The Role of Technology in Scholarly Editing

I just came back from sunny Würzburg where, facilitated by the impeccable organisation of Malte Rehbein and the splendid hospitality of Fotis Jannidis, I have spent a few days with colleagues and friends at the TEI Members' Meeting discussing over the future of the TEI and Philology in the Digital Age. If this Members Meeting will be remembered for something, it will certainly be the chocolate-flavoured keynote delivered by Edward Vanhoutte (the slides are also available).

I have given a quite controversial paper there and I have been asked to share slides and content of such paper. As I'm a bit lazy (a.k.a. busy), it will take a while until I'm able to write my considerations down (they will come, I promise!!), but at least I can share the slides:

The Role of Technology in Scholarly Editing

You can read the abstract here (it will take a bit of scrolling, there is no direct linking to the single abstract, sorry, but you can take advantage of the many other interesting abstracts present there!), or down here:

In the past years two complementary but somewhat diverging tendencies have dominated the field of digital philology: the creation of models for analysis and encoding, such as the TEI, and the creation of tools or software to support the creation of digital editions for editing, publishing or both (Robinson 2005, Bozzi 2006).


These two tendencies are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as the creation of models can represent either the underlying structure or an exporting format for the development of tools. However, these two approaches have often been perceived in opposition, as a dichotomy. On the one hand we have the XML enthusiasts, the editors-as-encoders who apply XML markup to their texts and perhaps also develop publication strategies; on the other hand we have those who support out-of-the-box tools (the ‘magic’ or ‘black’ boxes), who proactively seek the development of fully comprehensive tools that present user-friendly interfaces with the explicit purpose of ‘covering the wires’, in particular hiding the much-abhorred angled brackets. But what are the implications of these positions with respect to the future development of digital (or computational) philology? How realistic is it to ask ‘traditional’ textual editors to turn into encoders? Conversely, how realistic and sustainable is the creation of ‘magic boxes’?


In the past I have studied the difficulties and theoretical implications of using a TEI-based editorial model for an editorial team that was highly geographically dispersed (Pierazzo 2010, but presented as a paper in 2008). On that occasion I argued that the development of ‘magic boxes’ is a very ambitious item to have on the digital philology agenda because every edition, every scholar needs a very specialized, tailored set of tools. In the same article I expressed the opinion that, even if the scholars do not feel comfortable in using tags-on-view XML and the TEI, this was the only reasonable approach for digital scholarly editions. A couple of year later, my judgment has been mitigated somewhat. This was brought about largely by the interesting article by Tim McLoughlin (2010, to be read in combination with Rehbein 2010) which presents in an insightful way the difficulties and resistances in turning a consolidated editorial model into a digital TEI-based one, combined with the experience I gained on some collaborative research projects at King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities: these together have triggered questions about the role of technology when it comes to digital scholarly editing. As a matter of fact, the evolution of the editor into an editor-encoder has yet to be investigated in full; at the moment it seems that the attention has been mostly devoted to the steep learning curve necessary to master the techniques of encoding in XML but without reflecting on the deep and sometimes unwelcome changes in the editorial work and workload once a new editorial model is undertaken, particularly when that model is based on TEI. This model sometimes sees the editor-as-encoder evolving also in the editor-as-programmer, the editor-as-web-designer and editor-as-(self-)publisher (Sutherland and Pierazzo 2011). These changes in the editorial work and role of the editors necessarily result in somewhat parallel changes in the final editorial products.


On the other hand the claim for the magic box seem to have receded somewhat, and we have witnessed the appearance of the interesting experience of creating configurable and standard-based tools that have the less ambitious goal of trying to help particular stages of the editorial work (collation, creation of stemmas and critical apparatus, transcription, annotation); this evolution is represented at best, in my opinion, by the tools developed within the Interedition (in particular with CollateX) and TextGrid projects.


