It’s 22:00 (military, airport and Halifax time) on day three of week two, and I haven’t even begun one blog. Goodness, the rest of these TEMiC people are on the ball. Probably helps that they’re well balanced: today we talked about theoretical concepts and their corresponding examples, and were also provided with a generous offerings of clear and technical tips to put us at an advantage when we first embark on digital projects of our own. Additonally, we were encouraged to think about future-proofing our work not only for scholars and readers to come, but in terms of our own professional careers.
Approximately twelve hours ago, we dove into guidelines Zailig Pollock is currently developing for students working on the P.K. Page project, transcribing the work and encoding it with TEI, which in turn can be manipulated in various ways by XSLT to be viewed on the web through HTML. Though the practices he has adopted can not be applied to ever digitization endeavour, it was certainly heartening to see such a clear breakdown of practices. Since his guidelines are still being revised, they are not yet available, but they cover a system of colour coding, symbols, and ways of dealing with issues such as added lines, deleted lines, and illegibility that will ensure consistency in transcription.
The colour coding system demonstrates different versions of the text created by the author, including interventions authored at a later date, as well as the editorial decisions that have taken place. Earlier versions are in red, while final version in black so that this versioning is immediately apparent, while symbols also show where the author has made conscious changes, or simply mistakes which they revised themselves, over a period of time.
The advantage of having both the image of the document and the corresponding markup available online now becomes immediately apparent: by making explicit the choices of the editor, an unambiguous invitation for multiple valid readings is extended to the reader. The editor’s decisions should always be justified, but the ability to return to the text and change things globally, makes it easy to modify editorial decisions with ease.
Along with the decisions of the editor, the creative process of the original author becomes somewhat illuminated.The ability to pull up “incompletes”, or what have been judged to be mistakes on the part of the author, may seem somewhat absurd at first, but it does show off the places where potential for editorial intervention has taken place. The advantage of having both the image of the document and the corresponding markup available online now becomes immediately apparent: by making explicit the choices of the editor, an unambiguous invitation for multiple valid readings is extended to the reader. The editor’s decisions should always be justified, but the ability to return to the text and change things globally, makes it easy to modify editorial decisions with ease. One encoded, the user can pull different scenarios up out of the text, such as lists of emendations, regularizations, genetic views, and the authors own revisions. All of this goes to show the possibility that digitization affords us.
Next we spent some time with an example of P.K. Page’s work coded in oXygen. The basic aim of this kind of encoding is to outline a process, not simply describe the physical appearance of the page and essentially reproduce a transcriptions, but to get at the story behind the process through genetic editing.
Our guest speaker for the afternoon, Dr. Matt Huculak, an EMiC postdoctoral fellow, is concerned with finding and preserving find rare modernist periodicals, which he warns us are currently “dissolving in the archive– literally”. His talk, entitled “Blood on the Tracts: Preparing the Future Archive”, focused on the practicalities of creating the digital archive. It was incredibly pragmatic, (“be useful”, we were told) honest, (addressing the shifting demands of the profession in which we work) and stimulating (discussing the ability to manipulate our data in ways that will serve us no matter where we go in the world, or where the world goes through interdiciplinarity and connecting projects in complex environments).
Apparently, 80% of work in the digital archive is done in preparation. Here’s some quick and easy tips we learned today that will probably save us weeks of work in the future:
Scanning:
-figure out your equipment options, find what is available to you
-always scan as an uncompressed TIFF (avoid compressed formats like jpeg)
-never scan lower than 300dpi.
Backing Up:
be paranoid (so that you don’t have to run into a burning building to rescue your work from the freezer someday) and make sure that you have a backup plan in your workflow. In fact, have three:
-local disk
-backup disk
-cloud
File Naming:
-file naming is for your benefit, so make sure they are sortable according to what you will need.
-file names must be logical, use a heirarchy to name them.
-never put a space in your file name, and always use lower case letters
And finally, my favourite one…befriend a librarian! They know how things work. Also, they’re just cool people.
It’s also important to remember that you can’t do everything–you’re only human ( DHers are not “digital humans”), and you should only be doing work that serves to answer the question that you really want to ask.
Uncovering
Twenty-two years of living as a Canadian coupled with twelve years of public school education, including a mandatory Canadian History class, gave me little impression of the violence and turmoil that has played a part in shaping our country. It wasn’t until near the fourth year of my post-secondary degree that I began to read, write, or speak about it, and only recently that several specific events detailed in Right Hand Left Hand made their incidence clear to me. I’ve already been unpleasantly surprised several times by what I’ve come across in the past few months: accounts of anti-Semitism, artistic censorship, tear gassing, the murder of unemployed and evicted Canadians, to start. Though these events are certainly awful, it’s more so the realization that I’ve never heard of them before that disturbs me; Livesay’s documentary narrative has contributed to my continual understanding of Canadian history in a voice I can trust and connect with.
