Comparing Emily Dickinson Projects: Discussion

[ebeshero]

The short poems of Emily Dickinson have generated lots of excitement and serious digital humanities projects in our time. Web technology lets more people than ever before view "photo facsimiles" of the tiny scraps of paper on which she wrote, and text encoding has transformed and remixed and circulated the poems to give them a digital rebirth. Let's review and discuss some of these projects to see what text encoding can do with the way we read a poet.

Browse the following projects and choose two to discuss together in your post. You'll need to be patient and "dig around" some of these sites to get to the poems. I'll provide a little guidance to get you in to each one:

1. Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886

   • Skim around the introductions to get a sense of what this site is archiving.
   • Then wander about in the Browse documents: dig into a collection and select some poems: look at each reading view and look at the XML code.

2. Emily Dickinson Project (fascicles 16 and 6) (made/remade by my students from 2015/16!) :-)

   • Try interacting with some specific poems posted on this site, such as Poem 1605, and look at the Dash Reduction Analysis. What can you learn about how Dickinson a) wrote variations on her own wording, and b) how publications of her poems altered her work? How are you able to learn about this?

3. Emily Dickinson Archive: An open-access website for the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson

   • There are three ways to explore this site from the front page: either by Searching the text of the poems for a word or phrase, by browsing by library collection, or by Lexicon: looking up words and definitions pulled from Dickinson's poems. Try exploring some of each.
   • For the Search box, try plugging in some words that jump out at you from the Lexicon. Suggestion: try the word "bee" or the word "fly"
   • If you look up the word "funeral" you'll see how this site archives versions of Poem 1605 represented in the Emily Dickinson student project.

In your posts, you should respond with your thoughts about how any two of these sites compare with each other for a) how you interact with Dickinson's poems: how are they represented and what is the reading experience like? b) what can you see of the text encoding: How easily can you find the markup, and what kinds of things can you see in the markup? How does the markup compare between the two projects you're looking at?

This is a discussion! Since each of you is responding here, you can reply to each other, help each other out (it's tricky to to get a view of the code in the Emily Dickinson Archive but it is there!), and also feature examples (you can use screen captures from the sites in your posts). We'll keep this discussion running online until Friday this week.

[Tiny-Pickles]

I looked at the Radical Scatters site and the Emily Dickinson Project.

First I noticed that the Radical Scatters are trying to provide where all of the current documents of Emily Dickinson’s works are being held. Also they are trying to capture the details and structure of the documents, poems, and notes that Emily Dickinson wrote. There is more focus on the structure and physical properties of the poems and the letter fragments.. In the text from the Boston Public Library Higg 86 describes a letter that she wrote. In the xml code you can see there are elements that signify different passages and attributes that describe the position of the words of the original document. In other words, the code describes any indentation and separate passages from the original transcript. I enjoyed looking at this xml code more than the Emily Dickinson Project because it was slightly easier to follow and understand the reason why they labeled the elements and attributes a certain way.

I would say the markup for The Emily Dickinson Project is vastly different. They are trying to compare and display the changes from the different publications and variations of the poems to the original manuscripts. For example in, Poem 5 (1605) you can see up to 4 different editions of this poem and you can see the discrepancies between them. The xml code displays attributes and elements that help to identify which addition is under what publisher and the year it was published. They are focusing more on how the content is being changed and tweaked over time. This site was slightly easy to navigate and understand the document changes over time, the layout of the site and the layering of the different publication years made it easier to see the overall changes to the text.

[lbanic]

I compared the Emily Dickinson Project and the Radical Scatters.

When I first looked at the Emily Dickinson Project, specifically, Poem 1605, you can easily see the markup is different compared to Radical Scatters. I can admit, I am not very good at reading code, but I can see that it is longer and detailed. At the end of this poem, they are trying to decipher between different variations of the poem using values such as "var0" and "var1".

In Radical Scatters, I like how they first started off with coding that it is an electronic manuscript. This, along with the transcript, helps shows that it was originally written on a typewriter. They also make a note of this in the code. They also code that this is a draft and that there are alternatives to this poem. Next, they added in line breaks where in the Emily Dickinson Project they did not do so. In the code, they is to show how words are not necessarily in line with the rest of the sentence. This helps us get a picture of how the actual document looks simply through the code.

[austinmurry]

For my comparison I wanted to look at the Radical Scatters page and the Emily Dickinson Project page.

