DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2009
Volume 3 Number 2
Volume 3 Number 2
It’s For Sale, So It Must Be Finished: Digital Projects in the Scholarly Publishing World
Abstract
Since the early 1990s, theorizing in the digital humanities has often celebrated open-endedness and incompletion as inherent qualities of digital work. But a scholarly publisher undertaking preparation and sale of digital objects cannot altogether dispense with traditional notions of deadlines and completion if those publications are to enter the dual marketplaces of peer review and institutional purchase. The Electronic Imprint of the University of Virginia Press was funded in 2001 with the goal of bringing born-digital scholarly projects under the aegis of the same review and marketing system that applies to books. In this article I describe how we defined the criteria for “done-ness” in creating two very different projects, a born-digital edition of Herman Melville’s Typee manuscript and a conversion of the letterpress Papers of George Washington into a digital edition. Our experience suggests that it is possible to categorize different genres of digital creations based on the extent to which intrinsic criteria for “done-ness” can be applied to them, and that decisions about completeness are always subject to extrinsic factors as well, such as budgetary constraints and the pressures created by competition and the evolution of standards.
Some History of Terms
Viewed from the perspective of someone who works for a university press, the
semantics of the term “done” as applied to digital objects is rather curious.
From our point of view, it's generally a good thing for a scholarly publication to be
“done”: review copies can be sent out, books can be shipped to distributors,
and budgets perhaps even met. Traditional publication in the scholarly publishing
world has always meant the implicit guarantee that a work is the end product of a
rigorous process of peer review, revision, copyediting, design, and proofreading
shared institutionally by author, press boards, outside scholars, and in-house staff.
When a book or journal issue is “done” it is a source of pride and satisfaction
for everyone concerned.
The case seems to be different with digital objects. The claim that a digital project
or publication is “done” may be met with suspicion. What do you mean, your
Web-thing is finished? Since it's nonlinear, how do you know where it starts or ends?
Won't there always be more features or links you can add? If your Web-thing is so
much like an old-fashioned codex book that you can call it “done”, does it
really belong online in the first place? This suspicion has a history. Theoretical
discussion of projects in the digital humanities has, since the 1990s, suffered from
semantic slippage between two related but nonidentical pairs of contradictory terms:
on the one hand, “open” versus “closed”; on the other hand, “complete”
versus “incomplete” (or “unfinished” versus “done”, etc.). The
tendency has been to merge these two sets into a single pair, then to valorize the
first pair of terms and to demonize the second.
One of the more polished articles on Wikipedia these days, ironically, is on the
topic “Unfinished Work”; it discusses incomplete works in
various domains from literature and music through architecture to software. On the
article's discussion page, the first thing we find is some amused perplexity about
the label's applicability to the very source it appears in ['Unfinished Work' 2007]:
It is a familiar conundrum about the nature of digital texts. Obviously, a formally
defined text like a sonnet can be recognized as complete or incomplete; it's the
difference between a well-wrought urn and a pot whose clay is still wet. But can a
nonlinear, extensible, text ever be said to be finished? Is it by definition
unfinished, or is the opposition “finished/unfinished” just plain inapplicable
to open-ended texts?
These are theoretical questions I'm not in a position to answer, but I would submit
that early in the 1990s the postmodern admiration of the “open-ended” at the
expense of the “closed” somehow got turned into a celebration of the
“unfinished” and a suspicion of the “done,” and that this transmutation
may have been one of the things that delayed the entrance of digital scholarship into
the traditional system of peer-reviewed academic publication.
Consider these assertions from George Landow and Paul Delany's 1991 essay “Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the
Art”:
A clever reader might object that even in print the Encyclopedia Britannica is always incomplete: like any reference work, it is constantly being updated and reissued. So when Landow revises this particular passage for his 1992 book Hypertext, he makes the claim even more radical by making a single change to the second sentence to replace the encyclopedia with a work of literature:Particularly inapplicable [to hypertext] are the notions of textual “completion” and of a “finished” product. Hypertext materials are by definition open-ended, expandable, and incomplete. If one put a work conventionally considered complete, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, into a hypertext format, it would immediately become “incomplete.” [Landow and Delany 1991, 13]
Landow is now claiming that even a recognizably closed, well-wrought modernist text becomes both open and unfinished when put online. And he ends his 1992 discussion of completion by citing Derrida to the effect that “a form of textuality that goes beyond print ‘forces us to extend...the dominant notion of a “text” ’,” so that it “is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces” [Landow 1992, 59].Hypertextual materials, which by definition are open-ended, expandable, and incomplete call such notions into question. If one put a work conventionally considered complete, such as Ulysses, into a hypertext format, it would immediately become “incomplete.” [Landow 1992, 59]
Julia Flanders has observed in a memorable phrase that the digital humanities have
sometimes suffered from “a culture of the perpetual
prototype”
[Flanders 2007], and identified some plausible economic and institutional causes. To them I
think we can add the theoretical conflation of the digital with
différance. After all, what was the postmodern project if not a
cult of the perpetual prototype?
