"some crauen scruple/ of thinking too precisely": democratization, dialogue, and the...
DESCRIPTION
What affordances does the digital bring to editing? This keynote talk presents a partial view on the early modern digital landscape, asks what a (digital) edition is, and looks at the claims and potential for dialogue and democratization. The talk was presented at the Editing Tudor Literature workshop, Newcastle University, 11 May 2014. The workshop was organized by Jennifer Richards and Fred Schurink, and I'm grateful to them, and to everyone there, for wonderfully generous and thought-provoking discussion.TRANSCRIPT
democratization, dialogue, and the digital
Pip Willcox
Curator of Digital Special Collections
Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford
@pipwillcox
William Shakespeare, The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, London (1604), fol. K3v.Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22276X, Copy 1. http://quartos.org.
Editing Tudor Literature, 11 May 2014
A partial view on the early modern digital landscape
What is a (digital) edition?
Digital decisions
Dialogue
Democratization
A republic of letters
Today
Publisher-led editions
Library-led editions
Academic-led editions
Social editions
A partial view on the early modern digital landscape
Publisher-led editions
Library-led editions
Academic-led editions
Social editionsLic
ense
d fo
r re
-use
Free
ly a
vaila
ble
Subs
crip
tion
Priv
ate
A partial view on the early modern digital landscape
Publisher-led editions
Library-led editions
Academic-led editions
Social editionsLic
ense
d fo
r re
-use
Free
ly a
vaila
ble
Subs
crip
tion
Priv
ateDisc
overa
ble
Citable
Reusa
bleSus
taina
ble
A partial view on the early modern digital landscape
Publisher-led editionsLiterature Online (LiOn); Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (OSEO); Early
English Books Online (EEBO)
Library-led editionsHathiTrust; Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-
TCP); Early English Print in the HathiTrust (ElEPHãT); JISC Historic Books/Historic Text
Academic-led editionsProtestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I; Early Modern Letters Online
(EMLO); Forms Online: Renaissance to Modern (FORM); Verse Miscellanies Online; Digital Renaissance Editions
Social editionsA Social Edition of the Devonshire MS, BL Add MS 17,492, Transcribe
Bentham, The International Greek New Testament Project, Crowdmap the Crusades
A partial view on the early modern digital landscape
Metadata — Early Modern Letters Online
Image — Early English Books Online
Optical Character Recognition — Google Books
Transcribed — EEBO Text Creation Partnership
Encoded — Shakespeare Quartos Archive
Edited — Digital Renaissance Editions
What is a (digital) edition?
MetadataDiscoveryAnalysisBibliographyProsopographyCartographyNetworksVisualization
What is a (digital) edition? — Metadata
Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO)
What is a (digital) edition? — Metadata
http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO)
What is a (digital) edition? — Metadata
http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
ImageAccessMaterialityReflectance Transformation ImagingMultispectral imagingHyperspectral imagingImage matching
What is a (digital) edition? — Image
Bodleian Ballads
Archimedes Palimpsest
http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/
What is a (digital) edition? — Image
TranscribedEarly English Books Online Text Creation Partnership
130,305 records; 129,541 image sets; 44,314 full textsVendor-transcribed, partially proofed, encoded textsSubscription (ProQuest, JISC Historic Text)
What is a (digital) edition? — Transcription
http://eebo.chadwyck.com/http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/
EEBO-TCP enablesDistant reading — AdornMorph, DocuScope ElEPHãT
Close reading — Verse Miscellanies Online, F21, FORM
EEBO-TCP: 25,000 texts freely available 1 January 2015
What is a (digital) edition? — Transcription
http://morphadorner.northwestern.edu/http://www.cmu.edu/hss/english/research/docuscope.html
http://versemiscellaniesonline.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
What is a (digital) edition? — The copy specific questionCopy specific or “ideal”?Shakespeare Quartos Archive’s Hamlet
32 copies of 5, pre-1642 quarto editionsfrom 6 libraries
Text Creation Partnership representative textsNo manuscript annotationDigital rebindingIllegibility, damage, missing pages
http://quartos.org/http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/
What is a (digital) edition? — EditedDigital Renaissance Editions
Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I
http://digitalrenaissance.uvic.ca/http://www.culturesofknowledge.org/?page_id=4593
Rut
h &
Seb
astia
n A
hner
t
What is a (digital) edition? — Social editions
Dav
id D
e R
oure
http://www.slideshare.net/davidderoure/future-of-scholarly-communications
What is a (digital) edition? — Social editions
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscripthttp://egora.uni-muenster.de/intf/
http://lbt.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Pagehttp://dhcrowdscribe.com/crowdmap-the-crusades/
http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/Google Image search for “Latin lolcats”
What is a (digital) edition?
Using social media allows us to integrate a new stage into the editorial process — a stage that fills the gap between an edition’s initial planning stages and its concluding blind peer review, which capitalizes on the engaged knowledge communities inside and outside the academy.
(Siemens and Arbuckle)
http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/viewFile/118/268
What is a (digital) edition?
Audience
Tim
eFundingQuality
Compromise
What is a (digital) edition?
When the great preliminary obstacle of money had been so far overcome as to justify the Transcript being proceeded with: there came an almost overpowering despondency from the bulk of it. Leisure moments only were available for its execution: and it did seem for a time that it could not be accomplished within a reasonable period.
(Arber, I. 27)
What is a (digital) edition?