This paper will briefly present the background outlined above, and then turn to fundamental issues that arise from it about the nature of editors and editing for digital editions. In particular, it will address the following questions:

1. Which are the competencies necessary for digital editors?
2. Which are the roles that digital editors are expected to cover?
3. What do editors expect the technology to do for them?
4. Which parts of the editors’ work should be assisted by the computer and which must still be performed in the traditional way?
5. In which ways is digital editing different from traditional editing, if any?

Failing to understand how technology can really contribute to the editorial work will have serious consequences in the development and ultimately existence of digital editions.


The paper will address these theoretical and methodological questions making use of concrete examples, particularly from the Jane Austen Digital Edition and from the ongoing editorial experience of the Early English Laws project.

Bibliography:

• Bozzi, A. (2006). ‘Electronic Publishing and Computational Philology’. In The Evolution of Texts: Confronting Stemmatological and Genetical Methods, C. Macé, P. Baret, A. Bozzi and L. Cignoni (eds.). Pisa-Roma Istituti Editorali e Poligrafici Internazionali.
• Pierazzo, E. (2010). ‘Editorial Teamwork in a Digital Environment: The Edition of the Correspondence of Giacomo Puccini’. In Rehbein, M. and Ryder, S. (eds.). Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie, vol. 10, pp. 91-110. Also available at: computerphilologie.tu-darmstadt.de/jg08/pierazzo.html 
• McLouglin, T. (2010). Bridging the Gap. In Rehbein, M. and Ryder, S. (eds.). Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie, vol. 10, pp. 37–54. Also available at:computerphilologie.tu-darmstadt.de/jg08/mclough.pdf
• Rehbein, M. (2010). ‘The Transition from Classical to Digital Thinking. Reflections on Tim McLoughlin, James Barry and Collaborative Work’. In Rehbein, M. and Ryder, S., (eds). Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie, vol. 10, pp. 55–67. Also available at: computerphilologie.tu-darmstadt.de/jg08/rehbein.pdf 
• Robinson, P. M. W. (2005). ‘Current Issues in Making Digital Editions of Medieval exts  ¬– or, Do Electronic Scholarly Editions Have a Future?’. Digital Medievalist, 1(1). Available at: www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/1.1/robinson/ 
• Sutherland, K., and Pierazzo, E. (2011). The Author’s Hand: from Page to Screen. In Deegan M., and McCarty W. (eds.), Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities. Aldershot: Ashgate (forthcoming).
• CollateX: https://launchpad.net/collatex 
• Early English Laws: www.earlyenglishlaws.ac.uk
• Interedition: www.interedition.eu
• Jane Austen Digital Edition: www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html
• TextGrid: www.textgrid.de

What Texts (of Manuscripts) are, really

Ok, I give up. It is time for me to enter in the arena and give my definition of Text, as I gave it during my last paper at DH at Reading.
I argue that to determine what a text IS is not that complicated (?), what’s complicated is to establish how it works and how it relates to its “support”.
So, here is my definition.

A text is a linguistic architecture that conveys a meaning which is potentially understandable to at least one group of receivers which have the capabilities to decipher the code in which the message is encoded.

With this definition I connect the theory of text with the theory of communication, but, mind you I am only speaking of texts contained, bared by manuscripts.
Let's consider for a moment the following "classic" diagram of the theory of communication:

                                  CODE        
Source --> SENDER --> Channel --> RECEIVER --> Destination
Message                       Noise                             Message’

Is this model helpful to understand texts within manuscripts? Let's try to understand what these terms mean in our case (i.e. digitised texts contained in manuscripts). Let's then have for the Code

• Language
• Grammar
• Syntax
• Rhetoric
• Orthography
• Writing system, conventions…

Which are the factors that can make the code hard to decipher? The main are time and space, which is to say diachronic and diatopic variations which  force us to modify our diagramme as follows, inserting CODE' and CODE''.

