung elektronischer Publikationen, zur Konkurrenz gedruckter und elektronischer Medien sowie zu den strukturellen Veränderungen im Publikationswesen. In: zeitenblicke 5 (2006). URL: http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2006/3/Riehm/index_html.

Romano, Frank: E-books and the Challenge of Preservation. In: Microform & Imaging Review. Band 32, Heft 1, Winter 2003, p. 13-25. DOI: 10.1515/MFIR.2003.13.

Trinckauf, Korinna: Nicht nur Festschrift – Methodische Überlegungen zur wissenschaftlichen Verlagsgeschichtsschreibung. In: IASL Online Diskussionsforum Probleme der Geschichtsschreibung des Buchhandels. URL: http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/discuss/lisforen/Trinckauf_Verlagsgeschichtsschreibung.pdf

„Not only commemorative publication – methodological considerations on the scholarly historiography of the book trade"

Beyond Reading: The ‘Gamification’ of Books

There is a fundamental shift taking place in our relationship with books. No longer perceived as distinct, physical objects to be read and stowed on a shelf, their digitization has created a complex, interconnected network of sociability, data, and engagement using e-readers and other digital media. This desire for engagement, in particular, mirrors an emerging trend in the publishing industry: the “gamification” of books. Gamification — defined as the integration of game mechanics into traditionally non-game environments — has already penetrated the publishing industry through applications such as Kobo’s “Reading Life,” which awards the reader badges, shares information with friends, and stores statistical data (e.g. number of pages turned). How do these digital trends affect our study of reading and the reception of texts in the twenty first century? Using “Reading Life” and other recent examples of “gamification” as a point of departure, this paper examines how digital books, as “active” vehicles for real-life engagement, influence the reception of texts in a digital age. In a world of social media and integration, the proliferation of digital books, I argue, has caused a trend toward increased engagement — objects that can be “played” with beyond reading itself. The future of textual studies, then, should be open to considering both the digital object and the interactive worlds which surround them. Far from Huizinga’s “magic circle,” the amalgamation of books and gaming mechanics blurs the boundaries between not only reality and entertainment, but also between the idea of “game” and “text.”

Works cited:

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT, 2010. Print.

Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Trans. Meyer Barash. New York: the Free Press of Glencoe, 1961. Print.

Chatfield, Tom. Fun Inc: Why Gaming will Dominate the Twenty-First Century. New York: Pegasus, 2010. Print.

Consalvo, Mia. “There is No Magic Circle.” Games and Culture 4.4 (2009): 08-17. Print.

Dignan, Aaron. Game Frame: Using Games as a Strategy for Success. New York: Free, 2011. Print.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. London: HarperCollins, 1973. Print.

Herther, Nancy K. “The Ebook Reader is Not the Future of Ebooks.” Searcher 16 (2008): 26-40. Print.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo ludens, proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultuur. Haarlem: H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1938; Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. New York: Roy, 1950. Print.

Kostick, A. “The Digital Reading Experience: Learning from Interaction Design and UX-Usability Experts.” Publishing Research Quarterly, 27.2 (2011): 135-140. Print.

Kratky, A. “Re-thinking Reading in the Context of a New Wave of Electronic Reading Devices.” Human-Computer Interaction, Tourism and Cultural Heritage. Eds. F. Cipolla Ficarra, C. de Castro Lozano, E. Nicol, M. Cipolla-Ficarra, and A. Kratky. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Volume 6529. Heidelberg: Springer. 1-11. Print.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of Interactive Narrative.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 1 (2009): 43-59. Print.

Siegenthaler, E., Wurtz P., and Groner, R. “Improving the Usability of E-Book Readers.” Journal of Usability Studies, 6.1 (2010): 25-38. Print.

Fascinating Rhythms: Typographical journals & Global Communication Networks in the Nineteenth Century

The transnational turn in book history has led to a renewed interest in early modern forms of globalisation and the ways in which people, ideas, material objects, texts, and technologies circulate within and between empires, nations, and other geopolitical entities. Using new tools to crack old chestnuts, this illustrated talk discusses how nineteenth-century printers relied upon a complex mesh of information networks grounded in typographical journals to sustain their professional identity, preserve time-honoured social and cultural practices in an age of mass industrialization, and maintain connections with family, friends, and colleagues in the wake of large-scale trade migration. Text analytics, geotemporal reasoning, and data visualisation offer dynamic new approaches to understanding the emergence of historic social networks, technology transfer, koowledge creation, and global communication systems.

