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August 14, 2011
Diary of a Digital Edition: Part Five [On Modularity]
Having been an English student for more years that I want to count (but if we’re keeping track, nine—yipes!—years at the university level), it’s sometimes easy to feel like I’ve got the basics of being an academic figured out. Much of the time, the learning I do is building on things I already know or refining techniques that I’ve long been practicing. My thinking often shifts and slides, or becomes more nuanced, but I think it would take a lot to completely transform the way I understand, say, Canadian modernism.
As a DH student, though, those statements absolutely do not apply. Every time I walk into a DH classroom—at DEMiC or at TEMiC, or even just in conversation with other DHers—it’s all I can do to keep up with the ways in which my thinking and practice are continually transforming themselves. The Wilkinson project is a case in point. I started out thinking that I’d be able to do a digital collection of all of her poems—after all, there are only about 150. Then I recognized that facsimiles on their own were inadequate, so the project grew exponentially when I took into account all of the versions—up to 30, for one poem—that I would have to scan, code, and narrativize to create a useful genetic edition. That project was clearly too big to even mentally conceive of right now, so I broke it down into smaller chunks: the 1951 edition first, then the 1955, then the 1968, and so on. Then I broke those chunks down into smaller parts, all the while keeping in view everything I was learning from the EMiC community about DH best practice as I made more and more specific choices about the edition.
As my three weeks in DH studies this summer have made very apparent to me, modularity is now the name of the game (and all credit for this recognition on my part goes to Meagan, Matt, Zailig, and Dean). The idea of modularity is important for my editorial practice, my future as an academic, and my mental health. I always have my ultimate goal—The Collected Works of Anne Wilkinson—in view, but what I used to think of as a small-ish project I now realize will probably take me a decade to completely finish. A more manageable chunk to start with is one module (of probably 10): a digital genetic/social-text edition of Counterpoint to Sleep, Wilkinson’s first collection. Even the first edition, which I’m aiming to have ready for final publication by the time I finish my PhD this time in 2013, can be broken down into smaller modules. First will come the unedited facsimiles. Then, the transcriptions. Then, the marked up facsimiles with their revision narratives and explanatory notes. Each of these modules can be published as soon as they are complete; they don’t represent my final goal for the edition, but they will certainly be useful to readers as I work on the next layer of information.
Modularity makes a lot of sense to me. Counterpoint can be published in the EMiC Commons and go on my CV before I go on the job market, which should help make possible my having the chance to keep working on the Wilkinson project as an academic. By breaking it down, I don’t have to try to mentally wrangle a huge and complex project. And if I hate how Counterpoint turns out, if someone has a really great criticism that I want to act on, if DH best practice changes significantly, or if the EMiC publication engine means that I can do things quite differently, I can completely re-theorize the next edition, The Hangman Ties the Holly, and do quite different things with it. This is especially important when it comes to peer review. If a modernist peer-review body gets created for our digital projects, I want to be able to design my editions so that they will be successfully peer reviewed, and I likely won’t know what those criteria are until after the first edition is done.
The idea of modularity also works quite well for edition and collection design. You’ll note that I’ve given up debating what to call the Wilkinson project, at least for the moment. The individual modules will be called editions, and the modules together will be called collections. I might change my mind later, but rest assured, this will never be called the Anne Wilkinson Arsenal (no offence to Price). I’ve mocked up the splash page for what the Wilkinson collection will look like when the five poetry editions are done.
The wireframed splash page for the Wilkinson Collected Poems
As you can see, it’s really just a bunch of boxes. And I can have as many, or as few, boxes as I currently have work complete. Those boxes can also become other things as the project gets bigger. In the end, they might say something like Poetry/ Prose/ Life-Writing/ Juvenilia/ Correspondence. They’re endlessly alterable and rearrange-able, which seems to be the core of my new editorial philosophy.
If I can sum up the sea-change that has happened in my thinking about digital editing this year, it’s a shift from thinking big and in terms of product to thinking small and in terms of process. If I didn’t learn anything else, that would be a huge lesson to have grasped. I did learn lots else—the importance of user testing and project design, how committed I am to foregrounding the social nature of texts, how much I love interface design, how much I believe that responsible editing means foregrounding my role as editor and the ways I intervene in Wilkinson’s texts—and I’m looking forward to learning lots more in my hopefully long career as a digital humanist. It’s been a big summer for Melissa as DHer.
There’s a lot I can’t do with the Wilkinson project while Dean, Matt, the PEI Islandora team, and all sorts of other EMiC people work together to get the EMiC Co-op and Commons up and running. It’s just not quite ready for me yet. But there’s a lot I can do: secure permissions for all of the versions of poems that aren’t in the Wilkinson fonds and scan them, create a more refined system to organize all of my files, start writing my editorial preface (very roughly, and mostly so that I don’t forget what I think is most important for readers to know about the edition and my editorial practice), and start narrativizing the revision process of the Wilkinson poems that undergo significant alteration. And (you’ve probably guessed what I’m going to say), I’ll try to make sure that however Islandora turns out, the work I do can be altered and shifted to work with it. It’s going to be a fun fall.
August 11, 2011
TEMiC – Week 2, Day 4: Energy and Inspiration
This morning’s work can easily be summarized with one word: energy. Our session began with Melissa Dalgleish’s discussion of her current work involving the digitization of the collections of Anne Wilkinson. As part of her discussion, Melissa gave a demonstration of an alpha version of her digital interface. I was not alone in being impressed with the elegant, clean, and extensible qualities of the few pages she demonstrated. She also addressed some of the challenges she faces, such as how she intends to label her project (since “archive” and “edition” seem to be misnomers, and “collection” and “collected” both seem insufficient), how she plans to prioritize and organize her data (at which point Melissa re-iterated her principle of modularity; that is, to work with smaller projects that can be incorporated into a larger architecture), and what to do with the vast raw material she has at her disposal.
