Tablets Apps, or the future of the Scholarly Editons?

I was yesterday at a very interesting symposium entitled The Future Perfect of the Book organised by the Institute of English Studies. It has been an interesting mixture of people and of presentations. One in particular I would like to discuss (i.e. Elaine Treharne's keynote adress The Numbered days of the Page), but not now, in another post.
In this one I would like to report about the presentation I gave with Miguel Vieira and that builds on the research conducted by Patricia Searl for her MA dissertation on Digital Humanities at Kings' College London. Here is the abstract we submitted to the conference organisers:

The last 20 years have seen a rise of scholarly digital editions, which offer new, unexplored dimensions and depth to textual scholarship. The new possibilities opened up by the pioneering work of Peter Robinson and Jerome McGann’s charmed editors to the point that at the beginning of the millennium they seemed ready to switch to the digital medium. However, this promised switch did not happen and while many universities have adopted eBooks for course readings, digital textual scholarship seems not to have reached classrooms at all. In fact, an unpublished survey of twenty-two undergraduate syllabi in the US and UK has revealed that not one class had a single web edition as an assigned reading material. On the other hand, in commercial publishing the last couple of years have seen a boom in eBooks and eReaders. It is true though that eBooks look like very poor relatives of digital scholarly editions: in most cases they include the raw text with no additional features other than string searching. As such, eBooks look somewhat regressive, representing an evolution of the codex but not the revolution of the way we read texts which was promised by the advent of computers. Usability studies have demonstrated that reading on tablets is more enjoyable than reading on the screen of computers and, in some cases, more than reading print. But this is for general reading: does it also apply to highly sophisticated digital scholarly editions? Is the sophistication of such editions, as we have conceived them so far, the enemy of accessibility and user-friendliness? Are tablet apps a possible way to enhance the appeal of Digital Scholarly Editions? These are some of the questions that this paper will address.

and here are the slides we have used for the presentation

Tablet apps, or the future of Digital Scholarly Editions?

Comments? The presentation was very well received and we got plenty of nice feedback.
Early this week Miguel and I rehearsed the presentation within the DDH internal seminar and Raffaele Viglianti wrote a very nice summary of this event.

I will get back shortly on this topic, so stay tuned.

To Market! To Market! Academia in the Marketing Age

The 80's were supposed to be the decade of marketing and PR. Ah! Amateurs! They thought that doing a little bit of ads on the telly an on the newspapers was enough...

These days I seem to be spending most of my time organising marketing activities, advertising activities we can use for marketing, talking to people about marketing, writing advertising material, using all possible social networks to share all of the above and now blogging about it (meta-marketing?).

One of the most important duties of a Head of Teaching is, it appears, ensure that there are enough students around to justify the existence of a teaching programme and the job of colleagues. Quite scary, it you think of it. I'm not complaining, mind you, only reporting the fact and reflecting on it.

In the past we (Centre for Computing in the Humanities -- now Department of Digital Humanities -- at King's College London) have not been very good in letting people know what we were up to, in particular from a teaching point of view. We had thought (or so is my reading of the situation, as I was not involved in this thinkings) that our outstanding record of research would have been enough to attract students. We were wrong, so wrong. Students are not aware or not interested in research, as it happens, they are interested in knowing that there is some teaching going on and that they can gain a valuable qualification out of it. Funny that! So, now this trend has to change and here is the list of the initiatives I have undertaken these days:

• New marketing printed materials is being developed.We will start with foldable leaflets, then we will see
• A video will be produced early next year: I will need to have my hair done for the interview!
• Three virtual open days will be organised for potential MAs and PhD students
• An event on "Become a Digital Humanities PhD student" has been organised for the 1st of December
• The PhD seminar has been moved from our gloomy Seminar Room into the Anatomy Theatre Museum and Opened up to the public. Next week Seminar will be the first of the new Era!
• A lot of contacts are going on with King's Agents in Asia and in the US
• Our 2011-12 Students have organised a Facebook group from where they broadcast all our initiatives
• Social Media, in particular Facebook and Twitter are intensively used (by me, mostly) to spread the word about our activities

Will I be successful? Will our MA programme survive the wild cuts operated by the less illuminated cabinet Englad has seen since WWII? Stay tuned and you will have an answer!

