Needs Assessment - DIGH 501, Week 3

[taylorcate]

Assignment Details:

Even if you do not know what form or structure your project might take, begin with the field in which you’re in conversation. What need is there for this project? Where’s the gap in current research that this project is addressing? (i.e., “Digital archives for x exist, but none of them adequately address y”).

Demonstrate the need for your project in a proposal draft that includes:

• the specific intervention the project is making,
• the theories informing your project idea,
• a prelimi­nary bibliog­raphy of at least 10 items – primary and secondary sources -- that seem relevant,
• and a more fully developed landscape scan (what similar projects exist, and how is yours contributing something new/different?).

[taylorcate]

Landscape Scan:

Lyrical Ballads: An Electronic Scholarly Edition (2013?) edited by Bruce Graver, Ron Tetreault, and Vivien Hannon (technical editor)

• Dynamic "Nutting" Collation - This collation compares three distinct versions of the poem, 1798-1805, in four blocked windows (uncollapsible) with a "variant map" of the poem cascading down the left-hand side of the screen.

The Cornell Wordsworth Digital Collection (2016) edited by Stephen M. Parrish

• Contains digital copies of all important Wordsworth texts from 1798-1850.

William Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes: A Romantic Circles Digital Edition (2015) edited by Nicholas Mason, Shannon Stimpson, Paul Westover, and technical editors Billy Hall, and Jarom McDonald.

• This is an interesting take on a digital edition. The only linking is in the Table of Contents and footnote notation. They even include a four-version, parallel text in pdf format.

Thomas Gray Archive (2000) edited by Alexander Huber

• An interesting interpretation of what constitutes an "interactive" edition. They have enabled line-by-line commenting and annotating. The whole corpus is marked up in TEI-XML. Very transparent documentation.

What Intervention is My Project Making in the Field?

To the best of my knowledge, the projects linked above (excluding the Thomas Gray Archive of course) are the only digital editions of Wordsworth's texts that currently exist. Each has its merits and certainly its methods of representing the author's expansive and complex corpus. Nearly all of these editions use TEI-XML to draw connections and link between poems or works, however, each seems to miss the mark in terms of meeting its hypertextual potential. All three editions are, for the most part, print editions slightly adapted to an online space, not inherently dynamic editions which maximize the capabilities of their digital environments.

I want to avoid doing this at all costs as this was the primary hindrance to Iteration 1.0. I simply constructed a print edition online with little regard for innovation. Iteration 2.0 is meant to evert the process of the editor and enable the user to gradually consume the mechanics of the edition by inviting them to first experience the poem in an interactive way. Therefore, shifting the "editorial" significance away from myself and onto the poet who was, of course, the primary and most authoritative editor of these works. I hope that this will also reveal the creative potential of editing, that altering the state of a text is as much a visual/aesthetic disruption as it is a rhetorical one. I plan to do this by making a digital flipbook wherein the user selects the "path" or "version" of the poem they'd like to explore. So far, there are no digital flipbooks of Wordsworth's poetry–certainly none that endeavor to convey a critical function–but there are, however, a great deal of illustrated children's books.

I think the greatest intervention I'm making in my project is doing everything in an open-source, version-controlled environment. I received an email from Federico Brega, a DH archivist in Chile, this afternoon regarding the "Nutting" project and I couldn't believe it. He said he found my project through the #digitalhumanities tag on Instagram and googled it from there. He explained how my methods seem incredibly applicable to a project he's currently working on and he wants to keep in touch! I think this is exactly the type of intervention I'm ultimately seeking from my project. I want to spark conversations about how we communicate and transfer discourse in the digital age. Who knows what kinds of conversations could be had if all projects were open-source!

[taylorcate]

Primary and Secondary Sources:

My primary sources for the project are two-fold: manuscript facsimiles–the copyright for which currently resides with Adam Matthew–and facsimiles of the poem in print up to 1832–digitized by Google Books.

• See "Nutting": Textual History" for a near-complete transmission history of the poem.

Secondary sources, extracted from my wiki, "Editing Wordsworth: The Versioning Controversy"

*The first paragraph was added after the feedback for my Needs Assessment was released.

While many editing rationales and theories were considered during the development stages of this edition, no single editor has had quite so significant an impact on my editing style as Jerome McGann. Throughout my study of textual scholarship, McGann's theories on the sociology of texts always made the most sense to me—perhaps because, being a digital native myself, I have always harbored a propensity for large scale, dynamic, representations of textual histories such as you can only truly find in a digital edition. Many of McGann's writings have influenced my rationale including A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983), his 2014 book A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction, as well as his textual commentary and notes to Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. with Introduction, Apparatus, and Commentaries which he edited and published throughout the eighties and early nineties. Inspired by McGann's dedication to understand the text's whole transmission, I have endeavored to house a whole-text (or as near as is currently possible to a whole-text) transmission history for Wordsworth's poem "Nutting." Unlike the bower the young poet "deformed" and "sullied," I attempted to include as many witnesses in the poem's transmission as possible to provide my users with a text that, bolstered by its rich sociological history, challenges the notion that a work is conceived in a silo—remote from the messy and complicated influence of the actors in the transmission. Instead, I wanted to celebrate that messiness, to unveil the intricacies of composition and life-long editing (on the part of the author and the editors that took over the work after the poet's death) that led to the creation of not one but many versions of a wonderful poem, from manuscript to print publication.

