Orientation and Where We Might Go Next:

[ebeshero]

Orientation to the Repurposed Emily Dickinson Fascicle 16 Project

I started this as a "repurposing" project: taking an old website that was broken and incompatible with current web standards and "up-converting" it to TEI XML so it could last and maintain its value. Let's begin by reviewing the original website, "Translating Emily: Digitally Re-Presenting Fascicle 16" which was created by master's student named Michele Ierardi in the University of Virginia's English Department sometime back in the early years of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Ierardi didn't work with XML but did all her editing and coding in HTML to produce a "hypertext" edition. Read her essay about what she wanted to accomplish here: "Translating Emily: Digitally Representing Dickinson's Poetic Production Using Fascicle 16 as a Case Study".

One of Ierardi's goals was to represent the way Emily Dickinson's poems were altered by her later editors, so she collected page-images of published copies of each poem from a collection of 20th-century editions, and tried to find a good way to represent those in connection with facsimile images of Emily Dickinson's manuscript. Ierardi thus did a lot of work that's really valuable and worth preserving--which is why I wanted to repurpose her site so it wouldn't go defunct or obsolete into the land of lost websites. I found Ierardi via social media and obtained her permission for us to do this repurposing, and we're now in a good position to build on her work.

The part of Ierardi's site that stopped functioning a few years ago was her pages on which she represents an HTML transcription of each poem, including Dickinson's variant words and phrases. Dickinson did not typically cross out a word to replace it with another, but seemed to write alternate words in the margins and signal where they might replace words in the main text--as if to provide some options. Ierardi used hypertext with JavaScript to try to represent these options (or "variants") as equal to each other in value, so as not to choose one over the other, but to have the variants gradually alternate inline with the poem: She used gradually alternating (flashing) text to do this. When her JavaScript broke (or really, when web browsers changed their JavaScript standards), the pages turned into, well, this: Poem 1.

My first order of business in attempting to rescue the site was simply to 1) Convert her poem files from HTML to TEI XML (for long-range sustainable archiving) and 2) Render them again in HTML with CSS so we could read her variants. So, here's my repurposed HTML page of Poem 1. Scroll down to see how I handled the variants. Here's a more spectacular example: Poem 8.

I made a rush job of repurposing this just because I wanted to use it in my Pre-20th-century American Lit class (Englit 1215) here at Pitt-Greensburg a year or two ago. And now you are coming on board to do new and interesting things with this site--perhaps to repurpose it yourselves and take it in new directions.

Here is a list of directions I've been thinking we should or might want to pursue. You should add your own ideas here!

• Sometimes Ierardi (who was a student herself when she started this) made an error in transcription from Dickinson's manuscript. We should look for errors by carefully and systematically reading against the ms images ourselves and edit the TEI to correct them.
• Look at the TEI for a poem file and study the code to see how I have been handling the variants: Poem 1 in TEI For this, I've been using "apparatus" tagging from the TEI, drawing from Chapter 12 of the TEI Guidelines here: http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/TC.html We may want to build up the "apparatus" markup to work with , which you can read about in Ch. 12, because Dickinson produced other versions of some of the same poems in Fascicle 16 and bundled them in with different Fascicles! A famous example of this is with Poem 11 but in most editions of Dickinson it looks very different, with the pronouns changed from "I" and "He", to "I" and "her"! Here's the edition probably better known to readers of Emily Dickinson, as posted on Bartleby.com: (http://www.bartleby.com/113/5126.html).
• Knowing this about one poem, perhaps there are others that exist in some alternative form because Dickinson wrote them down a different way in another bundle of manuscripts! We might research this to try to locate alternate editions of other poems in this fascicle. And we might want to try coding these alternate forms in a way that binds them together with our project somehow--finding the right TEI code to do it. Should we consider presenting the XML as a single document, and encoding all the variant forms in the same file, including variations written and bundled outside fascicle 16? Or should we encode poem-variants from outside Fascicle 16 in separate files? We should think about this carefully to consider our tagging and what information we'd like to "bundle together" ourselves with our markup!
• We certainly need to work on laying out the page-images more effectively, and on developing a main page as you've all noted in project proposal stage. Site design is something we need to map and block out together as we overhaul this project.

Thanks for reviewing the pages linked here and giving this some thought before we have our first Project Meeting on Monday after class! (Nicole, I know you won't be here, but feel free to write and respond here or on the Issues board.) @nlottig94 @amielnicki @brookestewart @blawrence719 @ghbondar @RJP43

[ebeshero]

I've started a Wiki page on this GitHub to hold a list of resources for our research: https://github.com/ebeshero/EmilyDickinson16/wiki/Resources-for-Emily-Dickinson-Research

[ebeshero]

@amielnicki @blawrence719 @brookestewart @nlottig94 I see lots of great activity on the project lately, especially with checking for transcription errors! One question: Is anyone looking into a) the different published versions of the poems, or b) looking for other versions of the poems in this fascicle, in other collections of Dickinson's poems? What I mean is: sometimes Dickinson rewrote a poem that she'd bound in one collection (like fascicle 16), and bundled the new version separately, or sent it off in a letter to someone. Poem 11 is one of these (as described above), and might be worth a special study. Are there others?

**I notice the published images posted on my site with Poem 11 really don't go with it. I bet that's true of other pages on my site, too--and it will help to look through the original site to match up the published texts with the poems.