"some crauen scruple/ Of thinking too precisely": democratization, dialogue, and the...

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

pip.willcox@bodleian.ox.ac.uk@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.