The Genesis

The Wake Newslitter Project had its Genesis in a chance remark made on the FWAKE-L electronic discussion list on the Internet in November 1996. The FWAKE-L list and its companion list FW-READ have filled some of the gaps left by the demise of 'A Wake Newslitter'. Although the expected brevity of email messages precludes posting in-depth studies, these lists have become effective forums for the discussion of both annotation and explication of Finnegans Wake. It was in this context that a cry went up as to why 'A Wake Newslitter' was not being reprinted and as to whether there were any enterprising publishers prepared to take up the task. Email inquiries were sent to Fritz Senn in Zurich and Clive Hart in Essex to canvas their views and also to offer possible solutions. Fritz Senn was amenable to the idea and Clive Hart actively supportive of any project.

The Problems

My own holdings of 'A Wake Newslitter' material were sparse and covered mainly the later issues. Initial tests made it clear that the journals would need to be retyped in order to digitise and edit the material. Clive Hart informed me that all the Old Series were produced using stencils and, even though I knew some of the issues were produced by letterpress, I decided that the whole publication run would need to be re-keyed into computers. A mammoth and error-prone task - I needed help. So some issues were mimeographs; some issues were letterpress or litho and some were typed and photocopied. But there was more - some issues included illustrations, diagrams, tables and even a few halftone photographs and illustrations - it would be necessary to scan, redraw and source original material. Finnegans Wake scholarship and explication covers a very diverse range of cultures and languages. The typing and printing limitations of the time of original publication of the Newslitter meant that a large number of issues were retouched by hand to provide the appropriate accents or signs. The constantly changing methods of production had a strong impact on the ability to maintain any consistent editorial and typographical style. Typefaces, sizes, leading, paragraph styles and punctuation would vary from issue to issue, printer to printer and even sometimes page to page. Italic type was not always available and an overuse of bold face was inevitable in the original publications including the use of some very exotic faces in later volumes. To compound all this 'A Wake Newslitter' had become a significant reference source in Finnegans Wake studies and therefore its material had been heavily cited in critical literature. Any new electronic edition would have to accommodate the pagination of the originals due to critical - page-specific - citation. This was even more daunting considering that the old series and the new series had vastly different page sizes. The Old Series was mimeographed on crown quarto paper (10x7.5in) with a text density of about 400 words per page. New Series issues started on demy octavo (8.75x5.5in approx.) at a text density of 450 words per page but by Volume X the page size was A5 (8.25x5.75in approx.) and the text density over 600 words per page. The type size in parts of some issues was as small as 6 point. It was decided to set all the issues in A5 format and a basic template was created with running heads, rules and page numbers. This meant that the Old Series material was condensed down to A5 - which due to the monospaced original text was fairly easy - and a cover page conforming to the New Series was added. A number of liberties had to be taken with standard typographical practice in order to fit diverse material into the new format. Some pages had to be hit quite hard with the 'digital' equivalent of a mallet.

The Collaboration

As some issues required retyping into computers and all material would need proofreading, it was obvious I needed further help. I turned to the same forum that had voiced the desire for 'A Wake Newslitter' to be made available. An email was sent to the FWAKE-L requesting volunteers to type, and eventually proofread A Wake Newslitter issues. The response was immediate with about twenty volunteers coming forward in the first few weeks. Reflecting the membership of FWAKE-L and demographic access to the Internet the majority of the responses came from the United States but there were also offers of help from Australia, England, Finland, France, Italy and Thailand.

The Technology

Electronic mail and the Internet were the main communications tools of the project - enabling the speedy exchange of messages and the ability to view the progress of the project itself on the World-Wide Web. There was in excess of 700,000 words to be typed and then proofread by the team and this ultimately would be achieved by using both old and new technologies. Photocopies were posted to the members of the team and electronic copy returned using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to an Internet drop zone. As photocopies of the original issues were received from Clive Hart it became evident that a larger proportion of the New Series issues than had originally been expected were printed by letterpress or litho. This raised the possibility of avoiding the retyping of all the issues. A few trial issues were processed using scanners and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software and the results were encouraging. Although the scanned material was by no means error-free the speed of input made the scanning of the letterpress and litho printed material a viable alternative to - the also error-prone - retyping option. Scanned material processed using OCR software - while offering a faster input mode - also requires more diligent proofreading due to the unique and sometimes insidious errors created by such processes. All material whether typed or scanned would require formatting and typesetting using desktop publishing (DTP) software. Artwork and diagrams were either redrawn on computer or scanned and tables were rebuilt within the DTP software. Most accents and special characters were available on the computer systems but the Finnegans Wake sigla required the use and adaptation of a Wake typeface which is under development as part of another project. From the outset it was determined that the electronic reproduction would be required to respect the pagination and layout integrity of the original material. The mechanism chosen for this was Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format). Once the material has been desktop-published this software enables the replication of the individual pages of a publication within a single electronic document. The PDF format is designed to be platform-independent and offers a range of features such as indexing, keyword searching and hyperlinking. Another advantage of this format is that all text is indexed and multiple documents can be searched for keywords using Adobe Catalog software.