1) I am extremely interested in broader issues of how to structure digital editions. I am also interested in questions of how best to create, present, and sustain hybrid editions: editions that are both print and digital. Would this DHSI course be an appropriate place to work through some of those issues?
2) During DEMiC/DHSI there was some talk of standardization of editorial practices within the EMiC project. It seems to me, that those standardization practices will be built into the functioning of the mark-up tool: just by using the mark-up tool we will be subscribing to a set of editorial practices. I think this is a good thing (I think). I find myself wondering about the “front” and “back” matter more than the body of the texts that will be processed through this tool. More specifically, I am wondering if we should think collectively about a sort of standardization of our principles of bibliographic description. Should we focus on the thick descriptions of traditional literary/bibliographic description? Should we comply with the Canadian Committee on MARC (CCM) or the Book Industry Communications/Bibliographic Standards Technical Subgroup (BIC/BSTS)?
3) I think a low student/teacher ratio is really important.

That is all for now… any thoughts?

A small side note, to put the breadth of EMiC’s digital projects in a little bit of context: This week I was at a conference in London on Patrick White (Australian modernist novelist) for whom there was very little archive material until just recently, when some new papers of his came to light. (He claimed to have destroyed them all, then years after his death his editor revealed that he had given some to her. Immensely exciting.) At the conference, a handful of images from his archive – pages of notebooks etc – were flashed briefly up onto the screen, to the delight of everyone who had not yet been to see them at the National Library of Australia. These few images generated so much talk and excitement, and it made me realise how extraordinary the scope of EMiC is, when an even wider and broader range of material will be made available in digital format, with some of it marked up in ways that will facilitate modes of analysis that we might not even have imagined yet. (Sadly I do not think the SSHRC-equivalent in Australia could be persuaded to spend this kind of money on an equivalent project to EMiC … but if and when that happy day comes, at least there’ll be a Canadian model of how to go about it!)

Now to the question of criteria, and what we need as editors of Canadian modernist texts:

Melissa’s and Zailig’s posts below cover much of the territory. I’ve already mentioned wanting a set of personographies and placeographies, so that we don’t duplicate each other’s labour, and so we’re alert to the people and places of interest to other projects besides our own. Other –ographies which the various projects have in common will emerge more gradually as our work goes on (little magazine-ographies? institution-ographies? coterie-ographies? following on from Vanessa’s post about Grand Central Station, allusion-ographies and/or theme-ographies?).

Thinking some way down the line, it would also be great to have POS-tagged texts that have been generated from finalised editions. It is always more interesting to work with corpora that are marked up with parts of speech than with plain text alone (given that grammatical + lexical analysis provides a much deeper level of analysis than just lexical analysis). This doesn’t mean that we should all begin tagging our text with parts of speech on top of TEI-tags, but it’s just to say that if there’s a way to provide a POS-tagged version of each edition down the line, that would provide some wonderful material for stylistic analysis, which is apropos given that breaches of stylistic and syntactic conventions are one of the reasons why modernist writing is so interesting to work with. After some hours spent unsuccessfully attempting to get the Stanford Tagger to work I can confidently say that I’m not yet at the point of being able to install a POS-tagger – only how to do linguistic analysis on the corpus that results – but I’ll keep at it.