Re-Placing the Book: Preparing a Geo-text of the Mayoral Shows

How can digital editions allow us to recover the lost spatial component of mayoral pageants? Although the texts of the entertainments survive in codex form, the extant texts do not convey either the disjointed nature of the entertainment as a whole or the importance of specific location to a pageant’s meaning. No one spectator would have seen the entire entertainment. The crowd gathered at Paul’s Chain, for example, would see only the pageant performed there, while the procession moved on to a new pageant and a new set of spectators. The Map of Early Modern London (MoEML; mapoflondon.uvic.ca) aims to capture something of this partial experience by attaching components of the printed books to the relevant streets and creating a chronological stack of these components extracted from their codex context. My goal is for visitors to MoEML to be able to read the entire text in a linear “bookish” way if they wish or to experience the event hypertextually by reading a description through the “Pageant” link from MoEML’s street or site essay, as if they themselves were lining the street at that point and having the procession arrive at their vantage point. It has taken some time and number of failed experiments to recognize that we need to break the book to make the show. I shall model some potential codex-based structures for a digital and georeferenced non-peripatetic edition of Chruso-thriambos, the Goldsmiths’ Company pageant prepared by Anthony Munday in 1611, and make some reference to The Triumphs of Truth (by Thomas Middleton for the Grocers’ Company in 1613). I will show how working through these codex-based structures has led to the non-codex-based peripatetic edition that aims to reconstitute mayoral pageantry in the digital environment of the map of London. I mark-up the file in such a way that pieces of it can be attached to an interactive map and/or to a hypertextual node and that the pieces can also be put back together into the “bookish” order. Mark-up allows for one single underlying file (a database) to populate the peripatetic edition for each year. It also becomes possible to pull from multiple files all of the pageants that occurred at one place in the years specified, or to pull out all of the forematter, all of the company history, all of the dedications, or anything that has been tagged in the same way in multiple files. If we get away from the notion of the pageant book as copy-text, we can conceive of an edition of an event. The peripatetic hypertextual edition is also an open-ended edition that can accommodate various other “documentary witnesses” to the event, marked up in similar ways. The edition thus becomes a node for eyewitness accounts, livery company records, the extant visual materials, and printed materials. A principal benefit of this peripatetic editorial platform is that we can support our suppositions about these radically place-dependent performances by drawing upon the evidence of the other shows. Suppose that we can use this tool to identify thematic and performance trends in the pageants performed at a particular place. This evidence may then help us georeference the pageants in those shows that are sparing in their place identifications. We may, in fact, be able to reconstruct some of the site-specific knowledge that made pageant poets feel that they did not have to provide spatial coordinates to a readership deeply knowledgeable about the places of performance in the streets of London.

Selection of Works Cited in the Paper

Hill, Tracey. Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585-1639. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2010. Print.

Mahood, M. M. “Shakespeare’s Sense of Direction.” Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes. Ed. Grace Ioppolo. Newark, DE: U of Delaware P; London: Associated UP, 2000. 33-55. Print.

Manley, Lawrence. Literature and Culture in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

McGann, Jerome. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. Print.

Middleton, Thomas. The Triumphs of Truth. London, 1613. Print. STC 17903 and STC 17904. Page images of British Library copy on Early English Books Online. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home. Web. See student edition of STC 17903 by Lacy Marshall and James Campbell at http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/render_page.php?id=TRIU1.

[Mulcaster, Richard]. The passage of our most drad Soueraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the citie of London to westminster the daye before her coronacion Anno 1558. Cum priuilegio. London: 1558/9. Print. STC 7590. Page images of Huntington Library copy on Early English Books Online. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home. Web. See student edition of Society of Antiquaries copy by Jennie Butler at http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/render_page.php?id=QMPS1.

Munday, Anthony. Chruſo-thriambos. The Triumphes of Golde. London, 1611. Print. STC 18267.5. Page images of Trinity College (University of Cambridge) copy on Early English Books Online. http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home. Web. See http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/render_page.php?id=CHRU1.

Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Editing without a Copy-Text.” Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994): 1-22. Print.