From Melissa’s engaging talk, our group quickly branched out into a larger discussion of the issues and complexities surrounding digital humanities. Matt Huculak, Dean Irvine, and Zailig Pollock all contributed their vast expertise to the conversation. Zailig highlighted the opportunities stemming from digital representation of original manuscripts, and specifically offered kind words for Melissa’s project and her rationale. Matt stressed the importance of working with reproductions of your original files, while Dean encouraged us to re-consider how we manage our workflow, asking us to take a scientific approach and to offload raw data onto databases, rather than rely on our own machines for data storage. Extending this line of thinking, Dean talked about SourceForge and GitHub, two portals for dissemination of and collaboration with beta versions of software. He reminded us of the importance of sharing our groundwork, so that future scholars needn’t re-invent the wheel every time we begin a new markup project. He pointed to a number of resources, including Juxta, the Versioning Machine, and a proof-of-concept transparency viewer at MITH.
We also talked about the culture surrounding academic work and the spirit of collaboration that typifies the EMiC experience. During the conversation, we all agreed that there is very much a feeling of ‘stumbling around in the dark’ in regards to digital humanities scholarship, which could be remedied (or at least addressed) by further collaboration. However, we also acknowledged that many scholars involved in EMiC already have ample demands upon their time and resources. We brainstormed the possibility of some form of EMiC mentorship program, wherein an experienced scholar or researcher could be asked to mentor a new member of the EMiC community. In this scenario, new members would not only learn the skills already acquired by more senior EMiC community members, but also benefit from the comfort of knowing that it is alright (and normal!) not to start from a position of expertise; indeed, that EMiC’s membership comprises all sorts of skill levels and competencies.
Our afternoon was a lot more free-wheeling. The session opened with a discussion of the idea of co-authorship, and Deans’ sketches for a plan for establishing standards, again drawing upon the scientific model for inspiration. Zailig then talked specifically about his experiences on his various editorial projects, and how he operated as a member of an editorial board, and his views on the role of junior scholars on these boards. He then discussed some other editorial projects, citing what he felt worked well and what didn’t.
Dean then postulated the creation of an EMiC Editions in order to avoid the label of EMiC projects becoming “coterie publications.” He suggested implementing a peer-review process in order to lend more credence to the work produced by EMiC scholars. However, since over a hundred researchers are now involved in EMiC across Canada, he realizes that arms-length peer-review becomes difficult. He suggested that EMiC might need to cultivate relationships with other Modernist organizations, specifically in the United States (although I imagine he would extend his vision globally as well). This, he believes, will foster a greater level of respectability for EMiC, cultivate a common vocabulary for assessment, and create a de-centred model for digital humanities scholarship. In the process of introducing this idea, Dean talked a bit about the history of EMiC, how it has developed as a network and the ways it has evolved since its inception.
Finally, Dean talked about how to fund our research projects. He spoke at length about the idea of leveraging the resources already at our disposal, such as cultural capital and organizational affiliations, and how to use these (and many, many other) resources to succeed in securing funding.
We covered a lot of ground in the afternoon, and I found my mind bouncing from topic to topic. Not that I wasn’t interested in our conversation: in fact, the opposite was true! Again and again, I was jotting down all kinds of notes, half-formed ideas, twists, turns and re-imaginings I might want to incorporate into my own research – and all from the discussion that was generated today! It was fantastic to share the air with EMiC’s zeitgeist incarnate. Dean’s vitality is infectious, and the enthusiasm he imparts, coupled with Zailig’s immense experience and knowledge, and Matt’s incredible expertise, has me feeling inspired, energized, and eager to dive into my research!
Suffice to say, our morning energy carried through to the end of the day, and is likely to carry me forward as I make my way back to New Brunswick at the end of the week, and beyond…
August 9, 2011
Day 2, Week 2 of TEMiC: Project Planning and so on…
For day two of Textual Editing Modernism in Canada (TEMiC) our discussions focused on planning both Digital and Print editorial projects. Because we are all at different stages in our projects (or yet to be determined projects) we tried to approach the subject as broadly as possible, sharing and elaborating at points of interests for all. For the sake of simplicity I am going to break the day into three sections (excluding lunch, though our conversations at lunch are often fruitful) and provide a snapshot of what we covered at each point in the day.
Preface:
We had some exciting news to start off the day. Apparently, Zailig Pollock’s grandchild has been potty trained. All it took were a few M&M’s. Exciting, no?
Part 1: Sage Advice from Zailig Pollock
First, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Zailig Pollock whose advice has been invaluable to our discussions. His experience has provided me (and others, I am sure) with a unique and informed perspective on textual editing. My thinking has advanced exponentially in the past week and two days.
Our morning focused on the question “How should we approach editing projects?” And so we spent the morning creating a road map to begin to answer this question.
1. Choosing your institution: Its always important to find an institution with scholars who would be interested (or sympathetic) to your work. If you want to work on a digital editing project, you should try to find an institution with a potential supervisor/advisor who is interested in the Digital Humanities (DH). The same rule applies to Non-DH editing projects.
2. Choosing the author or group you would like to focus on: Try to choose an author or body of work you can justify editing, but also an author/work you are genuinely interested in.
3. Figure out where your material is located: It might be necessary to carry out extensive archival work. Being near (or far) from your material can have a dramatic impact on your work.
4. Permissions: Permissions can be tricky to acquire. Find out who holds the rights to the work, and be sure to consider issues such as privacy and ethics that may crop up.
5. Get to know your body of work: An editing project should be informed by the body of work and the work surrounding the body.
6. Theorizing your project: Decide on the methodolog(ies)y you wish to employ for your project. Deciding this early will help determine the work you do on the text and also shape the output.
