MITH's Lean, Mean Versioning Machine

“MITH's Lean, Mean Versioning Machine”

Martha Nell Smith Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Martha.Nell.Smith@umail.umd.edu Susan Schreibman Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Susan.Schreibman@umail.umd.edu Amit Kumar Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) amit@ccs.uky.edu Lara Vetter Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) lv26@umail.umd.edu Jarom McDonald Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) jmcdon@glue.umd.edu Edward Vanhoutte Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie, Belgium evanhoutte@kantl.be

The presentation of multiple witnesses continues to be a formidable challenge to both editing and publishing electronic texts. At the core of the theories of such computer editions and computer assisted editions is the requirement for a platform independent and non-proprietary markup language which can deal with the linguistic and the bibliographic text of a work and which can guarantee maximal accessibility, longevity and intellectual integrity in the encoding of texts and textual variation. The encoding schemes proposed by the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange have generally been accepted as the most promising solution to this. The transcription of primary source material enables automatic collation, stemma (re)construction, the creation of (cumulative) indexes and concordances etc. by the computer. With all of these advances, however, scholars have been required either to rely on expensive commercial software such as DynaWeb or to develop their own solutions (via major grant and institutional support) to deliver and successfully display multiple witnesses. Thus scholars who work in institutions that cannot afford to purchase or develop such tools have no way to deliver richly encoded multiple versions of texts and have therefore had their work impeded. The Versioning Machine being developed at MITH is an open-source software tool that will be freely distributed to individuals and not-for-profit organizations under general public license to display deeply-encoded, multiple versions of texts. To use this tool, scholars and students will encode texts in XML (which must be well-formed, but will not necessarily require a DTD), which will then be displayed through a browser plug in. The tool will not only display multiple versions of text, but scholarly apparatus appropriate to the version of the text being displayed. In addition, the system would keep track of apparatus already read by users (for example, a JavaScript routine would mark unread and read comments in different colors) so that users would not waste time reading previously read annotation. The papers featured in this session will, therefore, first describe the versioning machine’s development, and then will show, via specific projects, its value through diverse usages.

