Joris van Zundert

Delta for Middle Dutch—Author and Copyist Distinction in Walewein

The Middle Dutch Arthurian romance Roman van Walewein (‘Romance of Gawain’) is attributed in the text itself to two authors, Penninc and Vostaert. Very little quantitative research into this dual authorship has been done. This article describes our progress in applying different non-traditional authorship attribution methods to the text of Walewein. After providing an introduction to the romance and an overview of earlier research, we evaluate previous statements on authorship and stylistics by applying both Yules measure of lexical richness and Burrowss Delta. To find out whether these new methods would confirm or even enhance our present knowledge about the differences between the two authors, we applied an adapted version of John Burrowss Delta procedure. The adapted version seems to be able to distinguish the double authorship of the romance. It also helps us to confirm some and to reject other earlier statements about the position in the text where the second author started his work.

Computer-supported collation of modern manuscripts: CollateX and the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project

Interoperability is the key term within the framework of the European-funded research project Interedition,[1][1] whose aim is ‘to encourage the creators of tools for textual scholarship to make their functionality available to others, and to promote communication between scholars so that we can raise awareness of innovative working methods’. The tools developed by Interedition’s ‘Prototyping’ working group were tested by other research teams, which formulate strategic recommendations. To this purpose, the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp), the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (The Hague), and the University of Wurzburg have been working together within the framework of Interedition. One of the concrete results of collaboration is the development and fine-tuning of the text collation tool CollateX.[2][2] In this article, we would like to investigate how the architecture of a digital archive containing modern manuscripts can be designed in such a way that users can autonomously collate textual units of their choice with the help of the collation tool CollateX and thus decide for themselves how efficiently this digital architecture functions—as an archive, as a genetic dossier, or as an edition. The first part introduces CollateX and its internal concepts and heuristics as a tool for digitally supported collation. How this tool can be integrated in the infrastructure of an electronic edition is discussed in part two. The third and final part examines the possibility of deploying CollateX for the collation of modern manuscripts by means of a test case: the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project ([www.beckettarchive.org][3]). [1]: #fn-1 [2]: #fn-2 [3]: http://www.beckettarchive.org

Cultures of Formalization: Towards an encounter between humanities and computing

The past three decades have seen several waves of interest in developing crossovers between academic research and computing; molecular biology is often cited as the prime exemplar of ‘what computation can do for a field’. The humanities and social sciences have also been the terrain of such interactions,at times through bottom-up collaborations, and at times through concerted policy-driven efforts (Wouters and Beaulieu 2006). The main developments vary across national contexts and disciplines. In our local context (in the Netherlands), we can roughly identify the following waves: the ‘history and computing’ and ‘literature and computing’ efforts of the 1970s and 1980s;the collaboratory and infrastructure discussions of the last decade; the current efforts at developing computational humanities, and recent emphasis on virtual research environments (VREs) of which Alfalab1 can be regarded as an example.

Modelling Features of Characters: Some Digital Ways to Look at Names in Literary Texts

In the context of ongoing research into new methods and techniques for literary research we describe a primary implementation of a web application called Autonom, intended to be developed into a framework for textual parsing algorithms that may be used by literary researchers to trace literary phenomena in texts. We describe the technical parsing fundamentals and good practices the development of the framework is based upon, we clarify different design considerations and choices and we present an overview of the current state of implementation and functionality. We also demonstrate the application of a proper name parsing algorithm implemented within the framework, meant to be the first step in a new method for the research of names in literary texts. The algorithm is tested on Karel Glastra van Loons novel Lisas adem >> ( Lisas Breath >>, 2001). We go into the results that this test has yielded so far and summarily describe some of the consequences for the analysis of the names in the novel. We conclude with a short description of the directions new developments could take.