Dimensionality in Print and Digital Scholarly Editions of Henslowe’s Diary

The manuscript known as Henslowe’s Diary is widely acknowledged to be the major source of knowledge in the area of Early Modern playhouse practice in London. The Diary, a collection of lists, tables, and transactional notes, is at once artifact and resource, and Henslowe’s Diary has been presented using methods that have variably highlighted its data, its materiality, and its narrative characteristics. However, our understanding of Henslowe’s Diary has been predicated on the act of dividing up—and building hierarchies within—the types of knowledge perceived in the text. In contemplating a scholarly edition of Henslowe’s Diary in the digital environment, disconnecting the text from its physical and communicative framework is reminiscent of various methods of deconstructive and reconstructive editorial acts of print editions of the past.

Historically, scholarly editions of the diary have prioritized the semantic content as verifiable facts over the materiality of the manuscript. These verifiable facts, once abstracted from the obstructing “container” of the text, must be further fragmented and re-constituted to be more fully understood as they exist at the juncture of the dimensions of chronological, material, and thematic organization; prioritizing one reading has meant the obstruction of the others. Simultaneous presentation of dimensions has been a longhanded affair, as seen in W.W. Greg’s double volume edition. To what extent does unmooring these dimensions from the printed page augment understanding—a multidimensional reading, or an untethered, unstable one?

Henslowe’s Diary is a potential site for examining past and developing notions of text and data, especially the tantalizing possibility of accessing an unproblematic “reality” of the text through the verification of the Diary as a set of facts. The text is also a site for working towards a theory of dimensionality in the text that departs from the purely thematic and factual categories of the past in order to facilitate a digital scholarly edition that does more than mirror the condition of print.

Works cited:

Carson, Neil, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Beckerman, Bernard, ‘Philip Henslowe’ in The Theatrical Manager in England and America: Player of a Perilous Game, Ed. by Joseph W. Donohue, Jr., (Princeton, Princeton University Press)

Carson, Christie, ‘The Evolution of Online Editing: Where Will it End?’ in Shakespeare Survey 59 (2007)

Cerasano, S.P. ‘The Geography of Henslowe’s Diary’ Shakespeare Quarterly 56.3 (2005)

Chillington-Rutter, Carol, Documents of the Rose Playhouse, 2nd edition, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999)

Deegan, Marilyn and Kathryn Sutherland, Transferred Illusions: digital technology and the forms of print, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

Eggert, Paul ‘The Book, The E-Text and the ‘Work-site’’ in Text Editing, Print and the Digital World Ed by Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009)

Flanders, Julia, ‘Data and Wisdom: Electronic Editing and the Quantification of Knowledge’. Linguistic and Literary Computing 24.1 (2009)

Foakes, R.A. Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Greg, W.W., Henslowe’s Diary, (London: A.H. Bullen, 1904).

Greg, W.W. The Rationale of Copy-Text’, Studies in Bibliography 3, (1950-51)

Hockey, Susan, ‘The Reality of Electronic Editions’ in Voice, Text, Hypertext. Ed. by Raimonda Modiano, Leroy Searle and Peter Shillingsburg. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003).

Hunter, Michael, Editing Early Modern Texts, (Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan, 2007)

Jowett, John, ‘Editing Shakespeare’s Plays in the 20th Century’, Shakespeare Survey 59 (2007)

Robinson, Peter, ‘What text really is not, and why editors have to learn to swim,’ Linguistic and Literary Computing 24.1 (2009)

Schillingsberg, Peter, From Google to Gutenburg, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Sperberg-McQueen, C.M., ‘How to teach your edition to swim’. Linguistic and Literary Computing 24.1 (2009)

Stern, Tiffany, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Sutherland, Kathryn, ‘Being Critical: Paper Based Editing and the Digital Environment’ in Text Editing: Print, and the Digital World, Ed by Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009)

Vanhoutte Edward, ‘Every Reader his own Bibliographer—An Absurdity’ in Text Editing: Print, and the Digital World, Ed by Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009)

Warner, G.F., Catalogue of the MS and Muniments of Alleyn's College of God's Gift at Dulwich College. (London: Longman, Green and Co, 1881)

Juxta on the Web

Since 2008, NINES has managed the development of a textual collation tool named Juxta, originally conceived and created by Applied Research in ‘Patacriticism at the University of Virginia. The result of a conversation about textual studies between scholars and programmers, Juxta was designed to be more than just a scholar’s version of a diff algorithm; its visualizations of changes in the text were meant to be both analytical and rhetorical in nature. Not only did it allow scholars working with digital texts to produce collations more quickly than ever, but it also offered the possibility of sharing those collations full and dynamically, rather than in the traditional shorthand of print publication.