MITH’s Lean, Mean Versioning Machine

Susan Schreibman Amit Kumar

Peter Robinson’s 1996 article, “Is There a Text in These Variants” lucidly sets out the challenge of editing texts with multiple witnesses in an electronic environment. The article raises questions about texts and textuality exploring where “The Text” resides: is it to be found “in all the editions and printings: in all the various forms the text, any text, may take” (99), or is it in the imperfect transmission of the text over time. His thesis, “to consider how the new possibilities opened up by computer representation offer new ways of seeing all the various forms of any text - and, with these, the text beneath, within, or above all these various forms” (99) is a challenge that the current generation of electronic editions has not fully realized. Projects like Robinson’s own Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile and The Blake Archive, are two electronic scholarly editions which are excellent examples of projects that do not edit “from one distance and from one distance alone” (Robinson 107), but explore the text that emerges both in and between the variants, both in the text’s linguistic and bibliographic codes. Both these projects, however, utilize expensive software systems to publish their editions. In the case of The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile, Robinson’s own publishing system, Anastasia: Analytical System Tools and SGML/XML Integration Applications(<http://www.sd-editions.com/anastasia/index.html>), is utilized. In the case of The Blake Archive, Dynaweb(http://www.inso.com/) is used. Both these publication tools, in addition to being expensive, require, in the case of Anastasia, some knowledge of programming to, in the case of Dynaweb, a full-time programmer to support the product. The Versioning Machine that Amit Kumar and Susan Schreibman are developing is an open-source tool that will be freely distributed to individuals and not-for-profit organizations under general public license to display XML encoded text which is both deeply-encoded and which exists in multiple witnesses. A prototype of this tool, developed by Jose Chua and Susan Schreibman, was presented as a poster session at last year’s ACH/ALLC in New York . The present project will build upon Chua and Schreibman’s work to create a more robust tool which more fully addresses the various problems, both of encoding multiple witnesses and displaying them. The tool will also display scholarly apparatus appropriate to the version of the text being displayed. Since the same comment may be displayed across several versions, readers will need visual clues to know if a particular comment was previously read. However, persistence is not a goal of XML or XSL. The solution might lay in a server-side application with the aid of client-side application logic. The first time user of the facility will be asked to register under a name and password, so that the presentation layer is able to customize view as per users interest. Session Tracking provided by Java Servlets API will be used to track the users, and the different witnesses along with their annotation will be stored in the server side database. The server side database will be either an Object-Oriented database or better still a XML Database. The deletion, addition and transposition of the variation (which could be word or punctuation), will be cued in the presentation, which will create the impression of cohesion in the different versions. The simplest solution would be to give each comment an identification number. The Session tracker and the persistence database on the server would keep track of which comments were already read and the application logic could then take appropriate action. To give a more concrete example, if an XSLT document transformed an XML document into HTML, a JavaScript routine could mark unread and read comments in different colors. Another particularly challenging editorial issue has been the representation of the intra-textual writing process. When working with a particular manuscript draft, an editor may make an educated guess as to when additions, deletions and emendations were made on a particular manuscript draft (based on handwriting, ink colour, the logic of the sentences, etc). Indeed, one of the beauties of publishing facsimile editions of manuscripts is that no editorial statement need be made in this regard - it is left up the reader to decide on the writing process based on an examination of the evidence. Of course, this textual ambiguity can be replicated in the digital environment by publishing scanned versions of text. Unfortunately, however, encoded texts allow no such ambiguity. Representing the intra-textual revision process in an encoded edition is a particularly interesting and challenging problem. In these cases, relative ordering may alleviate the encoding process. We are experimenting with assigning ordering comparative identifications in XML, regardless of the exact revision time relative to other emendations. In the case where two or more revisions cannot be ordered, they are assigned the same ordering identification. It is then up to the presentation logic to determine how to display it. Syd Bauman of The Scholarly Technology Group at Brown University will be collaborating with Kumar and Schreibman in developing a free tool to assist authors in creating and editing multiple witnesses of texts. Most people used to TEI encoding can follow the following marked up text without difficulty:
Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its <app> <rdg wit="tos">five-year</rdg> <rdg wit="tng">ongoing</rdg> </app> mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no <app> <rdg wit="tos">man</rdg> <rdg wit="tng">one</rdg> </app> has gone before. Although even this simple example is a bit difficult to follow without the helpful whitespace. But even using only a relatively simple subset of TEI markup (not using, for example, <lem>, type=,cause=, hand=, or resp=, nor any markup to indicate certainty; and using <witDetail> merely for citation of the source), it is much harder to read a document with 12 witnesses. Even the following example, only a few short lines of a four witness set is challenging to follow:
<TEI.2> <teiHeader>  <encodingDesc>  <variantEncoding method="parallel-segmentation" location="internal"/> In each encoded APP all witnesses are explicitly mentioned in the wit= attribute of one of the RDG elements. </encodingDesc> </teiHeader> <text> <body> Space<app> <rdg wit="STtos2 STtos4 STtos ST2twok2 ST2twok3 STtng1 STtng2 STtng3 STtng4">, </rdg> <rdg wit="STtos1">: </rdg> <rdg wit="STtos3 ST2twok1">…</rdg> </app><app> <rdg wit="STtos1 STtos2 STtos3 STtos4 STtos5 ST2twok1 ST2twok2 ST2twok3 STtng2 STtng3 STtng4">t</rdg> <rdg wit="STtng1">T</rdg> </app>he <app> <rdg wit="STtos1 STtos2 STtos3 STtos4 STtos5 ST2twok1 ST2twok2 ST2twok3 STtng1 STtng3 STtng4">final</rdg> <rdg wit="STtng2"><emph rend="slant(italic)">final</emph></rdg> </app> frontier<app> <rdg wit="STtos1 STtos2 STtos3 STtos4 STtos5 ST2twok1 ST2twok2 STtng1 STtng2 STtng3 STtng4">.</rdg> <rdg wit="ST2twok3">…</rdg> </app> . . . </witList> </body> </text> </TEI.2> If reading such instances is extremely difficult, editing them is even more challenging (but could certainly be done almost completely automatically, if the individual witnesses have already been separately captured). Just keeping track of a single phrase across multiple witnesses is demanding for the textual scholar. The tool that Syd Bauman is proposing is one which would selectively hide the markup pertaining directly to all but the witnesses currently being studied, but left the rest of the markup and all the content visible for editing. Bauman believes that it should not be impossible for a developer of an XML editor to implement these features -- any such editor already selectively hides markup from other than the selected namespaces. The only part that need be changed is the code for deciding which markup is to be hidden and which is to be displayed. This, however, raises the obvious problem of how to handle a request by the user for additional markup which would overlap hidden markup in a non-well-formed manner. Ideally TEI-aware software would, at user option, automatically use one of the TEI mechanisms (e.g., part= if available on particular element in question, next= and prev=, or <join>). Far easier to implement, of course, would be to issue an error message. But again, the same basic problem exists for selective display of markup based on namespaces instead of witnesses. The Versioning Machine, therefore, will be both an editing and display tool to help textual scholars edit and display multiple witnesses of deeply encoded text.