Author, Editor, Engineer — Code & the Rewriting of Authorship in Scholarly Editing

This article examines the relation of software creation to scholarship, particularly within the domain of textual scholarship and the creation of (digital) scholarly editions. To this end, both scholarly editing and the creation of software are considered with regard to the individual relationship they have to the concept of authorship. I argue that both are in fact forms of revisionary authorship, and that they are scholarly in so far as they serve to present an expression of a text that can be taken as an argument about the interpretation of that text. In addition softwares performative aspect allows it to rewrite itself and other textual expressions; its application rewrites the very process of textual scholarship. Because of its scholarly ramifications the creation of scholarly argument and expressions of editions by means of code should be claimed as scholarly work by its authors, i.e. programmers. Without proper appropriation the accountability for scholarly process becomes problematic.This article examines the relation of software creation to scholarship, particularly within the domain of textual scholarship and the creation of (digital) scholarly editions. To this end, both scholarly editing and the creation of software are considered with regard to the individual relationship they have to the concept of authorship. I argue that both are in fact forms of revisionary authorship, and that they are scholarly in so far as they serve to present an expression of a text that can be taken as an argument about the interpretation of that text. In addition softwares performative aspect allows it to rewrite itself and other textual expressions; its application rewrites the very process of textual scholarship. Because of its scholarly ramifications the creation of scholarly argument and expressions of editions by means of code should be claimed as scholarly work by its authors, i.e. programmers. Without proper appropriation the accountability for scholarly process becomes problematic.

The case of the bold button: Social shaping of technology and the digital scholarly edition

The role and usage of a certain technology is not imparted wholesale on the intended user community—technology is not deterministic. Rather, a negotiation between users and the designers of the technology will result in its particular form and function. This article considers a side effect of these negotiations. When a certain known technology is used to convey a new technological concept or model, there is a risk that the paradigm associated by the users with the known technology will eclipse the new model and its affordances in part or in whole. The article presents a case study of this ‘paradigmatic regression’ centering on a transcription tool of the Huygens Institute in the Netherlands. It is argued that similar effects also come into play at a larger scale within the field of textual scholarship, inhibiting the exploration of the affordances of new models that do not adhere to the pervasive digital metaphor of the codex. An example of such an innovative model, the knowledge graph model, is briefly introduced to illustrate the point.

Code, scholarship, and criticism: When is code scholarship and when is it not?

What is the scholarly nature of code and how do we evaluate the scholarship involved with coding? Our claim is that the humanities need an urgent answer to these questions given the increasing softwarization of both society and scholarship that pushes the boundaries of the methods and objects of study of the humanities. We argue that, as a result, there is a need to develop code criticism as a critical and reflexive tool within the humanities. Code criticism is described and positioned with respect to critical code studies, textual criticism, literary criticism, tool, and interface critique. Finally we outline an approach to code criticism based on ideas of reciprocal inquiry and of a continuum of literacies that connects code, code criticism, textual criticism, and literature.

Qu’est-ce qu’un texte numérique? A New Rationale for the Digital Representation of Text

In this article we aim to provide a minimally sufficient theoretical framework to argue that it is time for a re-conception of the notion of text in the field of digital textual scholarship. This should allow us to reconsider the ontological status of digital text, and that will ground future work discussing the specific analytical affordances offered by digital texts understood as digital texts. Following from the argument of Suzanne Briet regarding documentation, referring to Eco’s understanding of ‘infinite semiosis’, and accounting for the reciprocal effects between carrier technology and meaning observed by McLuhan, we argue that the functions of document and text are realized primarily by their fluid nature and by the dynamic character of their interpretation. To define the purpose of textual scholarship as a ‘stabilisation’ of text is therefore fallacious. The delusive focus on ‘stability’ and discrete ‘philological fact’ gives rise to a widespread belief in textual scholarship that digital texts can be treated simply as representations of print or manuscript texts. On the contrary—digital texts are texts in and of themselves in numerous digital models and data structures which may include, but is not limited to, text meant for graphical display on a screen. We conclude with the observation that philological treatment of these texts demands an adequate digital and/or computational literacy.