“Oscillations”
Ségo
lène
Tar
te
http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/05/13/llc.fqr015.full
Additional skills: technical, project and staff management
Additional time: curating new communities
Additional funding: technical collaborators, storage, web hosting and delivery
Textual instability
Sustainability: ongoing support for resources, communities, and staff
Academic credibility: digital citation, credit, equivalence
Digital decisions: cons
Technical skills, project and staff management: knowledge exchange in practice
Curating new communities: ease and speed of communication, dissemination, public engagement
Digital delivery: no economy of the print run
Digital affordances: images, performance (audio and video), distant reading, comparison, visualization
Collaborative texts: ease of coproduction, updatable, “perfectable”, plural, mutable
Digital decisions: pros
Democratization: first, define your democracy
Physical AccessAn end to the “golden triangle” Internet accessSubscription
Sustainable intellectual accessStandards-based editingInform, engage, and support audiencesUpdate resources
The canonBeyond a narrow canonDiscoveryPreponderance of Shakespeare
The textContribute to the editingSelect your own versions of textsAuthority, commonality
Democratization: first, define your democracy
“Chains of expertise” crossing traditional boundaries
Academics
Editors
Developers
PublicsComputers
Designers
Dialogue: text shall speak peace unto text
Nobody has ever answered “yes” to “Let me show you my XML”
...except a computer
Hea
ther
Fro
ehlic
hD
avid De R
oure
http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Dialogue: text shall speak peace unto text
Dialogue: text shall speak peace unto textEarly English Print in the HathiTrust (ElEPHãT)
Kev
in P
age
& P
ip W
illco
x
http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Aeternitas Rei Publicae Literariae: Republic of Letters
Ease of publication, access, community building, democratization, flexibility of presentation
Test: discoverable, reusable, augmentable, sustainable
Digital affordances: this has never been easier
Collaboration: exchanging knowledge is more than the sum of its parts
Bodleian Library entrance
Aeternitas Rei Publicae Literariae: Republic of Letters
Quod feliciter vortat academici Oxoniens bibliothecam hanc vobis reipublicaeque
literatorum T.B.P.
Thomas Bodley has built this library for you and for the Republic of the Learned.
May the gift turn out well.Bodleian Library entrance
Aeternitas Rei Publicae Literariae: Republic of Letters
[email protected]@pipwillcox
ReferencesEdward Arber, ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers 1554-1640 AD, 5 vols. (London & Birmingham: private printing, 1875-1895).The Archimedes Palimpsest Project (William Noel et al) — http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/.Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (eds.), William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).Giles Bergel et al, ‘Content-Based Image-Recognition on Printed Broadside Ballads: The Bodleian Libraries’ ImageMatch Tool’, IFLA WLIC, 2013— http://library.ifla.org/209/1/202-
bergel-en.pdf.Bodleian First Folio (Pip Willcox et al) — http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/. Crowdmap the Crusades (Emma Goodwin et al) — http://dhcrowdscribe.com/crowdmap-the-crusades/.James Cummings and Pip Willcox, ‘Stationers’ Register Online: A case study of a byte-reduced TEI schema for digitization (tei_corset)’, j-TEI, Issue 6, 2012— http://jtei.revues.org/926.David De Roure, The Future of Scholarly Communication,UKSG 37th Annual Conference and Exhibition (2014) — http://www.slideshare.net/davidderoure/future-of-scholarly-
communications.Digital Renaissance Editions — http://digitalrenaissance.uvic.ca/.DocuScope — http://www.cmu.edu/hss/english/research/docuscope.html.Early English Books Online — http://eebo.chadwyck.com/.Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership — http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-eebo/.Form Online: Renaissance to Modern (Elizabeth Scott Baumann, Ben Burton et al) — http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/centres/lsc/people/staff/academic/lizscottb.aspx.Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2015).Google Books — http://books.google.co.uk.Jonathan Hope, and Michael Witmore, ‘The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading of Shakespeare’, in Early Modern Literary Studies 9.3 / Special Issue 12 (January, 2004):
6.1-36 — http://purl.oclc.org/emls/09-3/hopewhit.htm. The International Greek New Testament Project — http://egora.uni-muenster.de/intf/.JISC Historic Books/Historic Text — http://www.jischistoricbooks.ac.uk/..Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991).D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).MorphAdorner v.2.0 — http://morphadorner.northwestern.edu/.Protestant Letter Networks in the Reign of Mary I (Ruth and Sebastian Ahnert) — http://www.culturesofknowledge.org/?page_id=4593.Mark Rogerson, ‘Publishing Born-digital Content’, in Cultural Connections DHOxSS 2013 — http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/cultural-connections-exchanging-knowledge-and-widening-
participation-humanities Shakespeare Quartos Archive — http://quartos.org. Judith Siefring, and Eric Meyer, ‘Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition: Report on the TIDSR Benchmarking Study‘, SECT project report (2013). — http://papers.ssrn.com/
sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2236202.Ray Siemens & Alyssa Arbuckle, ‘Understanding the Social Edition Through Iterative Implementation: The Case of the Devonshire MS (BL Add MS 17492)’, Scholarly and Research
Communication, volume 4, issue 3, 2013.A Social Edition of the Devonshire MS, BL Add MS 17,492 — http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Devonshire_Manuscript.S.M. Tarte. ‘Papyrological Investigations: Transferring Perception and Interpretation into the Digital World’ in Lit Linguist Computing, 26(2):233–47, 2011. DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqr010.TEI: Text Encoding Initiative — http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml.Thus speaks Arshama: letters of a fifth-century BC Persian Prince — http://arshama.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.Transcribe Bentham (Tim Causer et al) — http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/.Whitney Anne Trettien, ‘A Deep History of Electronic Textuality: The Case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica’, DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 7 Number 1 2013.Verse Miscellanies Online (Michelle O’Callaghan et al) — http://versemiscellaniesonline.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/.
With particular thanks to Giles Bergel, David De Roure, Heather Froehlich, Anthony Gardner, Brett Hirsch, Kevin Page, Judith Siefring, and Ségolène Tarte.