References

Peter Robinson. “Is There a Text in These Variants.” The Literary Text in the Digital Age.. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 99-116.

Witnessing Dickinson’s Witnesses

Lara Vetter Jarom McDonald

Emily Dickinson’s writings resist the technology of print. In fact, all of her writings need to be reimagined outside the print translations that have seen the literary forms of her writerly work as entities that fit comfortably into the genres designated by previous editors and that conform to nineteenth-century notions of what constitutes the poetic and epistolary text. Not only do Dickinson’s verse productions defy conventions of lineation and text division, punctuation and capitalization, but they perform graphically and visually as she playfully reinvents the poem as a living, generative textual body, infused with movement. It is this feature of her writing that evokes Marta Werner’s call for “unediting” Dickinson’s writings, for “constellating these works not as still points of meaning or as incorruptible texts but, rather, as events and phenomena of freedom.” To do so, or to “undo” so, requires that readers unedit a century’s critical receptions to recuperate a sense of the material documents as Emily Dickinson herself left them. By offering full-color digital reproductions of Dickinson’s holographs, the editors of the Dickinson Electronic Archives have been working toward this goal of unediting; textual transcription and encoding, however, is another matter. Representing Dickinson’s compositions, astonishingly energetic and ambitious creative endeavors not bound to and by the book and print technology’s presentation of literature, presents unique challenges to the textual editor struggling to remain within the bounds of the TEI. One of the major obstacles in encoding Dickinson’s literary creations is the vast number of textual variants and versions that are found amidst the thousands of extant manuscripts. Much of what people recognize as the corpora of Dickinson’s “poetry” exists in collections of manuscripts, or “fascicles,” bound by Dickinson herself, which served as both a form of publication and preservation as well as a repository for copy texts used when disseminating her verse to her almost 100 correspondents. Working alone, and in collaboration with correspondents, Dickinson began to conceive of a model of the poem as fundamentally open and unstable, scripting compositions that evoke a multiplicity of readings through alternate versions and intratextual and subtextual variants. Editorially, then, the project of encoding Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts presents us with three types of variant or versioning issues, each with its own unique challenges in markup and display: Intratextual and subtextual variant words, phrases, and lines. In both draft and “finished” compositions, Dickinson frequently supplies multiple alternate words, phrases, and lines. Dickinson does not appear to privilege one reading over another; additionally, she does not always make clear how and where subtextual variants might operate in the text. Our encoding practice must mimic these facets of her writing by maintaining the integrity of the visual layout of the manuscript while still linking variants to possible, sometimes multiple, locations of substitution through the precision of the double-end-point methodology. Intratextual and extratextual variant line groups. Within letters or a series of letters, Dickinson may offer different final stanzas for an existing initial stanza, often in response to a collaborative compositional process with her correspondent. Our practice must recognize both the multiple suggested incarnations of the poem as well as the chronological progression by which the iterations evolved. Multiple versions. Dickinson often sends the same poem, in identical or variant form, to multiple correspondents. By encoding each manuscript separately and constructing constellations of linking between them, we acknowledge that each version possesses its own context and genealogy while bearing some significant relationship to its textual cousins; this practice also resists the notion that any one version is privileged over another. Faced with the instability of the Dickinson text, historical editors have made difficult, individual choices in printing her poems as singular entities, by choosing definitively a given word or phrase among the many that she offers and ignoring the rest, or by producing a “final” poem with a collection of “subset” readings beneath it; invariably, intratextual variants, if represented at all, are printed beneath the poem transcription. Hence, we must not only reflect Dickinson’s multiplicity in textual markup, but in final display. For example, one Dickinson manuscript offers 12 different word and phrasal intralinear and subtextual variants. Rather than offering a hierarchical, top-down display of the text in which the variants are viewed by a user as footnotes or afterthoughts, we must utilize an environment that recognizes the expansive nature of this strategy for poetic creation; this is not one poem with 12 different variants, but, potentially, 144 different poems. While there is only one encoded file for a given manuscript, the technology allows us to write scripts that would recognize the internal variants and allow the user to manipulate the result -- it could be as rudimentary as multiple, client-moveable layers or as complex as creating a dynamic relational database from the initial document which plays out all 144 possibilities. With this approach, we can de-hierarchize the various instantiations in all of their visual and theoretical complexities, allowing the reader to experience the textual creation in a spirit of “unediting” rather than in a spirit of traditional print translation.