Rotunda: A Scholarly Digital Imprint
My organization, the Electronic Imprint of the University of Virginia Press, was
established in 2001 to test the proposition that instances of digital scholarship
can be bounded, completed, and presented for review, sale, and
academic consumption in much the way journals and monographs had been for decades. We
were grant funded, with support from the University and the Mellon Foundation awarded
to a proposal co-written by the Press and John Unsworth, who was then head of the
Institute for Advanced
Technology (IATH) at Virginia. We became fully staffed in late 2002, and two
years later released our first publication, a born-digital edition of Dolley
Madison's correspondence, under our new imprint name of “Rotunda.” Since then we
have expanded to a total of seven publications in two separate collections:
nineteenth-century literature and culture, and the American Founding Era. Our main
focus for the next few years will be creating fully-featured digital versions of the
papers of American presidents and other Founding Era figures that began as
multivolume (and often still ongoing) print editions, joining our Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (PGWDE), which was released in February 2007.
The underlying data format of all of our Rotunda publications is XML, tagged
according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), plus accompanying
digitized graphical material. Unlike many other university presses with digital
projects, we outsource none of our technical work except for graphic Web design; our
markup specifications, stylesheets for file transformation, and programming for Web
delivery (mostly coded in XQuery using MarkLogic Server as the back-end platform) are all done in-house by several
programmers and technical editors.
Born-digital Rotunda publications go through the same steps that our books go
through: approval by a Press committee and then the Press Board after reports from
external reviewers; signing of a contract complete with royalty agreements; sharing
of “review copies” (in the form of password access) with librarians and academic
reviewers. Digital editions such as PGWDE that are based
on existing print series are produced in close collaboration with the scholarly
communities (historians and documentary editors) who create and use the letterpress
volumes. Clearly all parties to our process of publication and sale are implicitly
agreeing to bracket the theoretical issue of when or whether a digital work is ever
“done” by applying a socioeconomic definition: it is “done” when the
Press is prepared to offer it for purchase and customers are prepared to buy it.
I turn now to two very dissimilar examples of our publications — PGWDE and an edition of Herman Melville's Typee manuscript — and discuss the decisions we made about what we could
or couldn't include in the finished work; when we counted each as “done” for
initial release; and to what extent we consider the published release genuinely
complete or part of a work still in progress.
Melville's Typee: A Fluid-Text Edition
Figure 2.
Typee splash pageJohn Bryant's edition of a portion of Herman Melville's novel Typee was first envisioned and prototyped years before Rotunda came into
existence. Bryant has been editing Melville's texts for two decades, and has long
felt that any critical edition of a text that survives in more than a single version
needs to be faithful to its evolutionary history; it should be what he calls a
“fluid-text” edition. Because a fluid-text edition needs to capture a dynamic
process, a computer-based format is a natural fit, and he began imagining one for
Melville as early as the 1980s (personal communication).
The textual history of Typee is fairly complicated. The
only surviving manuscript fragment covers about three chapters of the published
novel. It contains a multitude of cancellations, erasures, and additions by Melville,
both in ink from the time of first composition and in pencil from later stages of
revision and proofreading Figure 3.
We know that Melville made changes in proof before the first English
edition was issued, and that the first American edition contained still more changes,
some requested by Melville, others made by the publisher probably without the
author's assent. Bryant's goal for a digital fluid-text edition was to capture all of
these stages and to allow the reader to follow the sequence of composition and the
editor's narrative reconstruction of that sequence, zooming in and out to any point
in manuscript time and space during the entire period from initial composition
through the published editions.