Juxta was first released as an open-source downloadable Java client that worked with files saved on the user’s own computer. Over the course of the application’s development, it became clear to the NINES Research and Development team that collation had much greater possibilities in a digital age: in addition to comparing hand-crafted witnesses of the same text, Juxta could be used for on-the-fly proofreading or authentication of witnesses found on the web, spotting plagiarism in students’ papers, and a host of other activities unique to a digital environment. In addition, the series of operations necessary for collating digital texts (parsing, tokenization and alignment) could be broken down in discreet modules that, when assembled in a larger toolset and applied to corpus of texts, could allow for powerful and multi-faceted textual analysis. The idea for the Juxta Web Service was born.

As Project Manager for NINES, I would like to present Juxta 2.0 as an important step in textual studies in the 21st century. Whether as a standalone site for collation and sharing, or embedded as an API within a larger toolset such as Bamboo CorporaSpace or Interedition, I believe that a wider array of scholars will find Juxta essential to their digital work in the coming years.

Juxta is developed by NINES R&D and Performant Software Solutions, LLC with help from Gregor Middel (University of Würzburg).

Links

Juxta

NINES

Bamboo CorporaSpace

Interedition

ARP

A Public Interface for the Archive: Scholarship and Smartphones

Following mandates to “allow research knowledge to flow . . . between academic researchers and the wider community” (SSHRC), the research team at the University of Alberta (EMiC UA) has been developing a smartphone app to help make archival materials accessible to both scholars and a wider public. We have been digitizing the archival papers of Wilfred and Sheila Watson, two important 20th-century Canadian writers. Distributed across two geographically separated archives (Edmonton and Toronto), the papers are no longer contained in one physically cohesive collection, which makes any kind of scholarly research more challenging.

One of our test cases has been to collect and to digitize papers from one particular year in the Watsons’ lives. The 1955-56 academic year was a period of transition and adjustment for the pair, but perhaps especially for Sheila, who was contemplating whether to continue the marriage or to end it. Spending the year in Paris, Wilfred and Sheila traversed the city in any number of ways, exploring theatres, art galleries, markets and the distinctive neighbourhoods that surrounded their flat at 28 Rue Vignon. To date, the only scholars who have been able to follow in the Watsons’ Paris footsteps are those who have visited the three cities of Edmonton, Toronto and Paris. Our smartphone app attempts to rectify that.

“Walking with the Watsons” is an augmented reality smartphone application that both exposes archival materials to a wider public and, for users who are actually in Paris, also allows them to walk in the Watsons' footsteps. Using GPS navigation, users can follow the same routes that Sheila and Wilfred took fifty years ago, leading to specific landmarks where the app retrieves relevant materials about that particular location from the archive. Using digital techniques to integrate materials from three different cities across more than fifty years, this project explores how new mobile technologies can help the digital humanities rethink the issues of accessibility that currently constrain our research and the ways in which others can engage with it.

Works Cited

SSHRC: Community Engagement..

Paris and Wilfred Watson’s Cockcrow and the Gulls

Wilfred Watson’s British Council and Governor General Award winning poetry collection Friday’s Child (1955) is considered an exemplar of Canadian high modernist verse. After the success of this work, Watson turned to theatre, beginning work on Cockcrow and the Gulls, his first major play. Paul Tiessen notes Watson’s investment in “the problem of finding a Canadian idiom” was a constant concern for him and that he wanted, as he wrote in 1958, to foster “a revolution in sensibility” in Canada (113-114). After receiving a Canadian Government Overseas Fellowship in 1955 Watson chose Paris as the place from which to begin “developing a Canadian theatre responsive to that of the European absurdists” (119).

When it was mounted at Edmonton’s Studio Theatre in 1962 Cockcrow and the Gulls shocked audience and critics alike – a response that Watson’s plays continued to evoke through the 1960s. During the premiere some audience members stormed out yelling “heathens” as they left: an indication that the play’s adoption of absurdist style was radical to the Canadian scene, to say the least. The play demonstrates Watson’s commitment to the development of a unique “Canadian idiom” that acknowledged and responded to the European absurdists.

