Julia Flanders

The Cambridge companion to textual scholarship

Introduction: textual scholarship in the age of media consciousness Neil Fraistat and Julia Flanders 1. A history of textual scholarship David Greetham 2. Anglo-American editorial theory Kathryn Sutherland 3. Continental editorial theory Geert Lernout 4. Late twentieth-century Shakespeares Hans Walter Gabler 5. Apparatus, text, interface: how to read a printed critical edition Paul Eggert 6. The politics of textual scholarship Michelle R. Warren 7. Fearful asymmetry Random Cloud 8. What is a book? Roger Chartier and Peter Stallybrass 9. Orality John D. Niles 10. Manuscript textuality Michael Sargent 11. Picture criticism: textual studies and the image Kari Kraus 12. Track changes: textual scholarship and the challenge of the born digital Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside Coda: why digital textual scholarship matters Jerome J. McGann Further reading Index.

The Virtual Monastery: Re‐Presenting Time, Human Movement, and Uncertainty at Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes, Soissons

The Wesleyan‐Brown Monastic Archaeology project (MonArch) integrates research results from standing remains, excavated material culture, and texts from the Augustinian abbey of Saint‐Jean‐des‐Vignes in northern France. The digital dimension of the MonArch project re‐presents the site through three‐dimensional reconstructions of its architecture, inventories of its material culture, and searchable encoded texts. The site employs a variety of strategies to engage the viewer/user in critiques of our knowledge representations. In this paper, we explore the ethical and analytic aspects of archaeological recording and present preliminary results of our work on representing time, human movement, and uncertainty.

Trusting the Electronic Edition

This paper discusses the contested role of images in electronic editions, and summarizes some of the chief arguments for their inclusion. I then argue that, to truly determine the importance of images to the function of electronic editions, we must understand the contribution the image makes to the form of textual knowledge provided by the edition. I suggest a distinction between editions which are primarily pedagogical in their aims, those which aim above all at scholarly authority, and those which attempt to provide textual information as high-quality data which can be analysed and processed. I conclude that the latter represents the most significant future trend in electronic editing.

Names Proper and Improper: Applying the TEI to the Classification of Proper Nouns

This paper discusses the encoding of proper names using the TEI Guidelines, describing the practice of the Women Writers Project at Brown University, and the CELT Project at University College, Cork. We argue that such encoding may be necessary to enable historical and literary research, and that the specific approach taken will depend on the needs of the project and the audience to be served. Because the TEI Guidelines provide a fairly flexible system for the encoding of proper names, we conclude that projects may need to collaborate to determine more specific constraints, to ensure consistency of approach and compatibility of data.

Data and Wisdom: Electronic Editing and the Quantification of Knowledge

The concept of data in the humanistic academy carries a heavy cultural freight: as a reductionist yet efficient representation of complex textual significance. Far from being an invention of the digital age, this conception of the role of quantification has a prehistory whose terms continue to resonate in modern debates about digital editing and digitally mediated scholarship. This essay explores these terms and the anxieties they reflect, concluding that digital representation is no less textually and methodologically rich, and no less a production of knowledge, than its print counterpart.

Some Problems of TEI Markup and Early Printed Books

This paper presents two groups of text encodingproblems encountered by the Brown University WomenWriters Project (WWP). The WWP is creating a full-textdatabase of transcriptions of pre-1830 printed bookswritten by women in English. For encoding our texts weuse Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML),following the Text Encoding Initiative’s Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding andInterchange. SGML is a powerful text encoding systemfor describing complex textual features, but a fullexpression of these may require very complex encoding,and careful thought about the intended purpose of theencoded text. We present here several possibleapproaches to these encoding problems, and analyze theissues they raise.

A licensing model for scholarly textbases

Smaller scholarly projects represent a sector of the digital library which makes an important contribution to research on specialized text encoding, retrieval, and interface design for scholarly audiences. Such projects, however, face funding and publication challenges which threaten their long-term survival. The Women Writers Project is using an unusual tier-based licensing model to make the transition from grant-funded research project to independent financial viability.

Learning from the Past: The Women Writers Project and Thirty Years of Humanities Text Encoding

In recent years, intensified attention in the humanities has been paid to data: to data modeling, data visualization, “big data”. The Women Writers Project has dedicated significant effort over the past thirty years to creating what Christoph Schoch calls “smart clean data”: a moderate-sized collection of early modern women’s writing, carefully transcribed and corrected, with detailed digital text encoding that has evolved in response to research and changing standards for text representation. But that data—whether considered as a publication through Women Writers Online, or as a proof of the viability of text encoding approaches like those expressed in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guideline s—is only the most visible part of a much larger ecology. That ecology includes complex human systems, evolving sets of tools, and a massive apparatus of documentation and organizational memory that have made it possible for the project to work coherently over such a long period of time. In this article we examine the WWP’s information systems in relation to the project’s larger scholarly goals, with the aim of showing where they may generalize to the needs of other projects.

Community-Enhanced Repository for Engaged Scholarship: A Case Study on Supporting Digital Humanities Research.

ABSTRACT Building digital curation and sustainability into digital humanities project development is challenging, and engaging digital humanities researchers fully as partners in curation practices with the library is even more so. How can we represent the longevity and sustainability of digital humanities research projects as a shared responsibility between faculty and student researchers and library staff? Northeastern University Libraries Digital Scholarship Group has designed a series of tools and workflows to ease the burden of sustainable development, support community engagement with digital materials, and enable the library and its partners to work together to build sustainable digital projects.