Figure 3.
Part of a Typee manuscript page, showing
Melville's typical deletions and insertions; the circled x above
the fourth line is keyed to a separate insertion leaf.Development of the Edition
Bryant was not himself a programmer or XML specialist, but he did have ideas about
what a computer edition might look like, and created detailed storyboards before
any actual programming work began. Although these were necessarily static, they
used frame- and button-like boxes to suggest how a screen presentation might
respond dynamically to reader choices (Figure 4). In
1998 he was named an IATH Visting Fellow
and received technical assistance to create a first proof-of-concept prototype of
the edition [Bryant 2000], which translated the storyboards into
standard HTML frames (Figure 5).
Figure 4.
An early storyboard by John Bryant illustrating a possible interface and
layout for the Typee edition
Figure 5.
A first prototype of the Typee edition produced
in 2000 by IATH at the University of VirginiaIn late 2003 we received Bryant's “manuscript” of the edition, consisting of
Microsoft Word and PageMaker files containing manuscript transcriptions flagged
with hundreds of “revision sites” and for each separate revision site a
“revision sequence” and a “revision narrative.” We licensed from the
New York Public Library the rights to reproduce their full-color photographs of
the entire manuscript. Our goals at this point were (1) to convert all
transcription and commentary to TEI-XML, and (2) to design an environment that
could deliver combinations of text and image to realize as closely as possible the
author's intentions for his edition. Our own finished rendering of the original
concept [Bryant 2006] would look like this:
Figure 6.
Default view of the Rotunda version of Typee,
with a manuscript page image in the top frame and a bitmapped typographic
transcription in the lower one (the current state of HTML made browser
rendering impractical). Readers can choose to display different combinations of
image and transcription state in either frame. JavaScript controls allow upper
and lower frames to scroll in unison.
Figure 7.
The lower frame now shows a textual transcription of the same lines rendered
in HTML, where color-coding represents “revision sites” from different
stages of compositional history.
Figure 8.
Clicking on any highlighted revision site brings up a window containing
Bryant's reconstruction of the revision sequence and a narrative explanation of
it.Once we had our basic page display working, all that remained was to code a search
page and add the editorial introductions before declaring the edition “done”
and releasing it in March 2006.
Three months later we added an enhancement, our major one to date, an XML-based
version of the entire first British edition of the novel, which the University of
Virginia Library digitized for us from a copy in their holdings. We created for it
a display interface combining a transcription of the text with images (Figure 9).
Figure 9.
The added first British edition includes an XML-based transcription of the
text plus optionally viewable page images from the printed text.Is Our Typee Done?
Neither Bryant nor the Press conceived of the Typee
edition as an open-ended project. The editor's work was done once he had finished
all the manuscript transcription, identification of revision sites, exposition of
revision sequences and narratives, and the introductory editorial essay. Our work
was done once we had translated the editor's vision into a fully functional
edition that coordinated photographic facsimiles with several transcription
formats, and that hyperlinked all “revision sites” with their editorial
expansions. The March 2006 edition was lacking one intended feature, the first
British edition, owing to extrinsic factors (our library's digitization schedule).
Once that was added, Typee was for practical purposes
stable and complete.
Nevertheless, we were aware of the potential for improvements and enhancements,
some more immediately practicable than others:
- We could generate RDF metadata files in the format used by the Collex tool created by Jerry McGann and his NINES team. In July 2007 we did this, so that the base view of each manuscript page exists as an indexed object in Collex, along with the editorial introduction and the publication home page.
- The full-text search needs improvements to return hits on supplied text and to properly handle word tokens containing XML tags (for example: savage<add>ry</add>). The first item is on our to-do list; the second is on hold until our MarkLogic software adds the ability to ignore selected elements for the purpose of word tokenization.[1]
More radically still, it is conceivable that all of our underlying XML markup and
presentation might be entirely revised if John Bryant were to incorporate the
proposals for temporal encoding in genetic digital editions that Elena Pierazzo
has advanced [Pierazzo 2007], as both her tagging strategy and
theoretical approach vary significantly from his own. A revision of that magnitude
would be analogous to issuing a second edition of a book that differs markedly
from the original because it has responded to new evidence and/or arguments. All
scholarly and scientific publications are potentially imperfect and thus
“incomplete” to the extent that later work can call them into question,
but it would be an equivocation to say that they are therefore always unfinished
in a formal sense.