Just browsing through the websites I liked how much more concise the Emily Dickinson project page was to navigate and how much easier that made things. I could find the poems vary easily and they gave a short description of the dates and name of the poem. The Radical Scatters page was a little harder to navigate but they too have a nice way of organizing it to where you can either look at all of the poems in the collection, or specific categories. For the XML I specifically looked at the "a802" from the Radical Scatters page and "1602varient" from the Emily Dickinson project page. I want to start off by saying that these two markups are completely different and I much rather enjoy reading the Radical Scatters code over the Emily Dickinson Project code. The Radical Scatters code uses only a few elements to describe the reading and uses the "lb" element to break the lines up based off the original transcript. The Emily Dickinson Project uses a long structure of code to describe the headers and the publication and such and then gets into the reading. I feel as though the Radical Scatters code is less complex, which in many cases can hurt it, but is easier to read, while the Emily Dickinson code is more complex, harder to read, but it looks much neater and organized and pleasing to the eye.

Again as for reading experience on the website, Emily Dickinson Project takes the cake. They make it so easy to click on a poem and know exactly which one you are reading and then they have different variations of the markup to show the different variations on what the code may look like on paper form. So you can see if certain words were changed or if certain characters from the original transcripts would be removed by others. The Radical Scatters page only allows you to see the reading view of each poem, the facsimile, transcript, and the xml mark up views, which is cool but not as interactive as the other page.

[arrowarchive]

I have chosen to review Radical Scatters and The Emily Dickinson Archive.

As I entered Radical Scatters, it was clear to me that the designers wanted to capture the feeling of 19th century literature, using a collage of letters, stamps, documents composed with a typewriter, and handwritten documents as their aesthetic and good colors that compliment it. The introductions are eloquent and formal, explaining their purpose but occasionally using complex vocabulary. Unfortunately, I came across some void javascript in some files and some images which refused to load. I can assume that it was coded incorrectly and will not show. I like how the text is shown and labeled, with unintelligible photos having transcriptions off to the side where they are legible. All the commentary is on the left, from the scale of the letter to the stationery it is written on and the amount of folds in it. It captures a surprising amount of detail that the average reader wouldn't think about.

While the documents containing all the fragments are neatly organized, this comes at the cost of how other pages are formatted. The other documents and their galleries aren't nearly as appealing visually. I can envision the causes for this, but all of them are organized the same way (letter then number), but don't contain thumbnail images. It's oddly inconsistent for a project that focuses heavily on its visual appeal to show thumbnails for some of their entries, but lacking others. They could have used the Facsimile images as their thumbnails and it's jarring that they didn't. What it has in detail it lacks in consistency.

The other website I reviewed was The Emily Dickinson Archive. The minimalist look of the website left much to be desired, but seeing how their information was organized and explained more than made up for it. Their purpose was to detail which works of Emily Dickinson were archived in which location, providing a clear idea of how the website was intended to be used, an FAQ for the viewers, A dictionary of 9000+ words, and the option to browse by image or by work. I was confused by this at first, but browsing by image showed each library alphabetically and dropdown pages where the poems could be viewed, but were occasionally hard to read. On the contrary, viewing by work would show a handful of works listed alphabetically that could be filtered in various ways (amount on screen, date, recipient, etc.) with the legible text in view. It's simple, but it works. While viewing poems by work can be cluttered, options are provided to minimize tabs and have a full view of the poem.

Radical Scatters was a aesthetically pleasing website designed to archive and translate the fragments of Dickinson's work, but was plagued by design inconsistencies and occasionally broken code, with an impressive amount of detail on individual texts instead of focusing on the website as a whole. The Emily Dickinson Archive isn't much to look at, but it does its job well organizing works by where they are archived and being flexible to the reader, even providing a dictionary for words used in her poems that can help them learn something new. If this review proves anything, it's that the content of a website and viewer accessibility come first, and I feel like Radical Scatters could learn from what The Emily Dickinson Archive has done.

[sveludandi]

The short poems of Emily Dickinson have generated lots of excitement and serious digital humanities projects in our time. Web technology lets more people than ever before view "photo facsimiles" of the tiny scraps of paper on which she wrote, and text encoding has transformed and remixed and circulated the poems to give them a digital rebirth. Let's review and discuss some of these projects to see what text encoding can do with the way we read a poet.

Browse the following projects and choose two to discuss together in your post. You'll need to be patient and "dig around" some of these sites to get to the poems. I'll provide a little guidance to get you in to each one:

1. Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886

   • Skim around the introductions to get a sense of what this site is archiving.
   • Then wander about in the Browse documents: dig into a collection and select some poems: look at each reading view and look at the XML code.

