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December 8, 2010
Diary of a Digital Edition: Part Three
A quick update on the progress of the Wilkinson archive/edition:
- I’m still waffling on whether this project is an archive or an edition. I’ll let you know when I’ve come to a firm decision, if I ever do.
- I finished the sorting of the unprocessed material in the Wilkinson collection at the Fisher archives today, and I’ll get to work scanning it in earnest imminently. I’ve been scanning as I sorted, but sporadically. I’m really grateful that the staff at Fisher let me do the sorting, as I now have a good mental picture of everything that’s in the archive, and I’ve gotten to see and read material that I’m not sure anyone outside of Anne Wilkinson’s family has ever seen. The sorting took longer than I would have liked, but that’s just a condition of being a grad student with other teaching and work commitments.
- Matt Huculak (and others, I’m sure) has done a great job of negotiating with the different institutions involved so that we have a file-naming system in place that hopefully satisfies everyone. My original spreadsheet kept me organized until the official system was in place, and it’s been easy enough to rename the files of material I’ve already scanned to conform to the new system. To give an example of how the naming works, I scanned an early essay of Wilkinson’s called “The Removal of Some Economic Causes of War.” The image file of the scan of the first page of this essay is named emic_ut_wilkinson_removal_00001.tiff, which in long form means “this is an EMiC-hosted digital project based on documents held at the University of Toronto in the Anne Wilkinson archive; the document that has been scanned is titled “Removal” etc. and this is the first page.” Did I get it right, Matt? The great thing about a text-based system like this is that I can look at the file names and know what the image file is without opening it. Things get a bit complicated when there are factors like documents that don’t have titles, or things that have multiple versions, but Matt and I will be working through those problems and coming up with good solutions as they crop up.
- I was already very attached to my external hard drive before I started work on the Wilkinson project, but we’re pretty inseparable now. I can only imagine how devastated I would be if my computer died and the scans weren’t backed up, so I’m being extra vigilant. I’m scanning to 300 dpi TIFF files, which aren’t super small (and there are a lot of them) so I’ve got a 1TB hard drive that I’m saving everything to.
- Although I still think that I’m probably only going to be able to deal with Wilkinson’s poetry if I want to get the project online as a “complete” entity before I graduate, I’m going to scan the entire contents of the physical archive. It only makes sense to do it now while I’ve got the time and access to the scanner, and I may end up being able to deal with more material than I currently think I can. Having everything scanned will also make it easier when I’m writing explanatory notes and want to refer to other aspects of Wilkinson’s writing than just the poetry. It’s a lot to scan—a daunting amount, actually, for one person—but a girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.
- I’m currently working on an article about the challenges of creating the Wilkinson digital edition/archive for the special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing that Dean, Meg, and Bart are editing. I’ll continue to use these “Diary” blog posts as a place to think through those problems and challenges, and hopefully, if the article turns out, you’ll get to read about the project in a more formalized form in ECW. As is my wont, I’ll be sure to talk about the practical challenges of doing this kind of project as a grad student, as the sole person working on the project, and as someone who is just becoming immersed in the field of digital humanities.
I’ll be back with an update once I’ve completed the majority of the scanning and I’m ready to move on to the next stage of the project. Stay tuned!
October 26, 2010
Diary of a Digital Edition: Part Two
It’s the Tuesday after the EMiC Conference on Editorial Problems, and I’m both happy and sad. Sad, because it’s over. Happy, because it was so wonderful to see everyone, share ideas, get inspired, and revel in the community spirit that so defines EMiC. Happy, because now that it’s over, I have time to think through the issues and ideas that came up this weekend and understand how they apply to my own project.
Firstly, I’ll point out the change in the title of this series of posts. The first post was titled “Diary of a Digital Archive;” this one is “Diary of a Digital Edition.” Why the change? Well, Zailig is why. As he so astutely differentiated on Saturday, what I’m doing with my work on Anne Wilkinson really is a digital edition. Yes, it is an edition that will include all of the archival source material that forms the basis of each poem, but that doesn’t make it an archive. For one, the scope of my project, and possibly copyright limitations, won’t allow me to digitally publish everything that’s in the Wilkinson fond—there’s one act of selection right there. For another, my edition will, like a scholarly print edition, make choices about what text to privilege as the clear-reading text and how these texts will be organized—another act of selection. Thirdly, my choices as editor will inform what I choose to privilege in explanatory notes and contextual essays, which is subjective and will have significant impact on a reader’s experience of Wilkinson’s work—another act of selection. Zailig—and please correct me if I’m wrong here, Zailig—seems to see our digital projects as being formed by three components, each of which builds on the other. The first is the archive: the physical papers that are held in a library or archive. The second is the database: the compiled digital files that are created from that archive. The third is the edition: the online organization, selection, and publication of those digital files to create a digital edition. So while my change in terminology may be small, its significance is big.