The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition
Figure 10.
PGWDE splash page in July 2007The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition
[Crackel 2007] is a very different project, one initiated in 2004 by
the Press in collaboration with the editorial staff of the Papers of George Washington (also
based at the University of Virginia), and partially funded by a grant from Mount
Vernon. Our mission was to produce an online version of the fifty-two volumes then in
print of our letterpress Papers of George Washington
[Jackson 1976], the authoritative scholarly edition of the documentary
legacy of the first president. Owing to the size and complexity of the letterpress
edition, [2] its adaptation to a fully-featured online format offered us as many design
and programming challenges as a born-digital project like Typee. We needed to establish an appropriate XML schema and encoding
specifications, decide on what structural and semantic tagging to do and what
metadata to add, figure out how much regularization of inconsistencies in the
letterpress edition we could accomplish, and design a Web environment for display,
navigation, and searching of the edition usable by advanced scholars and beginning
students alike.
For the editorial staffs of The Papers of George Washington and UVa Press, the
criteria for regarding a letterpress volume as complete have been well established
since the project began in the 1970s:
- all known documents from the period covered by the volume are included or referenced
- all document transcriptions are complete and have been checked for accuracy against manuscript facsimiles
- all possible identifications of persons have been made and included in the endnotes
- all other annotation and editorial introductions are written
- the manuscript has been copyedited
- page proofs have been checked and used to produce a back-of-the-book index.
Goals for the PGWDE
Determining where we could add value to the print edition required a preliminary
analysis of what makes a scholarly edition valuable in the first place. In such an
edition, the basic textual unit is the single document, always accompanied at a
minimum by bibliographical information and usually by editorial annotation, and
sometimes by translations, enclosed documents, or other ancillary material.
(Diaries and journals are a special case: depending on how chronologically
structured they are, the basic textual unit may be the single-day entry, the
single-month entry, or a longer narrative.) Besides the original text and
editorial material, documents contain metadata, cross-references, abbreviations
and other special features that are represented using a variety of editorial and
typographical conventions, as highlighted in the facsimile of the original
letterpress version of a letter from William Livingston to George Washington
(shown below). Beyond the document level, most
volumes contain scholarly apparatuses (lists of abbreviations and bibliographic
expansions of short-title references), editorial and historical introductions, and
a detailed index of all proper names and hundreds of topic categories. The
translation of all of these print conventions into their TEI-XML equivalents is
what must undergird a digital edition. (Our final XML encoding of the Livingston
letter may be seen in the appendix.)
Figure 11.
A page from the Revolutionary War Series of the print edition of The Papers of George Washington. Many, but by no means
all, of the features in a documentary edition that need to be captured in the
underlying XML representation are typographically distinct; determining the
optimal mixture of automated and human tagging is one of the challenges of
converting a legacy edition.Our initial goals for the digital edition were:
- to provide document-by-document display (or, for diaries, month-by-month or day-by-day, as appropriate) closely resembling that of the letterpress source;
- to offer a wide variety of means for navigating into the documents: through full-text search; through a hyperlinked consolidated index based on the back-of-the-book print indexes; via tables of contents similar to those in the print edition; and by chronology (in order to collect all documents and diary entries for a given date, for example);
- to use as much tagged information as possible for display, linking, and refinement of searching;
- to create a genuinely new edition incorporating corrections to the print edition submitted by the Papers of George Washington staff, along with consolidated and regularized lists of names and titles that had varied from volume to volume in the letterpress edition.
Work on PGWDE began in fall of 2004; a beta version
for public display was ready by October 2006; and we formally released a published
version for sale in February 2007. Screen captures of the online version of the
Livingston letter illustrate how we realized some of our goals (Figure 12, Figure 13).
Compasses are used to navigate the four hierarchies identifed in goal 2. A
“breadcrumb trail” allows quick navigation up to any higher node of the
current tree. Hyperlinks or mouseovers provide dynamic equivalents of their print
counterparts in ways that are familiar to Web users: endnote superscripts connect
to their notes via bidirectional linking; abbreviations and short-title references
(indicated by dotted underlining) are expanded when the user mouses over the
abbreviated text; and cross-references to other documents in PGWDE are active links.
Figure 12.