Putting Time back in Manuscripts: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Modern Manuscripts

Edward Vanhoutte

It’s interesting to observe how many theorists of electronic scholarly editing have advocated the transition from universional editions in print to universal electronic editions which can in theory hold all versions of a work (Dahlström 2000), but have passed over the practicalities underlying the production of such an edition. The envisioned model of the versioning edition, representing multiple texts (Reiman 1987) in facsimile as well as in machine-readable form, in concordances, stemmata, lists of variants, etc. has already been applied to editions of older literature and medieval texts (e.g. Robinson 1996, Solopova 2000), and more interesting work in several fields is currently under way (e.g. Parker 2000). At the core of the theories of such computer editions and computer assisted editions (e.g. Gants 1994, McGann 1996, and Shillingsburg 1996) is the requirement for a platform independent and non-proprietary markup language which can deal with the linguistic and the bibliographic text of a work and which can guarantee maximal accessibility, longevity and intellectual integrity (Sperberg-McQueen, 1994 & 1996: 41) in the encoding of texts and textual variation. The encoding schemes proposed by the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (Sperberg-McQueen & Burnard 1994) have generally been accepted as the most promising solution to this. The transcription of primary source material enables automatic collation, stemma (re)construction, the creation of (cumulative) indexes and concordances etc. by the computer. Although the TEI subsets for the transcription of primary source material "have not proved entirely satisfactorily" for a number of problems (Driscoll 2000), they do provide an extremely rich set of mechanisms for the encoding of medieval manuscripts and documents with a fairly "neat", static, and stable appearance such as print editions. The real problems arise when dealing with modern manuscript material.Whereas medieval manuscripts form part of the transmission history of a text, evidence of which is given by several successive witnesses, and which show the working (copying) process of a scribe and the transmission/distribution of a work/text, modern manuscripts are manuscripts "qui font partie d'une genèse textuelle attestée par plusieurs témoins successifs et qui manifestent le travail d'écriture d'un auteur" (Grésillon 1994: manuscripts which form part of the genesis of a text, evidence of which is given by several successive witnesses, and which show the writing process of an author). The french school of Critique Génétique primarily deals with modern manuscripts and their primary aim is to study the avant-texte, not so much as the basis to set out editorial principles for textual representation, but as a means to understand the genesis of the literary work or as Daniel Ferrer puts it: "it does not aim to reconstitute the optimal text of a work; rather, it aims to reconstitute the writing process which resulted in the work, based on surviving traces, which are primarily author's draft manuscripts" (Ferrer 1995, 143). The application of hypertext technology and the possibility to display digital facsimiles in establishing electronic dossiers génétiques, let the editor regroup a series of documents which are akin to each other on the basis of resemblance or difference in multiple ways, but the experiments with proprietary software systems (Hypercard, Toolbook, Macromedia, PDF, etc.) are too much oriented towards display, and often don't comply with the rule of "no digitization without transcription" (Robinson 1997).Further, the TEI solutions for the transcription of primary source material do not cater for modern manuscripts because the current (P4) and previous versions of the TEI have never addressed the encoding of the time factor in text. Since a writing process by definition takes place in time, four central complications may arise in connection with modern manuscripts and should thus be catered for in en encoding scheme for the transcription of modern primary source material. The complications are the following:

Its beginning and end may be hard to determine and its internal composition difficult to define (document structure vs. unit of writing): authors frequently interrupt writing, leave sentences unfinished and so on.
Manuscripts frequently contain items such as scriptorial pauzes which have immense importance in the analysis of the genesis of a text.
Even non-verbal elements such as sketches, drawings, or doodles may be regarded as forming a component of the writing process for some analytical purposes.
Below the level of the chronological act of writing, manuscripts may be segmented into units defined by thematic, syntactic, stylistic, etc. phenomena; no clear agreement exists, however, even as to the appropriate names for such segments.

These four complications are exactly the ones the TEI Guidelines cite when trying to define the complexity of speech, emphasizing that "Unlike a written text, a speech event takes place in time." (Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard 2001, 254). This may suggest that the markup solutions employed in the transcription of speech could prove useful for the transcription of modern manuscripts, in particular the chapter in the TEI Guidelines on Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment (esp. 14.5. Synchronization).Building on this assumption, this paper will address the relationship between theory of texts and the design of electronic markup, and will be illustrated with examples from four projects I am currently involved in at the Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie<http://www.kantl.be/ctb/> (Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies): The transcription of the Finnegan's Wake notebooks by James Joyce, the electronic edition of the diaries of Daniel Robberechts, a genetic edition of a manuscript by Willem Elsschot, and the transcription of all of the extant witnesses of a novel by Stijn Streuvels. This paper will revisit Michael Sperberg-McQueen's "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts." (Sperberg-McQueen, 1991) and will define a research agenda for the new TEI Working group on the transcription of modern manuscripts.

References

Mats Dahlström. “Digital Incunables: Versionality and Versatility in Digital Scholarly Editions.” Paper.. ICCC/IFIP Third Conference on Electronic Publishing 2000, Kaliningrad/Svetlogorsk (Russia): Kaliningrad State University, 17th-19th August 2000. Accessed on November 29, 2001. : , 2000.

M. J. Driscoll. “Encoding Old Norse/Icelandic Primary Sources using TEI-Conformant SGML.” Literary & Linguistic Computing. 2000. 15: 81-91.

Daniel Ferrer. “Hypertextual Representation of Literary Working Papers.” Literary & Linguistic Computing. 1995. 10: 143-145.

David Gants. “Toward a Rationale of Electronic Textual Criticism.” Paper.. ALLC/ACH Conference, Paris, 19 april 1994. Accessed on November 29, 2001. : , 1994.

Almuth Grésillon. Eléments de critique génétique. Lire les manuscrits modernes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris, 1994.

Jerome McGann. “The Rationale of HyperText.” TEXT. : , 1996. 9: 11-32.

D. C. Parker. “The Text of the New Testament and Computers: the International Greek New Testament Project.” Literary & Linguistic Computing. 2000. 15: 27-41.

Donald H. Reiman. “Chapter 10:'Versioning': The Presentation of Multiple Texts.” Romantic Texts and Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. 167-180.

The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM. Ed. P. M. W. Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Peter M. W. Robinson. “New Directions in Critical Editing.” Electronic Text. Investigations in Method and Theory. Ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 145-171.

Peter Shillingsburg. “Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials.” The Literary Text in the Digital Age. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996. 23-35.

The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales on CD-ROM. Ed. E. Solopova. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. “Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts.” Literary & Linguistic Computing. 1991. 6: 34-46.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. “Textual Criticism and the Text Encoding Initiative.” Paper presented at MLA '94, San Diego. : , 1994.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen. “Textual Criticism and the Text Encoding Initiative.” The Literary Text in the Digital Age. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996. 37-61.

Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. (TEI P3). Ed. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Lou Burnard. Chicago and Oxford: Text Encoding Initiative, 1994.

TEI P4 Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Ed. C. M. Sperberg-McQueen Lou Burnard. Oxford, Providence, Charlottesville, and Bergen: The TEI Consortium, 2001.