2. Emily Dickinson Project (fascicles 16 and 6) (made/remade by my students from 2015/16!) :-)

   • Try interacting with some specific poems posted on this site, such as Poem 1605, and look at the Dash Reduction Analysis. What can you learn about how Dickinson a) wrote variations on her own wording, and b) how publications of her poems altered her work? How are you able to learn about this?

3. Emily Dickinson Archive: An open-access website for the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson

   • There are three ways to explore this site from the front page: either by Searching the text of the poems for a word or phrase, by browsing by library collection, or by Lexicon: looking up words and definitions pulled from Dickinson's poems. Try exploring some of each.
   • For the Search box, try plugging in some words that jump out at you from the Lexicon. Suggestion: try the word "bee" or the word "fly"
   • If you look up the word "funeral" you'll see how this site archives versions of Poem 1605 represented in the Emily Dickinson student project.

In your posts, you should respond with your thoughts about how any two of these sites compare with each other for a) how you interact with Dickinson's poems: how are they represented and what is the reading experience like? b) what can you see of the text encoding: How easily can you find the markup, and what kinds of things can you see in the markup? How does the markup compare between the two projects you're looking at?

This is a discussion! Since each of you is responding here, you can reply to each other, help each other out (it's tricky to to get a view of the code in the Emily Dickinson Archive but it is there!), and also feature examples (you can use screen captures from the sites in your posts). We'll keep this discussion running online until Friday this week.

I compared Radical Scatters and The Emily Dickinson's Project.

When I first looked at the Emily Dickinson's page, I thought it was clearly laid out and easy to navigate compared to the Radical Scatters page. The home page had a brief and easy to understand description which explained where to look on the page and how to view the poems. The poems were easy to find as they were all contained in drop down menus and the poem variations were easy to view because you just have to toggle a button. When I saw the Radical Scatters home page, I thought the introduction text was significantly more lengthy and it seemed a bit more scattered compared to The Emily Dickinson's Project. Overall, I thought the Emily Dickinson's project was easier to navigate. On poem A175 I thought it was cool that they indicated physical attributes of the writing in the code. They said it was a rough copy draft and indicated in a comment that the handwriting was rough and the "ink type=pencil". Compared to A175 the XML code on poem 1605 had slightly more code and coded the variants using type="var" which was at the beginning and the end of the code.

[gvt5036]

I also compared the Radical Scatters and the Emily Dickinson Project. The Radical Scatters page seems very dated in comparison to the Emily Dickinson Project page, and seems sort of disorganized/overwhelming. My first thought when seeing the Radical Scatters page was that it hadn't been updated since the early 2000's, and upon further investigation, I found that was accurate. The XML from the Radical Scatters pages also did not feel as professional as the XML on the Emily Dickinson Project website. When reading through the Radical Scatters XML, I found myself frequently asking what their tags meant.

The XML from the Emily Dickinson Project site seemed much more well formed, and I rarely found my self asking what the different tags and attributes meant.

[Yuying-Jin]

I compare Radical Scatters and Emily Dickinson Project. I prefer the topic color of Radical Scatters page, because it looks classic and Artistic. However, compared with the Radical Scatters page, the navigation in Emily Dickinson Project page is more concise and clear. I was really lazy to read the sentences in the navigation Radical Scatters page. Also, it took me more time to locate the poem in Radical Scatter page. I check xml files in the two websites. The codes in Radical Scatters lack details and information, and most of them just present format and line marks of the manuscript. Differently, the codes in Emily Dickinson Project include more kinds of elements with various attributes. Besides format and line marks of the manuscript, they also presents publication information.

[NickyV1234]

For the radical scatters site. I had found it very interesting how they had discovered there were parts of Emily Dickinson's poems that were changed when they were copied. As well as the fact that there are parts of Emily Dickinons that are not shared by her other works. I had noticed there were far more trace fragments than variant fragments.

for the fascicles website, The poem 1605 example allows you to compare lines of different variations of the poem. with their corresponding original parts. Emily Dickinson appears to not change the wording at all and only seems to change the punctuation and capitalization in the sentence variations. When looking at publicized versions it appears that her poems were more likely to receive 100 percent dash reductions. rather interesting. same thing goes for the centenary edition poems.