Top of the Livingston letter in a browser view.
Figure 13.
Bottom of the Livingston letter.Along with the document navigation and display, we programmed a search page that
combines full-text search with optional filtering based on author, recipient,
and/or date range; and we added an online version of the consolidated index that
resembles a back-of-the-book index except that document titles and dates replace
page numbers and are, of course, hyperlinked.
We had scheduled official release of PGWDE for
President's Day — February 19, 2007. By a month or so ahead of this deadline, we
realized that every last cleanup task could not be completed by that date. Online
publication meant we could do a triage: fix first the things that affect the most
documents, or that are most obvious to the average reader; fix afterwards problems
or errors limited to single documents, or ones that would be noticed only by a
specialist (for example, an incorrect birth year for a minor historical figure).
Corrections of bad links and minor formatting glitches continued for about a month
after the February 19 release. Corrections to errors in transcriptions or
annotations, as identified by Papers of George Washington staff, have been
ongoing. So, too, have further regularization and consolidation: since first
publication, PGW staff have provided us with fully normalized lists of names of
all document authors and recipients that we have used to update the document
metadata, and with a corrected and up-to-date list of repository abbreviations and
expansions based on MARC
codes that we have used to globally update the XML volume files.
Planned Enhancements
So is PGWDE done? Yes and no. It is a stable release
version with some remaining imperfections, but there's a lot more we plan to do
with it, even apart from adding content as we digitize new volumes after they
appear in print. We've recently met with the PGW staff to agree on a list of
priorities for enhancement. The tasks fall into three general categories:
- Optimization of existing features. Examples: improving search speed and index retrieval; rewriting the search parser to make it more Google-like and to include more boolean operators.
- New features. Add an “advanced search” page that will allow users to search by document features or language, for example. We'll add full-text searching on the index. Farther down the road may be “keeping up with the Joneses” enhancements, like enabling the user to save a personal workspace containing bookmarked documents and search result sets as the Works of Jonathan Edwards Online at Yale has done.
- Features required by aggregating PGWDE into the larger Founding Era collection. Over the next year we will be adding editions of the Adams Family Papers, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, and The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. In order to build an extensible framework, we have already begun a thorough rewrite of our delivery code and encoding specifications so that our publication system will scale gracefully as more publications are added.
So we don't really expect ever to be able to say more than that PGWDE is done — for now.
A Few Conclusions: Generalizing from the Rotunda Experience
Ask any developer out there if a program is ever finished and they'll tell you, “No, of course not, I still need to...”. But, ask any developer out there if the program is almost finished and, assuming that the development cycle has progressed far enough along, their answer will invariably be, “Yes, all I have to do is...”. They may even quantify it: “80% complete”. Ask them a couple of days, weeks, months (depending on the magnitude of the project) later and you will get a similar response, but with a different percentage, say 90%. And so forth…but never 100%. (“Never Finished; or Zeno's Paradox as an Analog to Software Development”)
It is entirely possible to define “done-ness” for computer software in such a
way that no instantiation of a software project can ever satisfy the definition. For
example, suppose we stipulate that: “A program is complete and can be distributed
when it (1) satisfies all initial design requirements, (2) is known to run 100%
bug-free under all potential conditions of use, and (3) incorporates
state-of-the-art programming techniques and tools at the time of distribution to
offer the user an optimal mix of powerful features and ease of use.” The second
and third criteria entail that none but the simplest programs could ever count as
complete. To claim “my program is bug-free because I have found no bugs in it”
is argumentum ad ignorantiam; that you haven't found any doesn't
mean they aren't there. And criterion 3 turns done-ness into a Red Queen's race,
since the state of the art is constantly advancing, and at release time most complex
software projects are already “belated” relative to the cutting edge of
technology. To the extent that digital publications count as software projects, they
too would fail ever to count as finished under such a definition.
The adjective “simplest” in the preceding paragraph hints at a way around the
paradox. If my goal is to write a “hello world” program in Perl and I respond
with the one-line program “
print "Hello World!\n";
” I can confidently say I'm done. If my task is to write a new operating system,
it's another matter. As a rule, the more complex a task is,
the less susceptible it is of being judged finished by any set of formal criteria.
Contrast these two assignments:
- Create a crop circle in the shape of a simple circle with a diameter of 40 meters.