After you theorize your project there are many different avenues you can take. The list above is a basic approach and of course there many variations.
Our conversations also stressed the importance of building realistic timelines and carefully considering the amount of work we take on. In addition, we discussed the complicated task of gaining permissions. Potentially stellar projects can be quashed if an editor is denied access or rights to the material. Many factors need to be considered by the editor(s) and those who hold the rights. Factors that can influence these issues include finances, competition, privacy, image control and more.
Part 2: Guest Speaker, Carole Gerson
In the afternoon we were visited by the esteemed and experienced Dr. Carole Gerson. Gerson’s work focuses primarily on early Canadian literature and Canadian book history. She has edited a number of volumes including Pauline Johnson: Paddling Her Own Canoe: The Times and Texts of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) (2000) and E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose (2002). Gerson’s talk consisted mainly of anecdotes. She focused not only on her successes as an editor, but also the issues she has faced over her career. These issues ranged from typos, reprints, and problems of design to lack of information access at crucial moments. A discussion of these issues was especially useful because we were able to see what we may be faced with in the future.
Part 3: Image Markup Tool
We spent the remainder of the afternoon looking at the work Zailig Pollock has been doing on The Digital Page with the Image Markup Tool (IMT). For those of you unfamiliar with the markup tool… IMT is a unique and simple tool which allows editors to focus (or tag) interesting points of a document. It is especially useful for annotating, marking up, and noting revisions in materials. One simply scans the image in and then uses IMT to tag the desired space (its a lot like tagging a friend in a photo on facebook). IMT is an extremely valuable and exciting tool because it allows the viewer to get as close to the document as possible without having to go to the archive (a trip we should encourage).
After the IMT tutorial we knocked off for the day. We covered a great deal of ground and I think we all have a better idea of the work we face and the options that are available to us as we proceed.
I’d like to cap this post with a photo of a small token I received from Zailig. The image below presents a worm-cast that he found in Prince Edward Island. What weird and relevant artefact!
“and many and many
come up atom by atom
in the worm-casts of Europe.”
– from “I’ve Tasted My Blood” by Milton Acorn
It seems I have concluded this post the way it has been prefaced…
August 8, 2011
The New Week Two: Project Planning at TEMiC, Day One
Week Two at TEMiC looks different this year than it did last and the year before. Rather than being divided between theory and practice, the two weeks at TEMiC are now divided between theory and project planning. During Week One, we plowed through the greatest hits of editorial theory in both text and digital contexts, heard about EMiC projects currently in progress (including work on P.K. Page, Martha Ostenso, and Marius Barbeau), and got a view of the inside of Library and Archives Canada from Catherine Hobbs. This week, we’re taking the theory we’ve learned and applying it to the projects we’re currently planning or working on as EMiC co-applicants and graduate fellows and as undergraduate and Masters students.
We’ve got a fascinating cross-section of participants this week. Today’s post is a run-down of who we are and what we’re working on. Each of us will post about Week Two at some point this week: what we’re learning, the challenges we’ve identified, what we’ve taken from the scholars (Dean Irvine, Carole Gerson, Zailig Pollock, Matt Huculak) who are here to share their experience and expertise in textual and digital editing, and what our projects look like to us on the other side of TEMiC 2011.
As we discussed our projects today, we began to identify the set of challenges and issues that were central to our individual projects but were widely applicable to most of our editorial work. Our goal by the end of the week is to have addressed most of these challenges and to have worked our way as a group toward individual project plans that we can build on when we leave.
Eric Schmaltz is entering his MA year at Brock University under the supervision of Gregory Betts. He is planning a print or digital edition of Milton Acorn and bill bissett’s unpublished 1963 collaboration I Want to Tell You Love as his Masters MRP. Issues & challenges: designing a project that can be completed in a year (with scope to grow afterward); representing a text for which appearance (both type and images) is central; situating a text that straddles the border between modernism and postmodernism.
Shannon Maguire is also entering the Brock MA under the supervision of Gregory Betts. She is planning to work with some of the lesser known publications of Anne Marriott as her MRP–either a Selected Poems edition, or an edition of a specific collection. Issues & challenges: deciding what material deserves renewed editorial attention; designing a project that can be completed in a year (with scope to grow afterward); working with archival material that is located at a distance; deciding what kind of doctoral project to pursue in conjunction with an ongoing editorial project; addressing issues of gender and recuperation in an editorial context.
Melissa Dalgleish is a fourth-year doctoral candidate at York working on the first edition of a larger digital Collected Works of Anne Wilkinson project. Issues & challenges: permissions & copyright; securing assistance and funding prior to becoming faculty; balancing doctoral and editorial work; working on a project that is developing alongside the as-yet incomplete tools that will be used to edit and publish it; addressing issues of gender and recuperation in an editorial context.
Kaarina Mikalson is an undergraduate student at Dalhousie working with Emily Ballantyne and Matt Huculak on the digitization of the French-Canadian periodical Le Nigog. Issues & challenges: thinking through the kinds of editorial work she would like to undertake on her own; representing a text for which appearance (both type and images) is central; editing in French.
Leslie Gallagher is an undergraduate student at Dalhousie who previously worked on Dorothy Livesay’s Right Hand, Left Hand and is now planning to work on Isabelle Patterson. Issues & challenges: deciding what material deserves renewed editorial attention; determining the importance of geography to an author’s work and how to represent that; working with an archive that is located at a distance.
Gene Kondusky is a second-year doctoral candidate at UNB working as a research assistant on Tony Tremblay’s The Selected Fred Cogswell: Critical and Creative, designing the site and interface. Issues & challenges: choosing a markup language (XHTML vs. TEI); defining the purpose of a project–teaching, reading, scholarship; effective interface design; accessibility.