                  CODE'           CODE         CODE''
Source --> SENDER --> Channel --> RECEIVER --> Destination
Message                          Noise                           Message’

Of course, this factors are only the most common one when talking of ancient texts transmitted by manuscripts, but they are not by any menas , the only one. In fact, this new diagramme looks familiar to humanities people, in particular if we substitute the CODE with the terminology introduce be De Saussure:

                 PAROLE       LANGUE      PAROLE
Source --> SENDER --> Channel --> RECEIVER --> Destination
Message                          Noise                           Message’

So, we have to add to differences in time and space also differences in understanding and personal usage of the language.
Let's now consider the Channel, which in our case can be understood as follows:

• Scroll
• Codex (Manuscript)
• Printed book
• The screen of a computer
• The screen of a mobile phone
• Audio
• The eyes/brain (perceptive network)

And finally, let's consider the Noise, which, again in our case, can be found

• In the writing system
• In the writing conventions
• In the style of writing
• In the support
• In the layout
• In the screen colours
• In the pronunciation

Is this schematisation helpful to understand what is going on when doing a transcription, when, that is, we separate the text from its support?

I think it shows, at very least, how much of interpretation and subjectivity this operation implies, pace all the supporters of the objectivity of the transcription. It also shows how many things can go wrong here and how much understanding and skills and business of transcription is...

How can we reduce the distance between Message and Message' ? Well, I think I'll keep it for another post!

Restaurants in London where I love to eat

Perhaps this blog should have been entitled "Confession of a Digital Humanist with a passion for Good Food", but I guess passion for good food and cookery are strictly related anyway.

Some of my new international students have asked me to give them advice on where to eat in London, so here I am with the list of my favourite restaurants. Please feel free to add more suggestions!

• Thai Square: I normally go to the on on Shaftesbury Avenue: outstanding! #thai
• Tas, there is another one at London Bridge equally good: cheap and delicious #turkish
• Sagar in Covent Garden, really amazing!  Did I mention cheap? #vegetarian #indian 
• Bali Bali in Shaftesbury Avenue  #indonesian
• Kasturi in Leytonstone High road #indian #nepalese
• Kulu Kulu in Covent Garden #japanese
• Gaucho in Canary Wharf #argentinian
• Anatolia Cafe in Leyton: beautiful, unpretentious #turkish
• O'Neill's Pub in front of the British Library and in Leytonstone (and probably elsewhere!)  #irish
• King Edward VII in Stratford: gastro pub #british
• In Westfield at Stratford we tried so far the Vietnamese, Caribbean, Chinese, Malaysian: all great!
• Colbeh at Edgwar Rd #persian
• Thailander in Stratford #thai
• Le pain quotidien in South Kensington, but others are not bad either #belgian

The Future of the TEI

John Unsworth, interim chair of the TEI Consortium (TEI-C) has requested that candidates
for the Board and Council, and continuing members of the Board and Council, address some
questions on strategic issues related to the TEI. As I have been nominated for the Board,
and following James
Cummings example I decided to post here are my answers.

1) Should the TEI cease to collect membership fees, and cease to pay for meetings, publications, services, etc.?

No. I think the activities supported by the fees are extremely important,

for instance SIG grants, projects and Meetings. I would rather see a more

balanced expenditure with less money used for travels and more money for

more interesting activities.

2) Assuming paid membership continues. should institutional members have a choice between paying in cash and paying by supporting the travel of their employees to meetings, or committing time on salary to work on TEI problems?

I don't see why not: contributing to the TEI can take as many forms that

the TEI consider important and relevant for its activities. This doesn't

sound like a big innovation though, but very much like the partner

institutions which might be extended to include this kind of arrangement,

though without necessarily having a member on the Board. There could be,

for instance, different levels of contribution from partner institutions.

3) Should the TEI have individual members (paying or not) who can vote to elect
people to the board and/or council?

Yes: individual members should be able to elect people just as

institutional ones do.

4) Should the email discussions of the TEI Board be publicly
accessible?

Yes: there might be some topics that are really sensitive in which case

there might be some kind of privacy setting on a topic or something, but

in general I think this should be the exception, not the rule.

