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 #wiki2007:
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"
#flanders2007, 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
#pgwde2007 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
#pgw1976, 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:
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.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 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
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:print "Hello World!\n";
- 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
Affiliated with: Literary and Linguistic Computing
Copyright 2005 -
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
Last updated:
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
Affiliated with: Literary and Linguistic Computing
Copyright 2005 -
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License