Michael DiSanto is an associate professor at Algoma University working on the war-time letters and collected poems of George Whalley as part of a larger Whalley project that will encompass most of his published and unpublished works. Issues & challenges: permissions & copyright; securing funding; representing a widely varied career and body of work.
We also took a look at Zailig Pollock’s successful SSHRC application for the Digital Page project, and thought about the ways in which we should be conceiving of and representing our projects and project plans. None of us but Michael are at the stage of applying for SSRHC funding, as we’re still at the graduate level, but the kind of thinking required of a SSRHC is the same kind of thinking that will help us create detailed and organized project concepts and plans–and that’s our topic for tomorrow!
July 16, 2011
EMiC Funds Five New Graduate Fellows, One Postdoc
For 2011-12, EMiC has awarded five one-year graduate-student stipends ($12-15K) and one two-year ($63K) postdoctoral fellowship. For more comprehensive descriptions of these projects, see the newly revamped Projects page on the EMiC website. For bios of the stipend and fellowship recipients, please visit the About Us page of the website.
Vanessa Lent
EMiC Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2012-14
University of Alberta
Research supervisor: Paul Hjartarson
Project: Wilfred Watson, Cockrow and the Gulls
In January 2012, Vanessa will be leaving her post as EMiC Project Administrator for her new position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta. Her postdoctoral project proposes to engage in a much-needed reassessment of Wilfred Watson by creating a hybrid print/digital edition of Cockcrow and the Gulls (1962). This project will be nested within a larger scholarly initiative at the University of Alberta where Paul Hjartarson leads the joint digitization of the Wilfred Watson Fonds, held by the University of Alberta, and of the Sheila Watson Fonds, held by St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Her project adds to this work by initiating the digitization and analysis of Wilfred Watson’s dramatic works, a project that aligns with the first stage of the Wilfred Watson digitization initiative that runs from 1951 (when he was hired by as an English Professor by the U of A) to 1962, the year in which Cockcrow was mounted.
Kristin Fast
EMiC PhD Stipend, 2011-12
University of Alberta
Research supervisor: Paul Hjartarson
Project: Sheila Watson, A Genetic Study of Three Short Stories
This project is a genetic study of three short stories by Sheila Watson: “Brother Oedipus,” “The Black Farm,” and “Antigone.” The genetic study has a key role to play in the digital development of the Editing Sheila Watson and Editing Wilfred Watson projects underway at the University of Alberta. It will use the detailed knowledge of the archives built in the course of the genetic study as a driver for the digital implementation of the Watson projects online. This study is central to developing a nuanced understanding of the relationship between Sheila’s archive and Wilfred’s during this period. It will ensure that the EMiC UA team can design technological infrastructure to reflect the inter-related nature of these two archives; it will also guide design of an interface that makes these relationships visible to our users.
Melissa Dalgliesh
EMiC PhD Stipend, 2011-12
York University
Research supervisor: Stephen Cain
Project: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson: A Digital Edition
The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson: A Digital Edition will be an “archive of editions” of Wilkinson’s poetry. Rather than attempting to supplant or replace the existing editions of Wilkinson’s work, my edition seeks to encompass them; in so doing, the digital Complete Poems will illuminate the composition, transmission, and reception history of Wilkinson’s poetry, an ongoing process of which the published editions are material manifestations. The digital edition will present Wilkinson’s complete published and unpublished poems in all of their variant forms as marked-up images. The digital format of the Complete Poems will also allow readers to compare multiple versions of the same text so that they can examine the evolution of each work, in all of its variant forms, over time; readers will be able to select which versions of the text they choose to compare, providing them with control over their reading experience and selection of material for analysis. Alongside the variant and bibliographic markup, the poems will also include links to extensive explanatory notes. These notes will cross-link to other related poems, and as the collection expands, to Wilkinson’s letters, journals, juvenilia, and prose.
Reilly Yeo
EMiC MA Stipend, 2011-12
University of British Columbia
Supervisor: Mary Chapman
Project: Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, Selected Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Journalism: A Digital Edition
This project will produce a digital edition of works by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton that will push the edges of this EMiC’s digital initiatives by integrating innovative approaches and tools from both inside and outside the academy. This digital edition of works by Sui Sin Far will have three primary goals: (1) bridge academic and public conversations about Canadian modernism and multicultural contributions to Canadian literature by experimenting with a “duplex” website, with one half targeted to academics and one half targeted to the interested public, connected through multiple opportunities for dialogue and exchange; (2) explore ways to innovate on the interface design for digital editions in order to allow the reader/user to have more authority in designing his or her reading experience; (3) bring the digital edition into the 21st century by making it a rich multimedia experience. This project will help EMiC be at the forefront of the movement to change readers’ relationships to texts through their digitization, to make reading Canadian literature an interactive, immersive experience that can rival other, more pop‐cultural online experiences that dominate the bulk of what Canadians now do online.
Leah Ellingwood
EMiC MA Stipend
University of Victoria
Project: Wyndham Lewis, Tarr Resources
This project will contribute to the mandate of increasing the accessibility of Wyndham Lewis-related texts to those interested in unravelling his role in modernism. It will generate a Tarr Resources website with annotations of works relating to Tarr that are included in the C.J. Fox Collection housed at University of Victoria’s Special Collections. The Tarr Resources site will provide a description of longer works related to Tarr from the archive, including different editions and collections of criticism. In addition to summarizing each of the collection’s Tarr resources, this project will also involve digitization of materials relating to Tarr in the UVic Wyndham Lewis collection and works that are not already digitally available elsewhere. The Tarr Resources site is part of UVic’s Modernist Versions Project (MVP), a digital processing framework that will produce digital critical editions with searchable databases of variants. The 1918 and 1928 editions of Tarr are the first texts this project will digitize, and the resultant MVP Tarr editions will be invaluable and powerful digital tools for scholars interested in comparative analysis. The resources website will supplement the MVP as a starting point for critical inquiries on Tarr.