5) Should the Board and the Council be combined into a single body, with
subsets of that group having the responsibilities now assigned to each separate
group?

Not necessarily: Board and Council have very different functions and

activities and work better separately. There should be a much closer

relation between the two, though: I have served 4 years on the Council
and

I have to say very little of the activities of the Board ever reached us.

I have no means of knowing if the converse is true as well. On a related

topic, I think that there are far too many elected people between the

Council and the Board: 12 people on the Council and 8 on the Board,

meaning there are 20 people's travels to support, which is really a
lot!

I would welcome a reduction of numbers there.

Given that, in the next two years, which of the following should be the TEI's highest
priority? Pick only one:

• a) providing services that make it easy for scholars to publish and use TEI texts online
• b) providing workshops, training, and other on-ramp services that help people understand why they might want to use TEI and how to begin to do so
• c) encouraging the development of third-party tools for TEI users
• d) ensuring that large amounts of lightly but consistently encoded texts (e.g., TEI Tite) are generated and made publicly available, perhaps in a central repository or at least through some centrally coordinated portal
• e) developing a roadmap for P6 that positions the TEI in relation to other standards (HTML5, RDF, etc.)
• f) tackling hard problems not addressed in other encoding schemes, in order to maximize the expressive and interpretive power of TEI

I pick (a) hoping that it includes also a better design of the website, more
tutorial and support material. I think there is still a serious need for outreach and
evangelisation: the more complex the TEI gets in order to respond to scholarly needs, the
more need for tutorials and 'getting started' material there is.

I have also written an electoral statement, which follows:

After having served on the TEI Council for two consecutive mandates, I am now
delighted to have been nominated for election to the TEI Board. The recent events have
demonstrated that governance of the TEI requires some further thought in spite of the recent
modifications to the bylaws, in particular with respect to the role of the Board and the way
it manages its activities. The recent crisis and the way it has been handled were
unacceptable to many of the people that have generously contributed to the growth and health
of the TEI in the 30 years or so of its history. This, I believe, has damaged both the TEI
itself and the field of Digital Humanities in general, as witnessed by the shock and
bewilderment expressed by the community on TEI-L and on many social networks (e.g. Twitter, Facebook and Google+). These events, as well as the request from the Interim Chair of the Board for proposals about the future of the TEI, call for a deep re-thinking of the role of the TEI community and its relationship with the Board and Council. If I am elected to serve on the Board, I will engage in helping to move governance of the TEI toward a more transparent way of working, ensuring that broad consent is sought and pursued not only among the elected members of the Board and the Council but also among the community at large – a community represented mainly but not only by contributors to TEI-L. I have already made some proposals on TEI-L to which I plan to remain faithful, but I will be more than happy to also consider all other proposals (such as, for instance, the direct election of the TEI chair) which go in the direction of more transparency and collegiality in the governance of the
TEI.

New Year, New Students, New DHers

A new academic year is about to start, the lights of the old one have not yet faded and not all dissertations have yet been handed in, but we are now getting ready for the new cohort of students arriving from all over the planet.
I'm very excited about this new coming year, I have to admit: I had much more time to prepare with respect to last year and therefore I'm enjoying this liminal experience very much: all is new and sparkling, the reading lists are shining and I'm very much looking forward the new generation of DHers.

It will be a very exciting year also institutionally: we will be offering three new courses within the MA in Digital Humanities which are:

• Web Technologies: all about XHTML, CSS, Javascript and web design delivered by the loving hands of Beatriz Caballero and Raffaele Viglianti
• Digital English: all about digital resources for English studies, delivered by the experts hands of John Lavagnino
• Digital Resources for Historical Studies all about which resources are available to study history, delivered byt DDH rising star, Peter Stokes

What will I be doing then? I will be teaching Digital Publishing: from Gutenberg to Jobs (Steve, that is: yes, I will talk about iPads!) in the first term and Advanced Text Technologies in the second term: the content of both courses have been deeply updated, but the real novelty will be the new module I'm preparing for the following year: Digital Editing: only the brave!