Another consideration that came out of this weekend was the incredible importance of project planning. So far, I can only see about two steps ahead: finishing the sorting of the unsorted material and writing the finding aid, and scanning all of the archival material I need. After hearing Emily talk about her genetic coding of Page, and Meagan talk about the second iteration of the Image Markup Tool, I sent Dean an email containing one very basic question: What do I do after the scanning is finished? Or, in an expanded form, how do I go about putting together a project plan that outlines everything I need to do, start to finish, so that I never get to a point where I don’t know what to do next? These are things that we’re going to be talking about at DEMiC in the digital editions course, and at the second week of the newly-revised TEMiC, but I guess I’m just a bit impatient. And as my plan starts coming together, I’ll be sure to share it with all of you.
To update you on what’s happening with the sorting of the unsorted archival material, my first day working on it was a bit of a surprise. I got to the library, prepared to be given specific instructions and warnings about not deviating from Fisher’s archival practice. What I actually got was a carrel, some file folders and boxes, and the instructions to have at it. Needless to say, I’ve asked for more specific instruction, and if you’ve got any reading about archiving that I might find useful, I’m taking suggestions.
I’ve also begun the organizational framework that I need to have in place before I start scanning (which I’m hoping to do in November). As Anne Dondertman at Fisher warned me in our first meeting, it’s essential to have a strong organizing and file-naming system in place before you start scanning, so that you save yourself a logistical headache later on. I’ve taken this to heart and come up with a spreadsheet that I’m going to use to keep track of my files.
This spreadsheet allows me to give each file a unique identifier, and includes all of the data I should need to keep track of and organize each file. I’m sure there are fields I haven’t though of yet, but I can easily add them later. The ID is unique for each file and tells me three things (taking the first entry as our example): which poem it is (01—the first poem in Wilkinson’s first collection, “Summer Acres”), which version of the poem it is (01—the version published in Counterpoint to Sleep, which Dean takes as his copy text in his edition of Wilkinson’s complete poems), and which file type it is (01—the image file; 02 indicates a transcribed file). I’ve also given each file a group ID, so that I can quickly visually distinguish all versions of a poem. I’ve also indicated which published edition the poem is from, if it’s from Wilkinson’s notebooks, or if it was published only in a periodical, and the location of the file in the archive. I’ve also indicated who has done the transcription (it’s probably always going to be me, but it’s better safe than sorry to keep track of this information), the location of the actual file (which will be somewhere both on my computer’s hard drive and on one or even two of my backup hard drives; I’ll hyperlink this information so that I can call up the files right from the spreadsheet), and keywords that I can use to search for poems. I think I’m also going to try to figure out a way provide information about each poem’s links with other parts of Wilkinson’s papers, like her letters and journals. This will be useful when it comes time for cross-referencing and writing explanatory notes.
One question that I posed at the end of my last post seems to have answered itself—how will I limit what I choose to include in my edition? As of right now, I’ve decided just to deal with the poems. It is a bounded and not-too-huge body of work to work with (there are 148 poems, most with multiple draft and published versions), and working on the poems, which I’m already really familiar with, will give me the experience I need to move on to other less-known aspects of Wilkinson’s work, like some exciting undiscovered writing that I’ve found in those unsorted boxes, and one day her letters and journals.
More importantly, this is a project that (I think) I can reasonably complete within the time frame of my doctorate. The issue of getting credit for unfinished work, and the institutional pressures to have complete and peer-reviewed publications on your CV for hiring and tenure, was a recurring issue this weekend. My way of working with and around this is to artificially delimit the bounds of my work so that I have something “complete” to show that is not in fact complete. The digital edition of Wilkinson’s poems is just one part of the larger edition of her complete works that I have planned, but I’ll frame it as a discrete entity for CV purposes. It would be nice if we didn’t have to do this kind of “creative accounting,” but hopefully continued discussion and critique of the issue (like that we engaged in this weekend) will start shifting what the institution values and how they (and we) view our work.