- Create a crop circle representing the coastline of Great Britain at 1/10000 scale.
The digital publications that we have worked on in Rotunda have tended to resemble
the fractal project more than the simple circle. With PGWDE, for example, the “coastline” we needed to reproduce was, like
that of Britain, a pre-existing and well-defined object, the fifty-two volumes of the
print edition. To have omitted a volume would have been as clear a sign of
incompleteness as leaving Cornwall out of the crop circle. But decisions about the
richness of our feature set were very much a matter of “how far to trace”, and
in the end were dictated by our available time and skill (and budget). If our
experience is representative, deciding when to call a digital project “done”
usually requires a process of negotiation between intrinsic criteria and external
factors.
Intrinsic Criteria
Intrinsic criteria are formalist: they assume that the completeness of an object
derives from its inner properties alone, without reference to any social or other
external context. In the following table there is a continuum from objects like a
monograph (or a lyric poem) that can be judged to possess organic unity, to ones
like a collaborative virtual world that cannot. It is no accident that the latter
are the ones felt to be characteristically “digital”.
| Category | Object has definable boundaries? | Object has satisfied its design goals? | Print world example | Digital example | Is it “done”? |
| 1 | yes | yes | monograph, journal article | monograph-like object, online article | yes |
| 2 | yes | no | preprint, “rough cuts” | beta or 0.9 release | not yet |
| 3 | no | yes (for current stage) | encyclopedia; any work issued in discrete series | same as for print world | yes (for now) |
| 4 | no | no | ? ? | open-ended wiki, collaborative blog or social space, virtual world, etc. | no (by definition) |
Table 1.
“Done” as a function of intrinsic criteriaCategory 1 objects are the most familiar in scholarly publishing, hence the most
fully integrated into the tenure-and-review system. Bryant's Typee essentially falls into this category. Probably owing to the
influence of online publishing, Category 2 objects are becoming more familiar:
online preprints are accredited scholarly communications in a growing number of
disciplines, and cutting-edge book publishers like O'Reilly with their Rough Cuts series of
early-access PDF are adopting a “versioned” model of publication.
Category 3 objects are also familiar from the print world, where they represent
the one kind of open-endedness that does not upset traditional notions about
scholarly authority. The Oxford English Dictionary is
a good example. It has been supplemented, transformed, and extended many times
since the first fascicles were issued in 1884. Yet each discrete stage of
publication was accepted by the academic community as authoritative for its
moment. It is no accident that this category has translated easily to digital
format: the only essential difference between the print and online OED is that the latter is updated far more often.
Category 4 is the one to which the term “done” seems the most inapplicable.
Its characteristic objects are more like processes than products, and it is
difficult to think of genuine analogues in the print world outside the realm of
experimental literature of the Oulipo variety. A publication like
Wikipedia can perhaps be seen as a special case of Category 3 in
which discrete stages succeed each other with extreme rapidity, but a virtual
world like Second Life exists in such constant motion that it requires something akin to calculus
for adequate description. Unsurprisingly, Category 4 is the form of digital
creation least amenable to naturalization in the academic reward system or the
scholarly publishing marketplace.
Extrinsic Factors
For a scholarly publisher, intrinsic criteria of done-ness are important but are
often trumped by extrinsic factors. The judgement that a book manuscript is done
and ready for press requires an agreement among author, acquiring editor, external
reviewers, and the manuscript editorial and production departments that is based
largely on its formal content. But completely extrinsic factors such as the desire
to include the book in a particular season's list will often lead a press to veto
an author's wish to continue tinkering with a manuscript. Similarly, an author may
not consider a monograph on Chinese art formally complete without the inclusion of
several dozen full-page color reproductions on glossy inserts, but a publisher may
omit them for the wholly extrinsic reason that the profit-and-loss sheet doesn't
budget for them. Once a book is in print, decisions about its subsequent
“done-ness” (i.e., whether to reprint, revise, issue in paperback, etc.)
are based almost entirely on economic factors. In the case of digital
publications, I will suggest, extrinsic factors become important at an earlier
stage and are proportionately more important at every stage of composition and
publication.
The following list of extrinsic factors is not meant to be exhaustive; they are
the ones that have been most prominent in Rotunda's experience.