I just realised this is my second post of the day... my pattern of using this blog is, I have to admit, very random, nothing for months and then two  in day... oh well!

Digital Editing

Working on a revamp of the MA in Digital Humanities at King's I have started to think about creating a new module where I can teach something I care about and I am good at: Digital Editing.

I spent a bit of time browsing Lisa Spiro's Zotero Group (terrific resource, if you ask me!) and I have realised that none of the syllabi listed there speak about digital editing, there are a lot of them that cover XML and the TEI, but none explicitly address the issue of editing digitally, which is a bit weird, considering the number of articles and papers at conferences that discuss it. I think the reason is that it is considered a topic that is a bit too advanced for an MA programme (which is a bit weird as I studied editing during my BA back in Italy... )

The other possibility is that it might be considered too connected to a "traditional" humanities discipline more than to DH, namely literature (English, German, Italian...) or History, or Philosophy, or... which is true in a sense, but editing is also a trans-disciplinary methodology. When it comes to digital, even more so. There are in fact a set of competencies and methods that can be applied across the board, namely:

• data modelling
• text encoding
• text analysis
• imaging
• web design

All of which, of course, in addition to the traditional competencies that are required to do such a job, such us:

• understanding of what a primary source is and how it works
• understanding of the text one has to edit
• understanding of the circumstance in which the text was produces
• understanding of which circumstances the text has circulated and has arrived to us
• the use of such understandings in the act of editing

Is there here a scope for an interdisciplinary module for our MA in Digital Humanities? This is  what I'm trying to find out. Any suggestion?

Check out my new website! Or: does Digital Identity matter?

At the end I have given up and have created my very own website:

www.elenapierazzo.org

I have been pondering the need of a website since long now, but I have always been refrained by two considerations:

1. Does the fact that one has a website imply a certain level of narcism? 
2. Are the advantages of having a website more relevant than the hassle of having to maintain it up to date?

I think I can answer with a 'yes' to the first question, there is a sort of narcissism  implied in it, but not more than the one of having a presence in any of the social network spaces (by the way, I do have a presence in most of them as well, just in case you were wondering!)
This consideration leads to the second point: which are the advantages of having a website? I think the most important one is to represent the strongest statement of your digital identity, meaning that if you build it in the right way, your own website will be the first thing that comes out when people google you. This might be trivial, but it could be of a capital relevance for your professional life, to promote your activities, your research, what you care the most.
The importance of taking care our own digital identity has been emphatically stressed by Melissa Terras in her now legendary plenary keynote address at the Digital Humanities 2010 conference in London (and I remember the shivers of horror when some of our most horrible websites where on display...) The news often report about people being less than careful in posting on FB or Twitter with horrible consequences for their professional life, therefore we have  to conclude the DI indeed matter an dthat, yes, the hassle is subsided by the advantage.

Oh, yes, the fact that King's has decided not to support staff web spaces any longer is also a contributing factor! ;)

So, which is my recipe for a good DI?

1. Check what happens when you Google your name
2. Make sure you control the first, say, 5 results that come out (and if not, make it happen!) and make sure that their content is what you want people to know about you
3. If you have a website, make sure that it is valid according to W3C standards (my perfect recipe is XHTML strict + CSS2): if you are a DH person I don't need to explain why, right?
4. If you have a website, make sure that it is usable and user friendly
5. If you have a website, keep it up to date. If you have a blog, a twitter account, do the same. DI is terribly time consuming, but there is no escape.
6. Remember: Twitter is not a private space! maybe you have that impression because you can chat to your mates as it was a private chat  or email, but it is not, definitely not, so don't post there what you don't want is read by your present/future boss
7. Protect your privacy within Facebook: they seems to be changing the rules every fortnight, so keep alert!
8. Be fair to your friends: if you make public a photograph of them they don't like, soon or later they might be tempted to do the same