Recovering
Reading, researching, free writing, revising, and citing—creating a unified whole out of little pieces—is something I have done time and time again. And now, reverse it; rather than weaving research, class notes and ideas into something consistent, instead I begin with a cohesive entity and take it apart. Though books are presented as stable and authoritative by virtue of their materiality and publication, my task with Right Hand Left Hand is to document discrete elements and trace them, like taking a puzzle apart and trying to find the original tree each piece was carved from. For me, this both underscores the importance of citation and solidifies the importance of questioning every text; where it come from, how it was put together, presented, why, and by whom. As I go on to fill out MLA citations for each recorded element, I hope to work through these and gain a different appreciation for the construction of the novel.
Discovering
My main objective during our new bi-weekly EMiC meetings was, at first, to memorize the phrases I heard most frequently and look them up when I got home. But once in the habit of attending, I actually found the meetings very useful. Being informed about individual initiatives or developments allows me a greater understanding of the project as a whole, and observing the day-to-day workings of the project makes for natural integration into the way I go about my own work (for example, planning to digitize Dalhousie’s undergraduate English and Creative Writing journals to make them available on the department website). I anticipate that DHSI this summer, specifically a course in TEI, will also bring further opportunity for discovery and the broadening of my digital humanist horizons.
In 1928, Dorothy Livesay exclaimed, “her mind was as keen as mustard” of Margaret Ford, a young teacher at Glen Mawr school in Toronto. It feels as though she could have written the same thing about me, working here at Dalhousie in 2011. Although it was surely intended as a compliment for Ford, I can’t help but carry the metaphor too far (as I always seem to do) when applying it to my own situation. Mustard may be keen, but the idea of enthusiasm, energy and interest also has implications by omission. No mention of vision or clarity, for instance. Mustard certainly isn’t clear. Though a fine condiment, mustard doesn’t work well on its own. It has a distinct colour and flavour, true, it’s bright, but not to the taste of all. Many would claim it’s positively repulsive. Some are allergic. And at only five calories a teaspoon, it doesn’t have much substance.
After spending a little quality time with the other blog posts, I am feeling especially mustard-like today. Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that mustard is found in the form of a seed; a plant at the earliest stage of growth. It should also be noted that mustard is antibacterial, and very resilient. Not a bad place to start.
But I’m getting off track- let’s put the pungent mustard aside for a more academic flavour. The Editing Canadian Modernism seminar, where I first encountered Livesay’s name and poetry, transformed my education. Though I’d enjoyed each of my three years at Dalhousie with increasing intensity, my degree was ultimately inapplicable and unfocused. By the time I landed in Dean’s class I’d done a bit of everything: Renaissance and Medieval literature, American Gothic and African-American literature, Restoration Drama…the list went on. Until it hit Canadian literature, editing, or Modernism. That’s where it stopped. Psychologically scarred by the endless insipid required readings of Canadian authors trudged through in high school, I’d systematically avoided all courses with the name of my country attached to them. Conflating modernist writing with contemporary work (I know, forgive me), I had spurned the contemporary world as well. I inexplicably imagined it to be all glitter and fluff, something like the craft-time of literature. But Editing Canadian Modernism was the only seminar offered in the summer of 2010, and I’d heard many a friend scoff that courses were easier in the off-season. Obviously, these friends were not English majors. Even more obviously, they had never encountered the likes of an Editing Modernism seminar. The workload almost killed me, and I loved every minute of it. It was the most invigorating course I’ve taken at Dalhousie, and since then it’s been nothing but the modern and Canadian (before summer even came to a close I gobbled up a Canadian Literature course). Every essay I write tackles digitization, I fret about how faithful Kobo’s “The Sentimentalists” could be to Gaspereau’s, and even my parents know to link TEI tutorials to their emails if they actually want me to read them.
I started working with EMiC in September. At first I was content to chase down books or journals for scans and edits. But after a while, the fluctuating and occasional disputes (regarding contrast, discolouration, and the like) between the scanner and I became more than occasional. I began to spend my time hunting down publication information. Once January rolled around and my eyesight had deteriorated to around 20/40, I went back to give the scanner another chance. However, when I arrived to pick up the key, I learned that the entire room was closed off. The scanner appeared to have been slain by one of its very own. The special collections librarian informed me that the viewing window was twisted around completely while the camera lay on its side. I sent an email off to the EMiC office to notify them, and continued work on the spreadsheet. It wasn’t until our meeting two weeks later that the issue of the unworkable scanner was addressed. Any apparent horror accompanying the awareness that the downfall of a single piece of infrastructure had brought PhD, postdoctoral (and undergraduate) projects to a “grinding halt” was discussed with astonishing humour and composure. Technology fails. People fail. The important thing is that they don’t fail at the same time. Instantly the group began to spin ways around the problem, to continue their work, even to find great opportunity in the situation. I have never seen less of a “grinding halt” in my life, and this is precisely why I am confident that the Editing Modernism in Canada project will never fail.