-
Economic constraints
Two maxims apply: (1) if a digital publication doesn't sell, it's
“done”; (2) if the projected cost of upgrade exceeds projected
revenue, it's “done”
. (For freely distributed projects, substitute “when no more grant
funding or volunteer time is available, it's done.”)
-
Competition
Maxim: when your competition is adding features to its product, they
can render your finished product “incomplete.”
In the print world, this phenomenon is familiar in textbook and
reference publishing. In the digital world, it is absolutely pervasive. No
online publication, free or for sale, can afford long-term stasis when the
peer publications it is compared with are adding bells and whistles (a list
that would include, as of 2008, things like Ajax-powered form fields, tag
clusters, user reviews and personal workspaces, page previews on mouseover,
selectable themes or “skins” . . .) In the prestige economy as in the
market economy, keeping up with the Joneses is not optional.
-
Standards evolution
Maxim: even absent competition, the evolution of standards can make a
finished project “incomplete.”
This is primarily a matter of adhering to best practices, though not
entirely free from the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses factor. Certainly if your
academic discipline adopts a new format for metadata, or your institution
adds a requirement that Web publications meet accessibility guidelines, your
projects need to be revised for conformity. In other cases, it may be a
matter of pride to demonstrate that a project has upgraded to the latest
standard, for example by converting archival XML from TEI P4 to P5
compliance, or by following the very latest W3C recommendation for XHTML or
CSS.
-
Aggregation
Maxim: a stand-alone publication will probably become
“incomplete” when it is aggregated with other material. In
Rotunda's experience, it is inevitable that the user interface and back-end
coding one develops for a single digital project will need to be
substantially revised once a second project is added and meant to
interoperate with the first. (As a case in point, it would require major
effort to get our first publication, the Dolley Madison Digital Edition, seamlessly integrated with PGWDE, as
the back-end programming and underlying XML data formats of the two
publications are quite different.)
-
Technological change
Maxim: new technology will make your publication
“incomplete”
. This goes almost without saying. The evolution of hardware,
operating systems, programming languages, and Web standards will eventually
make any online publication obsolete. Failure to migrate a digital object
periodically as technical conditions require is the analogue of allowing a
published book to go out of print. (In fact it's worse: it's like printing
the book on high-acid-content paper with ink that fades on exposure to
light, and then letting it go out of print.)
A Necessary Synthesis
Whether you are a publisher or the editor of an open-access publication, allowing
extrinsic factors to influence your decision about whether a digital project is
done is in no way an admission of defeat or an abdication of responsibility. It
is, in fact, the only way to avoid the form of Zeno's paradox whimsically
propounded in the epigraph to this section. The progress of knowledge in the arts
and sciences is continuous, but in order for it to happen at all, scholarly
discourse must be distributed in the form of discrete objects that can be shared,
read or viewed, responded to, assimilated, quoted, disputed, and revised. In the
marketplace of ideas, it's less important how you decide when your piece is done
than that you do decide, label it and put it on display, and prepare
to haggle with others over its value.
Appendix: XML markup of a sample Washington letter
(Formatting has been applied for convenience in reading; carriage returns are not
introduced within mixed-content elements in the original files.)