October 5, 2010
Diary of a Digital Archive: Part One
Dean and I thought that it might be useful for other people to read about the process of creating a digital archive from start to finish. I’ve just begun the process of getting started on an archive of the work of Anne Wilkinson, and I’ll continue sharing stories, problems, and helpful information about the project as it progresses. Here’s Part One.
Sometime in the spring of this year, I was sitting on a bench outside Trinity College, on the phone with Dean, when he proposed an idea that I thought was brilliant: I should edit a digital archive of the work of Anne Wilkinson. For those of you who don’t do much modernist poetry, Wilkinson was born in 1910, lived quite a privileged life in Rosedale (an upper-class neighbourhood of Toronto), published two collections of highly mythical, metaphorical, and allusive poetry (The Hangman Ties the Holly and Counterpoint to Sleep) and a children’s book (Swann and Daphne), was involved with The Tamarack Review and Here and Now, and died of cancer in 1961. Dean edited Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, which was published in 2003. I wrote my master’s thesis on her, and I think she’s fantastic, so of course I was thrilled with Dean’s idea. And then I promptly forgot about it.
A few months later—a comprehensive exam passed, a trip to Victoria for DEMiC over, an EMiC RAship complete—I’m finally beginning the archive in earnest. If you remember back to the list of things to think about when planning a digital archive (you can find it here), the most obvious first thing to do is figure out where the papers you want to work with are held, and talk to the librarians there. I very nervously sent an email to Anne Dondertman at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, and crossed my fingers that my hopes for the project wouldn’t be dashed by nay-saying archivists who didn’t want to hand their valuable papers over to a mere graduate student.
I met with Anne this morning, and it turns out that my fears were entirely unfounded—she has been nothing but lovely and incredibly enthusiastic. Fisher used to have a department devoted to digital special collections (you can check them out here), but presumably for lack of funding, it has been disbanded. As we all know, librarians and archivists are driven by the oft-conflicting impulses to both protect and make available their holdings; since she no longer has the resources to do them herself, Anne is happy to help me with my project which will make Wilkinson’s work available and keep the physical papers safe.
Not only has Fisher granted me unlimited use of their book2net camera to create the page images that will be the basis of the archive (and have waived the usual $0.50 per page fee), they’ve also given me access to three boxes of as-yet-unsorted material donated by Wilkinson’s family in the 1990s. Moreover, they’re training me in manuscript sorting so that I can organize them for inclusion with the rest of the Wilkinson papers, and they’re letting me write the finding aid. As Anne said to me today, “Isn’t it wonderful to be a graduate student?” Yes!
I’ve got three next steps to do/figure out simultaneously. One, I’m going to get trained in how to organize the manuscript material and write the finding aid and then sort those three boxes. Two, I need to figure out an effective numbering system for my scans before I begin creating digital images of the manuscript pages. As Anne emphasized to me, this step is crucial because being organized from the start will save me a lot of work and hassle down the road. Three, I need to decide if and how I’m going to limit what I choose to include in the archive. Will it be just poetry? Poetry and letters? Poetry, letters, and juvenalia? Poetry, letters, juvenalia, and journals? What I choose to include is mostly constrained by the need to limit the scope of the project—I’ve only got so much time to complete the archive, and I’ve also got a dissertation to write. Considering that I spent four unplanned hours in the archives this morning discovering all sorts of interesting things in those unsorted boxes (A play based on Maria Chadelaine! The real-world location of the tree from Swann and Daphne! Literary squabbles!), time management is definitely going to be a recurring topic of discussion in these posts.
I’ll be back with another post when the project has progressed a bit and I’ve got more issues and exciting discoveries to discuss. Stay tuned!