This paper plumbs Watson’s Fonds at the University of Albertato trace the ways in which his artistic, social, and intellectual interactions in Paris shaped the composition of Cockcrow. It uses the smartphone app to visualize those interactions and make it available to a wider audience. The extensive letters, notebooks, and drafts of Cockcrow provide a rich aggregation of material that demonstrates how Paris’s theatrical and intellectual communities shaped the composition of a play that, in its turn, introduced Canada to a radical modernist vision. This project inaugurates a two-year EMiC-funded oostdoctoral project wherein I study the textual history of Cockcrow to produce a hybrid print-digital edition.

Many Hands, Many Editors: The Scholarly Edition And Social Media

This Paper Explores The Challenges Of Textual Scholarship In The Context Of Social Media. Our Case Study, A Socially Produced Edition Of The Devonshire Manuscript, Consists Of Two Versions: A Fixed Hypertextual Version, Residing In The Iter Community Pages, And An Editable Diffused Version, Spread Across Various Wikimedia Foundation Projects. The Scholarly Material That Underpins The Wikimedia Edition Is Housed By Several Wikimedia Projects; However, The Central Text Is In Wikibooks At http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript.

By Observing Both Specialist And Novice Editors’ Interaction With The Courtly Miscellany And With One Another, This Project Seeks To Understand, In Very Real And Pragmatic Ways, The Intersection Of Scholarly Editing And New Social Media, Which In Particular Spaces Like Wikimedia Has Proven To Have Considerable Promise. The Devonshire Manuscript Editorial Group Is In The Second Of A Three-Phase Research Process: The Group Has Published Extensively On Social Edition Methodology (Siemens Et Al, “The Devil”; Siemens Et Al, “Drawing Networks”; Siemens Et Al, “Toward Modeling”; Siemens Et Al, “Toward Visualizing”; Siemens Et Al “Underpinnings”), Is Now Modeling The Social Edition-Building Process, And Will Complete The Project With A Full Comparison Of The Wikimedia Edition And The Iter Community Edition. In Response To The Rapid Changes In Practice That Characterize Online Textual Space, The Group Is Taking Advantage Of This Intermediary Stage To Consult With Both Traditional And Citizen Scholars And To Share Our Findings As We Conduct Our Research². The Issue Of Public Knowledge Is Pressing, And The Opportunity To Investigate And Intervene In The Online Representation Of Collective Cultural History May Not Last.

Notes

1 Raymond Siemens, Karin Armstrong, Barbara Bond, Constance Crompton, Terra Dickson, Johanne Paquette, Jonathan Podracky, Ingrid Weber, Cara Leitch, Melanie Chernyk, Bret D. Hirsch, Daniel Powell, Alyssa McLeod, Chris Gaudet, Eric Haswell, Arianna Ciula, Daniel Starza-Smith, and James Cummings, with Martin Holmes, Greg Newton, Jonathan Gibson, Paul Remley, Erik Kwakkel, and Aimie Shirkie.

2 We have started to gather editorial data from our Wikibooks edition, and would be happy to update our abstract with a more formal analysis of community interaction in the new year. At the time of writing, the baseline material in has already attracted the attention of Wikibooks editors.

Works Cited

Siemens, Raymond, Barbara Bond And Karin Armstrong. “The Devil Is In The Details: An Electronic Edition Of The Devonshire Ms (British Library Additional Ms 17,492), Its Encoding And Prototyping.” New Technologies And Renaissance Studies. Ed. William R Bowen And Ray Siemens. Tempe And Toronto: Medieval And Renaissance Texts And Studies / Iter (2008 For 2005). 261-299. Print. http://web.uvic.ca/~siemens/pub/2008-devil_dms.pdf

Siemens, Raymond, Johanne Paquette, Karin Armstrong, Cara Leitch, Brett D. Hirsch, Eric Haswell, And Greg Newton. “Drawing Networks In The Devonshire Manuscript (Bl Add Ms 17492): Toward Visualizing A Writing Community’s Shared Apprenticeship, Social Valuation, And Self-Validation.” Digital Studies / Le Champ Numerique 1.1 (2009). Web. http://Www.Digitalstudies.Org/Ojs/Index.Php/Digital_Studies/Article/View/146/201

Siemens, Raymond, Karin Armstrong, Barbara Bond, Constance Crompton, Terra Dickson, Johanne Paquette, Jonathan Podracky, Ingrid Weber, Cara Leitch, Melanie Chernyk, Bret D. Hirtsch, Daniel Powell, Chris Gaudet, Eric Haswell, Arianna Ciula, Daniel Starza-Smith, James Cummings, With Martin Holmes, Greg Newton, Jonathan Gibson, Paul Remley, Erik Kwakkel, And Aimie Shirkie. A Social Edition Of The Devonshire Ms (Bl Add 17,492). Forthcoming From Iter And Medieval And Renaissance Texts And Studies: Toronto And Tempe. Current Social Texts At http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript.