[erinmooney]

I looked at the Emily Dickenson Archive and Emily Dickenson's Late Fragments and Related Texts.

I honestly like the black and gold color scheme of the Archive, but I'm not sure how accessibility-friendly it is. I have a problem with how the menu appears when you first go to the page. There are only 2 options until you go into one of them, then more options in the menu are available (that is more of an html issue though). Past that, I like how the Manuscript section has 2 sub-sections where we can see the the images of the Dickenson manuscripts and the other section shows what works they have in a catalogue style. The catalogue part did not seem to have much xml text, and neither did the image section. However that html was so interesting to look at! (All those tags and elements were intimidating, but familiar enough to not be overwhelming.)

The Late Fragments one is cute and I get the classy vibe that Yuying-Jin mentioned, but also I agree with A-Little-Coconut that the design is dated. My main problem with this site though is the text hierarchy. The visual difference between text and link menu is not distinct enough. Though they are separated, they are close enough in text size and color that they all feel like regular text. Going past that, I liked how the actual Dickenson writings were presented. With pictures along with the text (though the link to one picture is broken). When looking at the xml of this site, I thought it was really cool how it affected my reading. One example is when I saw,

Everything must be redefined in their wake.

I was drawn by the sentence, and immediately looked for it in the site to see how it is presented (if it was at all different because it stood out in the Elements tab).

[luh429]

I compared the radical scatters site and the Emily Dickinson Project.

The first thing I noticed was how they look totally different.

[acc5763]

I looked at the Radical scatters site and the Emily Dickinson project. Radical Scatters is much more in depth. There is a surplus of categories, one being introductions. In the "most arrows" article you can find old hand written notes. They are all dated and faded and they each come with a text written translation so the view can easily identify what Dickinson was trying to say. The XML had a little less information. The tags were pretty confusing for me to understand. The site also appeared to be a bit outdated and the was a bit hard to navigate.

The Dickinson Project had a much newer appearance was very easy to navigate. They are trying to compare her original work and her work that has been tampered with. The XML looked really well done. For me, the tags were a lot easier to read than the ones in Radical Scatters. I could not tell what the tags in Radical Scatter meant.

[jbg5721]

I explored both the Radical Scatters and the Emily Dickinson Project. The first site I really enjoyed how detailed it is. One downside I found was the lack of side by side comparisons. It has the original document, a text view, the xml view, and the transcription. These are great and a must have but the only way to compare is to have them open in different windows. Lacking side by side comparisons is a fairly common thing so it really shouldn’t matter too much but when I saw how it was done in the Emily Dickinson Project, I felt differently. This website has side by side comparisons from the original document and various options of the different versions of the poem. Each version of the poem is available through clicking a button and you can have every version viewable at once. The differences between versions were highlighted and color coded to match the respective buttons color. I think this is a phenomenal creation for digital recreations. You can easily have everything on one screen without needing multiple windows. At the time of writing this, I did not have access to a computer to view the xml code in its whole. Viewing the code on my ipad removes all the tags and actual code parts. Attached is a screenshot of how the xml code appears on my ipad. Parts are clearly missing and the code does not look complete.

[luh429]

I compared the Radical Scatters site and the Emily Dickinson Project.

The first thing I noticed about the two sites was how they look totally different when it comes to the basic layout of the page. The Radical Scatters site's poem started by showing a "reading view" of the text. Then along the top their were options to see the original document or open the XML. However the Emily Dickinson's layout was different showing the text next to the original poem document and giving you options to view different highlighted words. Then also giving the option to view the XML text. Both websites were detailed and allowed for easy viewing of the poem but I personally liked how the Emily Dickinson sight showed the original document side by side with the more readable text.

I thought both documents' XML looked well formed and neat. However I noticed that the Emily Dickson Project's XML seemed to have a lot more text. there were a lot more elements within elements and a lot more attributes. My guess is this is partially because the Emily Dickinson Project's text had more within it like highlighting unlike the Radical Scatters poem. Therefore it needed more code to organize the text to be highlighted.

[Janman813]

My comparison is on the Emily Dickinson Project and the Radical Scatters.

When looking through these websites I really liked how the Emily Dickinson Project was set up. It was easy to maneuver through and find what I was looking for. For the Radical Scatters, they were nice and formated, but not as easy to find what I was looking for in the "614" original XML code they used for each individual line they had the code "app " and then followed by "rgd" which deals with individual words. the coding for radical Scatters code was simple and straight to the point at least in poem a297. I preferred looking at this code more than I did for Emily Dickinson Project.