Jana Millar Usiskin
EMiC MA Stipend
University of Victoria
Supervisor: Stephen Ross
Project: Audrey Alexandra Brown, Collected Poems: A Digital Edition
This project will make Audrey Alexandra Brown’s work more accessible to modernist scholars and the general public by converting the published and unpublished poems to digital form. She published five volumes of verse and a prose diary in the 1930s and 1940s and her poems were published in newspapers across Canada. She won the Lorne Pierce medal in 1944 for “distinguished contributions to Canadian literature” as well as awards from the Royal Society of Canada (1948) and Canadian Women’s Press Club (1936). Given Brown’s success in the 1930s and 1940s, surprisingly little critical work on her poetry has been done, while other female writers such as Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Louise Morey Bowman, P.K. Page and Edna Jacques have enjoyed renewed scholarly interest. Working closely with Brown’s archive in the University of Victoria Special Collections, this project will enhance the digital form of her work with hypertext links to contextualize it. It will explore the social and political conditions that allowed Brown to achieve relative success in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the changes in those conditions that prevented her work from being recognized and discussed in subsequent academic discussion. In addition to the digitization of the poetry, this project will address three sets of questions. First, how did Brown see her own work in the context of the political and social conditions under which she wrote, and did changes in these conditions lead to Brown’s disappearance from literary publication? If so, how? Second, to what extent did Brown’s later poetry change with the Canadian literary landscape? Finally, how does her poetry submit to or transgress definitions of modernism and how can further study of her work contribute to the modernist project?
Congratulations to all of the award recipients. Many thanks to all of the students who submitted impressive application dossiers and supervisors who wrote letters of support for these highly competitive awards. We hope that prospective graduate fellows and postdocs will submit applications next year and that the website will provide more information on how graduate students at partner institutions can take advantage of EMiC’s training program.
Special thanks to the Fellowships and Stipends committee chair, Paul Hjartarson, and committee members, Alan Filewod and Neil Besner, for their work in adjudicating this year’s competition. We all look forward to hearing more about these projects at future EMiC events and reading about them on the EMiC community blog.
July 2, 2011
Two Steps Toward Digital Editions of Wyndham Lewis’s Canadian Works
Wyndham Lewis—the Canadian-born modernist painter, writer, critic, pamphleteer, etc.—is undergoing something of a renaissance at the moment. Two examples should suffice to make the point: Lewis’s work is the highlight of a major Vorticist exhibition at the Tate Britain this summer; and his first (and, to my mind, best) novel, Tarr, has recently been issued in the Oxford World’s Classics. That this renewed attention should be focused on his earliest work, however, is indicative of a lamentable tendency to concentrate on Lewis’s early activities as an avant-garde provocateur and to ignore a fascinating period of his later career—one of central interest to the study of Canadian modernism: the time he spent in Canada during the second world war.
Lewis spent the entirety of the period 1939-1945 in North America, living mostly in Toronto and Windsor. He published one book in Canada—Anglosaxony: A League That Works (Ryerson Press, 1941)—and planned another, which he published on his return to England, America and Cosmic Man (1948). Both books demonstrate an important shift in Lewis’s political thought, from the strongly-advocated nationalism of the early to mid thirties towards an equally adamant espousal of internationalism. In Anglosaxony, Lewis praises the “flexible,” “non-absolutist,” and “rootless” character of North American citizenship (29). He develops this in America and Cosmic Man, where he describes North America as “a laboratory for the manufacture of Cosmic Man” (201-2), the “perfectly eclectic, non-national, internationally-minded creature” (203) he takes as his ideal citizen.
Neither of these works has received the attention it deserves. The case is particularly acute for Anglosaxony, which Thomas Dilworth describes in The Talented Intruder as “virtually unobtainable” (159). The book was printed in a tiny edition in 1941, which sold so poorly that the majority of copies were pulped. Lewis produced a revised edition in 1941, in which he attempted to reflect the rapidly-changing political situation. Because of the poor sales of the first edition, however, it was never printed (the manuscript is available in PDF format, however, on the website of the Wyndham Lewis Society.)
It was with a view to remedying this situation that I attended DEMiC at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in early June. I participated in the Text Encoding Fundamentals class, where my goals were (1) to learn the TEI encoding procedures by which I could make the first edition of Anglosaxony available in a digital edition and (2) to learn more advanced coding techniques that would allow for the production of an edition reflecting Lewis’s unpublished revisions to this first edition. With much help from my instructors and classmates, I now have the encoding knowledge that will eventually allow the reader of a digital Anglosaxony to view the text in its original 1941 edition, to see it as it would have appeared in a revised second edition, or to see a version that registers the differences between the two editions.
Anglosaxony and America and Cosmic Man demonstrate the extent to which Lewis was influenced by his period of residence in North America—their celebration of multiculturalism and internationalism result directly from is observations of life in Canada and the United States. But they do not register the enormous influence that Lewis exerted on Canada—in particular, on the development of Canadian Modernism. Scholarship is only beginning to explore the full scope of this influence. In The Talented Intruder, Thomas Dilworth provocatively claims, “[b]y crossing the Atlantic in 1939, Lewis brought Canada into the history of literary modernism” (157). In his forthcoming Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations, Gregory Betts of Brock University devotes a chapter to what he calls the “Canadian Vorticists,” a community of Lewis-inspired Canadian modernists that includes such influential figures as Marshall McLuhan, Sheila Watson, and Wilfred Watson.