There are certain recognized texts assembled by Wordsworth's long list of dedicated editors without which a variorum edition of his poetry would be extremely difficult to reconstruct. The first of these is of course The Cornell Wordsworth Collection, compiled by George Harris Healey (1957), which lists, in rich bibliographic detail, all of the existing witnesses in Wordsworth's transmission history. While I was already familiar with the manuscript copies of the poem, my knowledge of the print editions the poem appeared in was severely lacking. My method for reconstructing the print history of the poem was to select titles from the Cornell catalog that either explicitly stated including poems from Lyrical Ballads or were attempts at collected editions, then I ventured to find the editions through Google Books to confirm the poem was collected therein. This was a fairly seamless reconstruction, until I discovered that many of the later editions have yet to be digitized and made publicly available. The second text I referenced will come as a surprise to no Wordsworth scholar: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, edited by E. De Selincourt (1944). De Selincourt's edition is incredibly rich and I found the logic easy to follow. This is also the edition from which my reading-text derives. To confirm that De Selincourt's version of the poem was in fact the most subsequently anthologized version of "Nutting," I referenced other anthologies of Romantic poetry as well as John O. Hayden's critical edition William Wordsworth: The Poems (1977) which gave me ideas for editions to link for further reading and a timeline of the poet's life that I found incredibly helpful. Finally, a great deal of the information I included about the manuscript copies of the poems was passed down to me by my professor and mentor Daniel Robinson. I also referenced the digital collection-records at the Jerwood Center where I attended a short course in manuscript study under the direction of head curator Jeff Cowton. My primary function as compiler in this edition would have been sincerely complicated were I to reconstruct this history without the help of the editors that came before me in the transmission, and I am honored to have had the opportunity to count myself among them.

[taylorcate]

Responses to Questions Raised in Assignment Feedback:

Will Iteration 1.0 be included or represented somewhere in the project?

• I think it will be necessary to show Iteration 1.0 when I present the edition at the Wordsworth Trust and when I defend it in April, but I'm not sure Iteration 1.0 will be accessible directly from 2.0. I'm thinking the user will have to access the Wix site from the repo, not from the GitHub Pages site.

How much will you need to teach people about editions in order for them to fully engage with the site?

• To engage with the flipbook, I'm hoping I won't have to explain anything about editions for a user to have a full and interesting experience using it. That being said, however, once the user makes their way through the flipbook, I hope they will consume the other components of the edition to elevate their comprehension of a text being represented in this way. The site will open with the flipbook, but the explanation for all the edition's choices will be included in a sort of interactive appendix.

How prominent is the "Nutting" text in Wordsworth scholarship?

• "Nutting" is a significant text that represents a key theme in Wordsworth's poetry; the adult mind superimposed on childhood memory. Carried into The Prelude–Wordsworth's autobiographical epic poem–"Nutting" captures one of the poet's most memorable "spots of time." The poem is, however, a work unto itself and not a memory which could be contained in a simple aside. Though the poem has been passively collected in scholarly editions of Lyrical Ballads, almost no effort has been made to evert the poem's complex transmission history. Even less effort has been made to translate that history into an interactive commentary on the poet's drive to version the self.

  • One of the key things I want my edition to focus on is audience. The primary differences between versions of the poem have to do with who the speaker is addressing. As the audience changes, so too does the message or the perceived response to the message. Because I am creating this edition in an open source environment, I'm reaching unanticipated audiences and I feel this alters my edition's argument. Wordsworth was known for bringing conversational language into "high verse," effectively democratizing the medium he was working in. I feel my mission is similar; create a scholarly edition that does not immediately push non-academic audiences to the outskirts. One that engages users on a level that Wordsworth himself was aiming for.

What makes the editions you cite in your Landscape Scan interesting? What does and doesn't work?

• I fear I use the word interesting a bit negatively here. What I really mean is, the digital editions of Wordsworth's works that have been put together have a strange adherence to the print limitations of their predecessors. Take the Guide to the Lakes edition, for instance: the splash page for the edition is a Table of Contents. From there the edition attempts to include interactive elements, such as a geospatial map of the Lake District, but all it does it place pins on the locations referenced in the guide. Why doesn't the map let you click on the pins and open the section of text where the location is referenced? The name of the map is "Places Mentioned in the Guide to the Lakes" but none of the places are linked to the section of text that mentions them! This seems like an "interesting" lapse in imagination to me. It seems as though these digital editions spend more time describing the importance of their embedded tools in static webpages then they do making sure the tools work and are actually useful. I simply don't want this to be the case in my edition. I truly recognize the importance of documentation and of flushing out the editing rationale in writing, but being able to describe what something should do and making it happen are entirely different things.