[thammer12499]

For the discussion, I looked through the Emily Dickinson Project (EDP) and the Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA) websites and compared their layouts and methods of getting to the poems.

As many others have pointed out, the layout for EDP is concise and straightforward which is largely due to the simplicity it utilizes to get the average browser through. The method in which the poems are accessed is a two-step process, however. In order to get the specific poem you wish to read, you first have to select the fascicles (you only have two choices). After that you are taken to a new page where you can select the poems from the same drop-down menu that's now been expanded. At first, I was rather confused by the top menu changing; I didn't even notice it until I randomly moved my cursor across and saw the change in the listing. I vibed well with the brightly colored website that contrasted well with itself white sectioned off white boxes, the patterned grey background, and the blue menu.

EDA on the other hand did not feel very user-friendly which isn't inherently a bad feature. For the average browser that may be looking for Emily Dickinson's poems, this website may be intimidating at a first glance. The layout is sparse with a very dark aesthetic, little contrast in the layout, and not many obvious options to browse the website. The website utilizes an internal search engine in order to find the different pages, if you do not have a specific poem or goal in mind upon entering the website then you may likely get stuck at the home page.

[kmh6907]

The two projects I chose to look over were the Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886 and the Emily Dickinson Project (fascicles 16 and 6). To begin with when I first look at the two projects the overall layout of them is very different. The Radical Scatters project has a lot more content to it and they go into a lot of detail with the code. For example, it has the introductions, browse, about, and indices and under all of these there are other tabs you can click on that takes you to another tab of information. With the code used for this project, they added a lot more attributes and tags rather than the other project where their code was a lot more simple. Overall the Radical Scatters project was a lot more complex and harder to navigate rather than the Emily Dickinson project. I found that project to be a lot easier to search through and find the content.

[ericsandbloom]

I compared the radical scatters and the Emily Dickenson Archive. The layout of the Radical Scatters is very vintage looking in terms of Internet aesthetics. Radical Scatters also allows you ease of access to different fragments and parts of the archive. It makes it easier for first time users and those who might be confused on how to search of specific things. It also has a blob of text near the bottom explaining all the different aspects of the archive itself; including sources, types of fragments, and what each part is labeled. The code is definitely more complex than the Emily Dickenson Archive. In the archive, you have two buttons a home and an about section. You then have a search bar to look up anything you desire. However the bio doesn't have much ease of access like the Radical Scatters does, so if you're looking for something specific, for the most part you'd better be spot on. I found that project much harder to navigate and find things that were specific.

[hjl5363]

I decided to compare the Emily Dickinson Project and Radical Scatters Archive. With the Radical Scatters, the poems are represented in several different ways, such as print, handwriting, a transcription and an XML Document. I would say that the reading experience was a little awkward with the + and - symbols in the beginning of a line in the Reading View. However, I do like the reading experience overall. In terms of XML documents, I personally think that the Fascicles 15 and 6 Archives are more detailed and organized comparing to the Radical Scatters. To be more specific in terms of comparisons, I am saying that certain things could have been changed, such as numbering your code lines to better identify something. I am just a person who likes to stay organized with everything, and I personally think this is part of mindful file management. With markup, I think that it is both hard and easy at the same time. I think it is just totally dependent on how organized the code is that effects how easily that I can locate markup. Both Radical Scatters and the Emily Dickinson Project have different structures as well. Radical Scatters is definitely a similar markup, and it does not contain any numbers. Revisiting the Emily Dickinson project, their markup is much more detailed and I am able to learn a lot more.

[bealse18]

I looked at the Emily Dickinson Project and The Emily Dickinson Archive.

I really liked looking at the Emily Dickinson Archive. It was very simplistic at first glance and pleasing to the eye. It wasn’t hard to navigate by any means however I can see how it would be difficult to find specific items you were looking for instead of just random browsing.

The Emily Dickinson Project was very easy to navigate and straight to the point. It would be very easy to find specific items on this site because everything is very concise and labeled well. The code in this project I felt was more advanced, but also more organized.

[SCD5363]

I looked at Emily Dickinson's Radical Scatters I really liked the layout of the website and how easy it is to navigate. The XML layout is also very neat and well-organized. Although the UI is not as user-friendly and I could see that if you don't know what you're looking for, or if you are just casually browsing. Radical Scatters also allows you to navigate around rather easily but there are a couple of hidden links that you can only find if you hover the mouse above a certain word.