Siemens, Raymond, Meagan Timney, Cara Leitch, Corina Koolen, And Alex Garnett, And With The Etcl, Inke, And Pkp Research Groups. “Toward Modeling The Social Edition: An Approach To Understanding The Electronic Scholarly Edition In The Context Of New And Emerging Social Media.” Literary And Linguistic Computing (Forthcoming). http://web.uvic.ca/~siemens/pub/2011-socialedition.pdf

Siemens, Raymond, Mike Elkink, Alastair Mccoll, Karin Armstrong, James Dixon, Angelsea Saby, Brett D. Hirsch And Cara Leitch, With Martin Holmes, Eric Haswell, Chris Gaudet, Paul Girn, Michael Joyce, Rachel Gold, And Gerry Watson, And Members Of The Pkp, Iter, Tapor, And Inke Teams. “Underpinnings Of The Social Edition? A Narrative, 2004-9, For The Renaissance English Knowledgebase (Rekn) And Professional Reading Environment (Pree) Projects.” Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape Of Things To Come. Ed. Jerome Mcgann, Andrew Stauffer, Dana Wheeles, And Michael Pickard. Houston: Rice Up, 2010. Web. http://cnx.org/content/M34335/

Shared Canvas: Towards an Electronic Scholarly Edition Standard Document Format

Scholarly electronic editions typically consist of an electronic facsimile of a set of documents as well as a transcription with appropriate tools for exploring the edition. Perhaps a project might provide commentary comparable to that found in a traditional scholarly edition, but that commentary would be considered part of the whole, not an augmentation or optional piece that might be replaced by some other commentary. Similarly, an electronic scholarly edition typically has a single edition that must be accepted as a whole. There is no apparatus for creating an edition customized for a particular purpose.

As part of the Shelley-Godwin Archive project, we are exploring the use of Shared Canvas and Open Annotation to provide the representation of scholarly editions with the goal of maximizing interoperability and sustainability, providing the ability to incorporate user-generated data selectable by a scholar, and allowing incorporation of ancillary materials as needed by a scholar to build an edition for a specific purpose.

By representing all aspects of a digital edition as a set of annotations onto a common space, Shared Canvas and Open Annotation provide a model able to represent the traditional edition as well as provide new affordances. For a manuscript, each logical page is a blank space onto which images, transcriptions, and other notations are mapped.

Representing the relationships between the various pieces of an electronic edition as a set of annotations, it is easy to incorporate other annotations into the edition. A scholar could replace provided commentary or collation with their own.

Combining Shared Canvas and Open Annotation with Linked Open Data provides a way towards a standard document format for describing scholarly editions because references to and relationships between resources are independent of the implementation for sharing and interacting with them. Having a standard for describing the content of a scholarly edition allows the digital humanities community to produce scholarly editions independently of the readers of those editions.

This open standard would allow previously difficult work. For example, someone could assemble the endpapers from a set of manuscripts to represent the original that the endpapers came from even if the original manuscripts were scattered across a number of projects.

Works cited:

Open Annotation Collaboration

Shared Canvas

Linked Open Data

Appeal to the Public: Lessons from the Early History of the Oxford English Dictionary

If ‘accessibility’ means that anyone can read a text, the other end of accessibility is the idea that anyone can contribute to the creation of a text. Proponents of crowdsourcing academic work regularly claim the Oxford English Dictionary as an early example, if not the first example, of a phenomenon now familiar to users of Web 2.0: a body of information created by the voluntary labour of a large number of participants. This Victorian and (in hindsight) very successful project deserves closer scrutiny, both to prevent an oversimplified triumphalist account of the victories of public collaboration and to find out why, after a shaky beginning characterised more by failure than success, the OED actually did succeed. When the OED is described as an early demonstration of ‘the wisdom of crowds’, for example, it is not usually explained how the contributions of its volunteers were handled so that they could, ultimately, serve as the base of data from which the OED was produced; nor is it often noticed that the early OED relied not only on volunteer readers but also on volunteer editors. This paper, therefore, examines the history of the first edition of the OED in order to discover what lessons it may offer especially for textual scholars of the twenty-first century, in which digital media offer both opportunities and challenges for open participation in traditionally academic work.