I began to sketch the outlines of Lewis’s relationship with Canada in an article for The Walrus in October 2010. A few weeks ago—in late June—I pursued my research by presenting on an EMiC-sponsored panel devoted to Sheila Watson and Marshall McLuhan at the 2011 convention of the Media Ecology Association at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. This panel, organized by Paul Hjartarson and Kristin Fast of U of A, gave me an opportunity to advance my argument that Sheila Watson (who wrote her dissertation on Lewis) and Marshall McLuhan (a friend of Lewis’s in Windsor who drew heavily on Lewis’s work) should be regarded as Lewis’s “ideal readers”: that they were not merely influenced by Lewis, but were able to extract the best from his style and ideas, and thus to turn him into an influence on Canadian letters and society.
The conference also put me in touch with a network of scholars who are actively exploring the importance of Lewis’s Canadian works to the development of Canadian Modernism. A fascinating paper by Elena Lamberti of the University of Bologna discussed the links between Lewis’s America and Cosmic Man and McLuhan’s 1954 Counterblast (itself a response to Lewis’s 1914 Blast.) At another EMiC-sponsored panel on the relationship between McLuhan and Wilfred Watson (who once began a dramatic adaptation of Lewis’s The Apes of God), Gregory Betts of Brock dealt extensively with America and Cosmic Man and presented a number of illuminating connections with McLuhan’s ideas. In a post-conference workshop, I was able to discuss my work with Linda Morra of Bishop’s, Paul Tiessen of Wilfred Laurier, and Wayne DeFehr of the University of Alberta—the other presenters at the EMiC-sponsored panels—who provided me with numerous leads to pursue in my work on the influence of Lewis’s Canadian texts. I’m pleased to say that I will be collaborating with this group of scholars on a book that will explore the network of influence between Sheila Watson, Wilfred Watson, and Marshall McLuhan in the context of Canadian Modernism. I’m even more pleased to say that this group has understood the crucial role of Wyndham Lewis in this network, and that the book will contribute to promoting understanding of this fascinating relationship.
It was a wonderfully productive June, in which I took major steps in my research: first learning the fundamentals of text encoding at DEMiC that will allow me to make Anglosaxony available to the growing community of scholars interested in Lewis’s Canadian works; and second attending the EMiC-sponsored panels at the Media Ecology Association’s 2011 conference, and discussing my ideas with prominent members of this very community. I owe enormous thanks to the Editing Modernism in Canada project for both.
Adam Hammond, University of Toronto
June 18, 2011
Embarking on Love: Producing a Digital Edition of “I want to tell you love”
My recent participation at DHSI and DEMiC was not only preparation for my upcoming MA studies, but an attempt to throw myself into a group of interested scholars, programmers, humanists and other like-minded individuals. I attended the week’s events as part of the EMiC project and I am entirely grateful that the EMiCites have taken me into their fold. Together we shared an extraordinary week of intensive learning and community building.
The focus of my academic work rests on an unpublished manuscript by bill bissett and Milton Acorn entitled I want to tell you love. The aim is to analyze and eventually produce a digital scholarly edition of the text. DHSI was the perfect place for me to begin collecting the tools and skills I need to complete the task. I enrolled in “TEI Fundamentals and their Application” which was taught by Julia Flanders, Doug Knox, and Melanie Chernyk. They were a dream to learn from. Flanders et al. taught clearly and overall the course was fun and informative. The trio made it easy for me to connect to a field with which I had no previous knowledge. Kudos to them! After the first day, my thinking of text and reading had completely changed. Not only am I now thinking about these ideas in a traditional analytical sense, but now I am considering how these ideas can be connected and then translated into a digital environment.
Admittedly, the first couple days of TEI were frustrating. This isn’t because its an incredibly difficult language to learn. It is because in the beginning stages you can’t see what you’re working towards. For a beginner like me, I had no idea what my mark-up might look like by the end. As I’m working I want to be able to ensure that I want to tell you love, as an edition, will be as aesthetically appealing as it is intellectually appealing. In order to see the end product of your encoding the text has to go through several other layers, layers which were not really addressed in our week’s agenda. A brief tutorial in CSS basics alleviated some of this anxiety, but I still possess a knowledge gap. Of course I realize that one week to learn TEI is probably not enough, other courses and more advanced learning is required. This is a responsibility I will own up to. I’m not disappointed to say that I’ll probably have to return to DHSI to build on and complete the skill set I desire.
The benefits of the TEI course do trump the drawbacks. On the other side, TEI is incredibly useful because of its ability to digitally connect interesting points, names, dates, themes, idiosyncrasies and other important pieces of information. This will be especially useful to my own project. For example, I want to tell you love is arguably a witness to the early stages of bissett’s unique orthography (an aspect of bissett’s poetry that has been of particular interest to bissett scholars for decades). One of the arguments I have developed from this point is that the manuscript marks bissett’s transition from Modernist modes of writing to Post-Modernist. His movement from a more conventional orthography to a personal, phonetic orthography is an evidence of this transition. TEI will allow me to track and take note of this transition as it occurs in the manuscript. In addition, TEI is not only a way of rendering data in a new, relevant format, but it frees the data to newer forms of analyses which consequently can open new doors for scholarship. TEI’s potential to develop new scholarship is especially important when addressing someone like Milton Acorn, co-author of I want to tell you love, whose legacy is sadly receiving less and less attention. It was at this moment of realization that EMiC’s mandate became clear. TEI and other digital tools can work to revive interest in Modernists and their writing. That’s incredible, yes?
All in all, DEMiC was a tremendous experience. The tools and skills I gained are invaluable. They will be built upon and put to good use.
June 12, 2011
Digital Editions @ DHSI: 2011 Version
This past week, I had the opportunity to teach a course on digital editions at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute with Matt Bouchard and Alan Stanley. It was my first time as an instructor at DHSI, and I was filled with nervous excitement on Monday morning. What I wanted to do with the course this year was to offer a holistic approach to building a digital edition that challenged the participants to think about their projects not only as a whole, but also as iterative and modular. The two themes that I tried to highlight were the importance of project management and the user-experience design. We talked quite a bit about planning and project management, workflow, information architecture, and for the first time, we worked with the alpha version of the Islandora editing toolkit.