June 12, 2010
Digital Archives/Editions: What We Need to Do and What We Need to Know
At today’s EMiC wrap-up lunch, Dean asked us to take 10-15 minutes to write a post about what we need from TEMiC/DEMiC going forward in order to plan and implement our digital projects. What I’ve done–and bear with me, because this is maybe a bit more extensive than what Dean was thinking of–was try to come up with a list of everything we need to think about/know/do in order to create a digital archive or edition, from start to finish. I’m sure I’ve missed quite a lot, and this list is coming out of the project I’m planning (so I’m sure I’ve missed things that you need to consider for your project, or I’ve included things that you don’t need to), but it’s a place to start.
1) The documents we’ll be working with
–Where are they located?
–How many are there? (and therefore, how big the project is and how long it will take)
–Who holds control over access to them?
–How do I get access and permission to publish digitally?
2) Project planning
–What do I want this project to be/do?
–How do I make it be/do that digitally?
–How big is this going to be (#of documents)?
–How long is it going to take to create? What’s my timeline and schedule?
–What do I need to learn?
–What resources will I need?
i) education: TEI, CSS, XMLT, IMT, analytics
ii) time: assessing, scanning, coding, web design, tweaking
iii) tech: oXygen, web editors, computer, hosting site, tech support, OCR program, scanner
iv) money: permissions, hosting, scanning, labour, education, software
v) people: to teach, to work, to listen
–How can I access these resources?
i) At my university-people, physical, and monetary resources
ii) Through EMiC
iii) At DHSI
iv) Through funding agencies and grants
v) My own resources, research, and self-teaching
3) What to do with the documents
–scans that then get OCRed for TEI markup
–300-600 DPI tiff scans that then get marked up in SharedCanvas and used for display
4) Making them digital
–TEI markup for conversion to web format and use with analytic tools (according to a standard schema and limited tag set for EMiC projects)
–image markup for digital facsimiles
–ways of integrating/paralleling the two
5) Making them useable
–converting TEI to functional websites (CSS, XSLT etc.)
–to do this ourselves, or to hire someone?
–getting them online (hosting etc.)
–making them aesthetically pleasing—EMiC-standard web design
–searchability/ analytics/visualizations
6) Making them known
–promoting our projects to the wider community—English scholars and students, digital humanists, general readers
7) How to manage EMiC projects alongside our “official” Master’s and doctoral work
–time management
–working at institutions/with supervisors who are not EMiC affiliated
Now to you–what have I missed? What else do we need to know and do to turn our ideas into realities?
June 9, 2010
DHSI 2011: Fantasy Curriculum
Chris Doody and I were talking as we poked around the UVic bookstore today, and he was shooting off some great suggestions for things we’d love to see at DHSI next year. Alicia Fahey and I also had a similar conversation with Zailig last night around the kitchen table. Some of these ideas are specifically for EMiCites, but most would also be of interest to the wider DHSI community. Some are lessons, some are tools, but all of them would be useful. Here are the ones that we’ve been discussing, but this will hopefully be a list that grows during the course of the week:
1. Image Markup Tool 2.0: Tools and Tricks
2. a standardized EMiC set of TEI tags, a schema, and a basic CSS template so that we’re all speaking the same language and our final projects have the same aesthetic. Of course we’ll all need to customize things for our individual projects, but consistent appearance and functionality across projects would be great for us as editors and for the EMiC “brand.” Along with this, of course, would be lessons in how to use them!
3. From Code to Digital Edition: CSS and XSLT Stylesheets for TEI
4. Successful Grant Applications 101
5. Issues in Permissions and Copyright
Some of these ideas could become documents that are hosted in a central location that all EMiCites can access. As it keeps getting repeated in TEI Fundamentals, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, so the more we can all share information and tools, the easier all of our jobs get. Looking forward to hearing more ideas!
June 8, 2010
Bunnies: not just a logo
Even in my residence room, I’m surrounded by bunnies. They’re on my course kit for Text Encoding Fundamentals. They’re on my thumb drive. They’re on my ticket to the Wednesday night DHSI banquet. They’re on my campus map. They’re smile-inducing as they pop up everywhere in their silhouetted logo form, but they’re even more entertaining in person.
I’ve heard about the (in)famous UVic bunnies, but experiencing them firsthand is something else. Excuse my delighted squeals in the video: we don’t get too much wildlife in downtown Toronto other than the garbage-eating raccoons, which are definitely not on par with a swarm of baby bunnies. DHSI is a great blend of academic pursuits and fun; the bunnies, in their logo and furry forms, really embody the latter side of this week. Enjoy!