As Rockwell (2010) has pointed out, examining pre-digital collaborative projects of this kind prevents us from an overly glib equation of concept and technology, and impels us to consider the human factors that contribute to the success or failure of such ventures. Now that a number of scholarly textual projects that rely on open participation have established a presence on the Web – Suda On Line, Old Weather, and the Bentham Project, for example – it is a good time to ask what the best practices for this kind of work might be, whether open participation can go beyond tagging and transcription, and how lessons of the past might be usefully applied to the future.

Works Cited

Brewer, Charlotte. Examining the OED. 2011. Web.

Brumfield, Ben W. Collaborative Manuscript Transcription. 2011. Web.

Howe, Jeff. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. New York: Three Rivers P, 2009.

Knowles, Elizabeth. ‘Making the OED: Readers and Editors. A Critical Survey.’ Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest. Ed. Lynda Mugglestone. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 22-39.

Mugglestone, Lynda. Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005.

Murray, K. M. Elisabeth. Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977.

[OED]. Oxford English Dictionary. Online ed. Oxford University Press, 2011. Web.

Old Weather. Zooniverse, 2011. Web.

Raymond, Darrell, ed. ‘Dispatches from the Front: Prefaces to “A New English Dictionary”.’ 2010. Available: http://softbase.uwaterloo.ca/~drraymon/Dispatches.pdf.

Rockwell, Geoffrey. ‘Oxford English Dictionary: The first crowdsourced humanities project?’ Theoreti.ca. 27 March 2010. Web.

Transcribe Bentham. University College London, 2011. Web.

Suda On Line: Byzantine Lexicography. Stoa Consortium, 2011. Web.

Rethinking The Hypertext Complete letters of E.J. Pratt: Exploring the Digital Threshold

The call for papers posed the question “What is the state of the scholarly edition after the transition from print to print and digital?” I have recently published a print edition of the letters of A.M. Klein and am about to submit the manuscript of the print edition of E.J. Pratt’s correspondence to the same scholarly press. Meanwhile, I am strategizing its re-design of a prototype of a digital edition (The Complete Letters of E.J. Pratt: The Hypertext Edition). At this moment in time, I am extremely conscious of how the design of print edition can effect its function as a research tool with the goal of providing as what Jean Genette refers to as “a more or less organized tour of the ‘workshop,’ uncovering the ways and means by which the text has become what it is” (Paratexts, p. 401). My task now is to determine how that function can be complemented and improved upon.

My task is complicated by the fact that I am working with texts considered by most scholars to be peripheral. However, marginalization can be liberating., and my hope is that The Hypertext Pratt will help to model engagement with correspondence of all sorts, including email – an even more ephemeral medium. After all, “correspondence” is now more at home in digital media than on paper. The most obvious advantages of a digital gathering of such materials are that it is almost infinitely expandable, can be linked to other sorts of documents (e.g., a specific version of a poem rather than an edited print edition, or to specific pages from printed books), and can be extended to other media. As Pratt consciously manipulated and exploited the media available to him, links can be established to recordings and radio broadcasts, as well as artistic, musical and dramatic interpretations of his work. The most intriguing problem for this digital edition is how to emphasize Pratt’s extremely “social” engagement with a broad range of participants in the composition and production of his work. However, the digital threshold has tremendous potential to show us into this writer’s workshop.

Works cited:

Genette, Jean. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1997.

Popham, Elizabeth, ed. A.M. Klein: The Letters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

Popham, Elizabeth and David G. Pitt, eds. The Complete Letters of E.J. Pratt: The Hypertext Edition.

Interface Ideals: Analyzing Text Analysis Interface Design from a Humanities Perspective