All in all, I think the course went very well! Below are some of the highlights. I’ve included my classroom slides and handouts in the hopes that these materials will be useful for those who were unable to attend the course and who may be beginning to think about building a digital edition, and for anyone who is interested in what we were up to this week!
Day 1 Overview
On the first day we began with an overview of print editions, and talked a little bit about some of the benefits of text-based versus image-based digital editions. The class came up with quite a substantial list of the elements that comprise a print edition, including:
timlines/chronology
glossary
static pages
page numbers
running headers
marginalia
provenance
book cover
dust jacket
reviews
bindings
bibliographies
biographies (author, editor)
table of contents
footnotes
endnotes
critical introduction
appendices (contextual, editorial)
errata strips
publisher information
typography/font
stitching/glue
whitespace, gutters
watermark
end papers
title pages
section pages
copyright
images (photos, illustrations)
dedications
acknowledgments
I encouraged students to think about these elements as they began to to conceptualize their digital editions. Many or all of these features might need to be included in a digital edition, and the challenge was to think about how we might represent them digitally. I also gave a very brief introduction to some of the current tools and platforms available for building digital editions. In the afternoon, we worked through a “Site Audit” of some existing digital editions, and considered what worked (and what didn’t) in the digital editions that are currently available.
Slides for day 1:
Day 2 Overview
On day two, we focused on project management. Borrowing heavily from Jeremy Bogg‘s work, I talked about the importance of thinking of the project in terms of different phases. Then I introduced the ever-so-important “Scope Document”, and asked the students to spend some time conceptualizing their project(s) as a whole. I suggested that before beginning to implement (read: code) a digital project, one must consider the project from multiple perspectives and have a rock-solid scope document and technical / feature specification in place. Building a project in phases allows for an iterative process that keeps the project moving forward, without the too-often paralysis that faces digital humanities projects that suffer from scope creep (or, more often, scope explosion). Instead of starting to code an entire collected works, I argued, try starting with a small subset that can serve as a robust working model for the project as whole.
I provided a handout with a long list of questions to ask at each stage of the project. These questions are meant to serve as a guide for project planning (and, if you so choose, a grant application).
Phase 1: Strategy / Project Objectives
- What kind of edition are you creating? Why?
- Why is your project important?
- What’s already available?
- Who is your audience?
- What are the limitations of your project?
- What approach or methodology will the project follow?
- What are the major dates or milestones for key points?
- How will you determine whether your project has been successful?
Phase 2: Scope
- What features would you like to include in your edition?
- What tools and technologies will you use (Islandora/Drupal, Image Markup Tool, Simile Timeline, JUXTA)?
- What kinds of questions can you ask of your data using text analysis and data visualizations? (This will impact the platform and technology you choose)
- Do you have technical skills or will you be working with a developer?
- Who will be involved in the project, and what will their responsibilities be?
- What specific components are needed on the site? What technologies? Static HTML? Need dynamic content? Need a CMS? Need a custom web application or interactive features?
- What tools would you like your project to be compatible with? Is there a specific data format you will need to use?
Phase 3: Content
- Create a sitemap that will determine how content is categorized and contained within the overall structure of the site
- Inventory of content: what will you put on each page? In each section?
- What kinds of materials are you using? General description? File formats?
- What is the relationship among different pages, images, texts, tags, categories, etc?
- How will users interact with your content? (Search, manipulation, view?)
Phase 4: Design
- What do you want to communicate?
- What do you want users to remember?
- How do you want users to respond?
- What are some “benchmark” editions that might influence your design process? (Site Audit)
- What do you like about these designs? Why?
Slides for day 2:
Day 3 Overview
On Wednesday, we moved into some hands-on technical work, and had the opportunity to begin using the Islandora editing system for the first time. Islandora is an editing workflow that integrates a Fedora Commons backend with a Drupal front-end. EMiC is working in partnership with the great folks at UPEI to create a fully-functional editing toolkit that allows users to pull materials from the commons (housed in the Fedora repository) and edit them in a web-based environment. Alan Stanley was an invaluable asset, and the testing and editing process would not have run as smoothly as it did without his help on the ground. It seemed like every time we found a bug, Alan was able to step in and fix it almost immediately.
Here are a few screenshots of the system:
The login screen and home menu:
MODS metadata editing for a Book object:
Object Description page:
TEI Editor:
Image Markup Tool Integration:
The participants in the digital editions class showed remarkable patience and understanding working with a tool that, at its core, is still in alpha phase (pre-alpha, even). Thanks to everyone in the class for serving as the first user-testers for the Islandora editing suite. At times, I’m sure you felt more like bug hunters than editors, but please know that your feedback will be invaluable in the development of the EMiC/Islandora editing workflow. Kudos!
Day 4 Overview
Once we’d had a chance to work with some of the technical aspects of editing a digital edition, we took a step back and talked a bit about design. I argued that design is visual rhetoric, and that as editors, it is as important to think about aesthetics as it is to consider content. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in building digital editions, form and content are inseparable. Good design, built with the user-experience in mind, often means the difference between a usable and unusable tool. On the afternoon of day four, participants worked on various aspects of their projects, depending on what they deemed most important to them.
Slides for Day 4
Day 5 Overview
On Friday morning, each person in the class gave a brief presentation of their projects and what they learned this during the course. I think Yoshiko’s slide captures the week quite aptly:
Over the course of the week, the students worked through site audits and project scope documents, design specifications, user personas, and wireframes for their digital projects. We talked a lot about designing for the user experience and the importance of bringing together form and content. “Modularity” was certainly the word for the week, and I hope that the students left with a solid understanding of all of the various pieces (and people) that are part of the process of creating a digital edition. Thanks to all of the participants for your generosity, patience, engagement, and brilliance. I had a fabulous week, and I hope you did too!