<div1 xml:id="Rev13d180" type="doc"> <FGEA:mapData id="GEWN-03-13-02-0189"> <bibl> <title>From William Livingston, 13 January 1778</title> <author>Livingston, William</author> <name type="recip">GW</name> <date when="1778-01-13"/> </bibl> <FGEA:Author>Livingston, William</FGEA:Author> <FGEA:Recipient>GW</FGEA:Recipient> <FGEA:mapDates> <FGEA:searchRange from="1778-01-13" to="1778-01-13"/> <FGEA:dayRange from="1778-01-13" to="1778-01-13"/> </FGEA:mapDates> <FGEA:pageRange from="Rev13p227" to="Rev13p227"/> </FGEA:mapData> <pb n="Rev13p227"/> <head>From William Livingston</head> <div2 type="docbody"> <opener> <salute>Sir</salute> <dateline>Morris Town [N.J.] <date when="1778-01-13">13th Jany 177[8]<ptr n="1" target="Rev13d180n1"/></date></dateline> </opener> <p>Upon frequent Complaints that Capt. Kennedy's Residence at his Farm was injurious to the State, & occasioned great Clamours from the People in This Neighbourhood, the Council ordered his Attendance on the Board — they at the same time desired a Gentleman near the Spot, to procure what Affidavits he could respecting Captn Kennedy's Conduct — He sent us by return of the Express three Affidavits with Copies of which I take the Liberty of troubling you; Capt. Kennedy denies the Accusations sworne against him, & refers to a Parole he signed to your Excellency in this Town. The Board would therefore be glad to know the Nature of that Parole (of which he has no Copy) & whether you consider him as a Prisoner of War, since Your Excellency has taken Paroles from persons professedly Subjects of this State & not pretending to any Connextions with Britain, meerly to prevent their being detrimental to this State as disaffected Subjects — If he is considered as a Prisoner we suppose him exchangeable & in the mean time it would probably be best to have him removed at a greater Distance from the Enemy's Lines — If his Parole was taken only to prevent mischief & in Aid of the magestrate whose Authority was then very inadequate to suppress Disaffection we shall consider him as altogether within the Civil Line<ptr n="2" target="Rev13d180n2"/> — I have the Honor to be With great Respect your Excellys Most Hum: Servt</p> <closer> <signed>Wil: Livingston</signed> </closer> <ps> <p>P.S. I am sorry that Troup has been suffered to return to the Enemy after being so clearly convicted of being a Spy. I have this moment received Intelligence that a party is engaged to way-lay me between this place & my house, of which I have reason to think Troup is at the bottom.<ptr n="3" target="Rev13d180n3"/></p> </ps> </div2> <div2 type="docback"> <note type="source" xml:id="Rev13d180sn"> <p> <bibl n="docSource"> <rs type="dType"> <abbr>LS</abbr> </rs> <rs type="dWhere"> <ref target="GWPrep37" type="repository">DLC:GW</ref> </rs> </bibl> The postscript is in Livingston's writing.</p> </note> <note n="1" type="fn" xml:id="Rev13d180n1"> <p>Livingston wrote '1777.'</p> </note> <note n="2" type="fn" xml:id="Rev13d180n2"> <p>The New Jersey council of safety had agreed on 10 Jan. 'that a Warrant do issue for apprehending and bringing before the Board Archibald Kennedy Esqr, that an Enquiry be made into his past conduct, and that the Oaths of Government may be tendered to him.' On 13 Jan., Kennedy appeared before the council, which after considering 'sundry Affidavits' resolved that 'a letter be written to Genl Washington respecting the nature of Captn Kennedy's Parole & that copies of the Affidavits relative to his conduct be also transmitted with the Same' (<ref target="PGWst1204" type="short-title"> <hi rend="italic">N.J. Council of Safety Minutes</hi></ref>, 186–88). Copies of the affidavits of Nathaniel Camp, Jr., Robert Neil, and Robert Nicholls, all dated 12 Jan., are in <ref target="GWPrep37" type="repository">DLC:GW</ref>. See also <ref type="document" target="Rev13d236">GW's letter to Kennedy of 20 January</ref>.</p> </note> <note n="3" type="fn" xml:id="Rev13d180n3"> <p>See <ref target="Rev13d242" type="document">GW's first letter to Livingston of 20 January</ref>.</p> </note> </div2> </div1>
Notes
[1] In fact
we could get around this software limitation by adding TEI tagging to
provide the regularized word tokens for indexing, and adjusting our
processing code accordingly. The decision not to do so was based on a
cost-benefit analysis, feeling that the amount of time it would require
outweighed the added utility in the context of this particular
publication.
[2]
The size and scope of the project can be illustrated with a few statistics:
- 52 printed volumes (originally published between 1976 and 2004) totalling ca. 30,000 printed pages, rekeyboarded and tagged as TEI-XML
- ca. 18,500 separate documents from 29,000 original sources (much of Washington's official correspondence survives in multiple drafts and copies)
- entries from Washington's diaries covering 560 months, with 6800 separate daily entries
- 2930 unique document authors and 1900 unique recipients
- corpus of ca. 11.5 million words (documents + annotation), with ca. 91,000 different word tokens, all indexed for full-text searching
- separate back-of-the-book indexes from each volume merged into a consolidated index containing over 35,000 main entries and nearly 100,000 subentries, with a total of over 400,000 separate page references
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URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/2/000039/000039.html
Last updated:
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright 2005 -
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Last updated:
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright 2005 -
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