In the current crisis of the humanities, the sub-discipline Digital Humanities (DH), which combines technological advancements and humanities content, is thriving. As a result, the “[digital] humanities has had to embrace the ‘two cultures,’ to bring the rigor and systematic unambiguous procedural methodologies characteristic of the sciences to address problems within the humanities that had hitherto been most often treated in a serendipitous fashion” (Hockey, 2004). Among the many activities of DH, two text analysis tools, Divitext and Treeview (part of the Lexomics suite), pre-process texts and compare them using computational stylistics. In its current early phase, Divitext uses the dominant, conventional, “task-oriented and efficiency driven” interface (Drucker, 2011). Some, like Drucker and Matthew Kirschenbaum (2004), have noted how the interface, “driven by pragmatic and utilitarian needs,” is “also where representation and its attendant ideologies are most conspicuous to our critical eyes.” Because this design has become commonplace since the 1970s, “the transparency of the windows interface and desktop metaphors [have come] to be assumed as givens” which has “structured and restricted options” for designers; thus, the identity of the designer has ultimately been challenged, as the struggle between older, “stable, flat compositions” and “multiple behind-the scenes tasks that are constantly changing” has come into play in the twenty-first century (Drucker, 2009). This project analyzes this interface from a socio-historical perspective, as well as in the context of the cultural divide embraced by DH. It poses the question: would an interface design that is “situated,” “emergent,” and “adaptive,” in a humanistic view, or one that substitute[es] the idea of a ‘user’ for that of a ‘subject’ whose engagement with interface in a digital world could be modeled on the insights gained in the critical study of the subject in literary, media, and visual studies” be of any use to the Divitext interface, or to humanistic interface design in general (Drucker, 2011)?

Works cited:

Branaghan, R. J., & C. M. Covas-Smith, K. D. Jackson, C. Eidman. (2011). “Using knowledge structures to redesign an instructor-operation station.” Applied Ergonomics, vol.42. Retrieved from www.elsevier.com/locate/aspergo

Drucker, J. (2009). Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Pearson Prentice Hall.

Drucker, J . (2011). “Humanities Approaches to Interface Theory.” Culture Machine, vol.12. Retrieved from http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view DownloadInterstitial/434/462

Hockey, S. (2004). The History of Humanities Computing. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford. Blackwell.

Hofland, K. (1995). What is the history of computer assisted text analysis? TACTweb Online Workbook. Retrieved from http://kh.hd.uib.no/tactweb/doc/Catahist.HTM

Kirschenbaum, M. (2004). So the Colors Cover the Wires: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford. Blackwell.

Kirschenbaum, M. (2010). What is Digital Humanities and What's it Doing in the English Department? ADE Bulletin 150.

Moretti, F. (2007). Graphs, Maps, Trees. New York. Verso.

Morville, P. (2005). Ambient Findability. California: O’Reily Media.

Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design. Massachusetts: Basic Books.

Norman, D. A. (1988, 2002). The Design of Everyday Things. Massachusetts: Basic Books.

Robichaud, A., & C. Blevins. (2011). Text Analysis. Tooling Up for Digital Humanities. Retrieved from http://toolingup.stanford.edu/?page_id=981

Rockwell, G. (2005). What is Text Analysis? Text Analysis Developers Alliance (TADA). Retrieved from http://tada.mcmaster.ca/Main/WhatTA

Schreibman, S. (2004). The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Oxford. Blackwell.

Changing the Climate: Alternative Approaches to the Scholarly Edition in Digital Environments

The recently created Modeling and Prototyping Team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project is currently exploring ways in which the scholarly edition can be re-imagined within digital settings. Our prototypes function as virtual environments that encourage play within their designed frames, but these frames remain flexible enough to accommodate unanticipated need and use. Prototypes thus embody process rather than product, and as Galey and Ruecker (2010) have argued, the trajectory of prototype iterations establishes a valuable record of critical enquiry. In this spirit, we wonder whether the digitalscholarly edition, in addition to being perceived as an environment which is both a trace record of the theoretical and argumentative motivations that inform the editorial processes of selection, organization and design, could actively allow the persistence of that process. Material print editions are records, artefacts of process, version-objects that assert an argument and establish a historical position through the printed finality of their collation and production. If digital editions are to take full advantage of their environments (rather than simply emulating print traditions) and are more about process than product, then the opening of editorial diligence, perspective and control to users is required. While editions can still be produced in digital situations, the larger question is how digital scholarly editions can take full advantage of environmentally-generated opportunities to focus on process, collaboration, and distributed control without losing the traditional affordances that make an edition “scholarly.” Perhaps the hope of migrating scholarly editions to digital climes and preserving top-down forms of authoritative and exclusive editorial selectivity should give way to the desire to:

1. generate robust workspaces within which users can process a repository of comprehensive data to fulfil specific editorial, analytical or research motivations, and

2. to provide environments which encourage users to master editorial processes through participatory praxis.

Works cited:

Galey, Alan & Ruecker, Stan. “How a Prototype Argues.” LLC 25.4 (2010). 405-424.