June 7, 2011
DHSI=>DEMiC=>Digital Editions
At our DEMiC 2011 orientation session, I had a chance to welcome 30 EMiC participants to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria. Or, rather, 31 including myself. A long month of EMiCites. This is our largest contingent so far, and DHSI itself has grown to host over 200 participants attending 10 different courses. The EMiC community is represented at DEMiC by 13 partner institutions. EMiC has people enrolled in 7 of the 10 offered courses. But what really makes DEMiC 2011 different from previous years is that EMiC is offering its own DHSI course.
If you’re already dizzied by the acronyms, this is how I parse them: DHSI is the institute in its entirety, and DEMiC is our project’s digital training initiative that allows our participants to take any of the institute’s course offerings. With the introduction of EMiC’s own course, DEMiC has transformed itself. EMiC’s Digital Editions course draws upon the specializations of multiple DHSI course offerings, from Text Encoding Fundamentals to Issues in Large Project Management.
The course has been in the making for roughly six years, beginning with the pilot course in editing and publishing that Meagan and I first offered at Dalhousie in 2006-07. This course was not offered as part of my home department’s standard curriculum, which actually proved advantageous because it gave us the freedom to develop an experiential-learning class without harbouring anxieties about how to make the work of editing in print and digital media align with a traditional literary-studies environment. In other words, we started to develop a new kind of pedagogy for the university classroom in line with the kinds of training that takes place at digital-humanities workshops, seminars, and institutes. To put it even more plainly: we wanted to import pieces of DHSI to the Maritimes. That was pre-EMiC.
With EMiC’s start-up in 2008, we began flying out faculty, students, and postdocs to DHSI. After two years (2009, 2010) of taking various DH courses at introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels, we consulted with the EMiC participants to initiate the process of designing our own DHSI course. Meagan and I worked together on the curriculum, and Matt Huculak consulted with both of us as he surveyed the various options available to us to serve as an interface and repository for the production of EMiC digital editions at DHSI. After six months of trial and error, weekly skype meetings with about a dozen different collaborators, three different servers, and two virtual machines, we installed Islandora with its book ingest solution pack. That’s what we’re testing out in Digital Editions, keeping detailed logs of error messages and bugs.
I would like to thank the many people and institutional partners who have come together to make possible the first version of Digital Editions. This course is the product of an extensive collaborative network: Mark Leggott’s Islandora team at the University of Prince Edward Island (Alan Stanley, Alexander O’Neill, Kirsta Stapelfeldt, Joe Veladium, and Donald Moses), Susan Brown’s CWRCers at the University of Alberta (Peter Binkley, Mariana Paredes, and Jeff Antoniuk), Paul Hjartarson’s EMiC group at the UofA (Harvey Quamen and Matt Bouchard), EMiC postdoc Meagan Timney at UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, Image Markup Tool developer Martin Holmes at UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre, and EMiC postdoc Matt Huculak at Dalhousie.
As I write this at the back of a computer lab at UVic, fifteen EMiC participants enrolled in Digital Editions are listening to Meagan, Matt Bouchard, and Alan walk them through the Islandora workflow, filling out MODS forms, testing out the book ingest script with automated OCR, and editing transcriptions in the web-based TEI editor. Some people are waiting patiently for the server to process their ingested texts. We’re witnessing the first stages of EMiC digital editions of manifestos and magazines, poems and novels, letters and short stories. We ingested texts by Crawley, Livesay, Garner, Smart, Page, Scott, Sui Sin Far, Watson, and Wilkinson. And we’re working alongside an international community, too: our newly born repository is also populated with editions of D.G. Rossetti, Marianne Moore, Tato Riviera, Hope Mirrlees, Catherine Sedgwick, and James Joyce.
This afternoon the server at UPEI processed 20 different texts. Hello world. Welcome to Day 1 of the EMiC Commons.
May 3, 2011
report from an RA: Laurier Poetry Series
Since summer 2010, i have worked as an editorial assistant (RA) to Neil Besner for the Eli Mandel and F.R. Scott volumes of the Laurier Poetry Series. From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel, selected with an introduction by Peter Webb and an afterword by Andrew Stubbs, was published in 2010; Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground: The Poetry of F.R. Scott, selected with an introduction by Laura Moss and an afterword by George Elliott Clarke, is forthcoming.
My previous experience as a copy editor was useful in this Editing Modernism in Canada position. With Neil, i copy-edited and proofread the tables of contents, introductions, afterwords, and bibliographies, and poetry for the two volumes. New experiences and challenges included poetry editing, with the importance of paying attention to visual elements and spacing and of proofreading against original versions; research at the Eli Mandel fonds at the University of Manitoba archives; and correspondence with editors, contributors, and the publisher. I found my visits to the archives to be especially interesting. I read and scanned early versions of Mandel’s poems and made the satisfying discoveries, anticipated by Peter, of early and varied versions of important poems like the “Minotaur Poems”; of a missing title for “signs” in Mandel’s Out of Place; and of lines from “The Meaning of the I CHING” that were removed by editors and later returned by Mandel. It was new to me not to have the last (or nearly-last) word on style: Rob Kohlmeier at Wilfrid Laurier University Press gave me a good and gracious introduction to working with a book publisher and its house style. As an MA student thinking about an editing/academic career after graduation, i was privileged to work with such thoughtful and creative scholars/editors as Neil, Peter, Laura, Andrew, and George, who have been supportive and appreciative of my work and interested in my personal and professional development.
It has been a pleasure to work as an RA with EMiC and the Laurier Poetry Series, and i am grateful for the opportunity that the EMiC and University of Winnipeg grants have afforded me to work on this project. The year has passed productively and too quickly, but i expect that this experience will lead to promising academic and editing/publishing opportunities in the coming years.