At the TEI Technical Council: Genetic Criticism Encoding

I have to say that today I feel very pleased with myself: the TEI Technical Council has just approved the proposal for encoding modern manuscripts and genetic criticism. This will be available for all TEI users with the next release of TEI (sometimes around Christmas).

I have worked on this material for a long time now, and all started with a paper I presented at the Digital Humanities Conference in Ann Arbor, in 2007 (attention! if you click on it, it will open a 26MB PDF, so you want to be cautious). The paper has been published later as a chapter of a book:

E. Pierazzo. 'Digital genetic editions: the encoding of time in manuscript transcription'. Text Editing, Print and the Digital World, Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. M. Deegan and K. Sutherland (eds.), Ashgate: Aldershot, 2008, pp. 169–186.

After, within the MS SIG, a formal working group (chaired by Fotis Iannidis) was organised and then, after an exciting workshop held in Paris in 2009, a draft proposal was submitted to the Council in 2010 (it seems about right is that the Council is actually meeting in Paris, what a coincidence!).

In particular this proposal includes the possibility of transcribing the text page by page, line by line (instead of, say, chapter by chapter): I have discussed this, with Peter Stokes, in an article:

E. Pierazzo, P. A. Stokes. 'Putting the text back into context: a codicological approach to manuscript transcription'. Kodikologie und Paläographie im Digitalen Zeitalter 2 - Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 2. M. Rehbein, T. Schaßan, P. Sahle (eds.) Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2011, pp. 397-424, available from http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/4337/

The final approval for the proposal arrived after a night of readings and comments (see the thread in the Council mailing list) and some last discussions about grouping surfaces to encode leaves and in general multi-surfaced objects. But there we are: it is done.
This is of course not my work only, quite the contrary: if this model will be usable by real people in real projects it is because many have contributed generously. Here is the list of some of the people that contributed (I may be forgetting some... forgive me!): Fotis Iannidis, Malte Rehbein, Gregor Middell, Lou Burnard, Moritz Wissenbach, Gerrit Brüning and all the people in the Council: thank you all (and not only from me). Now I can't wait for the next release!

Oh Happy Day!

On Blooks and other oddities: the DH abstracts' Season

Last week I was preparing a lecture for my course on Digital Publishing on the Web 2.0 and Scholarly Publishing (this alone deserved a post...). I ment to talk about the relationship between Blogs and formal publications and I remember the case of the Julie/Julia project, a blog that was first turned into a book, then to an Hollywood movie. While I was doing my online enquiries, to my horror, I found out that, apparently, a book that is based on a blog is called a Blook: not kidding and not irony, look at this, there is a Blooker prize, nothing less (my partner in life declared he feels sick every time I mention it, and I'm not that far off either).

Now, this happen to be the DH abstracts' Season: every year, around the end of October, in a striking coincidence with Halloween, a small army of DHers get in an extraordinary excitement, with emails firing across countries and time zones, all trying to write as many abstract as possible to submit to the forthcoming Digital Humanities conference. Again, my partner in life is no exception. It just happens that this year submission draws on some thoughts expressed on his project blog. It just occurred to us, than, it might be a case of a Blabstract, an abstract based on a blog. In case his blabstract get accepted, he might even end up and giving a Blaper (which, by the way, is not a new coinage, even if it has a slightly different meaning), not to mention the possibility of publishing a Blarticle (again, not a new word!) in the proceedings! Oh well...

The points I was trying to make are two:

1. in the digital age, genres and media tend to cross-breed and melt one into another
2. When one gets a linguistic creativity attack, the risk is not knowing where to stop...

Happy DH abstracts' Season!

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