Jamal Russell. “The Edition.” WhatEvery1Says Project, http://we1s.ucsb.edu. July 3, 2018. http://we1s.ucsb.edu/the-edition/.
As it pertains to its relevance to the WhatEvery1Says project and the digital humanities writ large, the edition paradigm must be considered as a theoretical construct that is composed of three separate conceptualizations of the edition: the scholarly edition itself, the digital scholarly edition, and the scholarly edition of a literary system as described by Katherine Bode in her forthcoming book A New World of Fiction. What unites these three theories of the edition is their consistent focus on the centrality of the document as a repository for the historical situatedness of discourse, and the commitment to constructing a scholarly apparatus that will not only preserve as much of the material specificities of the document as possible, but will also function as a tool by which the historical context of the documents in question can be conveyed properly to its readers.
The relationship that the WE1S project has to the edition paradigm, and specifically the scholarly edition of a literary system is quite fraught. While the WE1S project can learn much from the edition paradigm, particularly by examining how the WE1S project and those theorizing the scholarly edition of a literary system such as Bode are invested in the way in which eachproject’s respective objects of analysis (the word/topic/concept examined through the topicmodeling interface for the former; the document for the latter) convey the historical movements of discourse over time, it must also be understood that these are two separate projects. I say this because the fundamental concepts underpinning the projects differ, the material means by which each project pursues their goals differ, and their engagement with the media ecologies of their objects of analysis differ as well.
The second element of the Edition paradigm, the theory and practice of creating a digital scholarly edition, follows from both McKenzie’s theories of bibliography, as well as the issues surrounding the material affordances of historical documents and the processes underpinning the construction of the scholarly edition. Concerning the former, what is most notable aboutMcKenzie’s definition of text is that it does not limit itself to print-based documents. He, in fact, expands it to include “verbal, visual, oral, and numeric data, in the form of maps, prints, andmusic, of archives of recorded sound, of films, videos, and any other computer-stored information, everything in fact from epigraphy to the latest forms of discography.”11 With thelatter issues articulated above in mind, two questions follow from McKenzie’s words: First, how will the new media of the day allow bibliographers, textual critics, and scholarly editors to do the historical and critical bridgework that defines those academic fields? And second: how will the shift in medium from the book to the computer (bracketing for now the complex questions surrounding the computer as a medium) affect how the material affordances of the historically/culturally situated work will be represented using the scholarly edition apparatus?
McGann’s claim is worth investigating further. Scholarly editions were initially developed to inresponse to the complexity of literary works, specifically works that had “evolved through a long historical process,” as the Bible or Shakespeare’s works had done.14 The different mechanisms developed to deal with these transformations (the majority of which fall under the generalumbrella of the “scholarly edition”) were delimited by the affordances of the book as a medium,and how those affordances affect how information is organized and accessed. The organization of information in a codex is linear but able to be accessed randomly, the structure of which is revealed to the reader by a table of contents, appendices, indexes, introductions to the edition, etc., all of which can be used to aid navigation through the text and access to information about the text the edition is built around.15 Nevertheless, the apparatus’s representation of historical andmaterial specificities of documents within a print-based scholarly edition will be linear, and even historically teleological at times.
McGann’s initial answer to these issues of the print-based scholarly edition was his second example: The Rossetti Archive, which began development in 1993 and was completed in 2008. The Rossetti Archive was designed to escape the limitations of the print-based digital edition as described in Radiant Textuality by orienting the user’s focus not on the single textual documentthat has been reconstructed and contextualized by a given textual critic(s), but on the relationship between the numerous documentary remains of a given author or set of authors. This is necessary because for the Rossetti Archive, the documentary remains it is constructed around are not only very numerous, but the history of those documents is not fractured or incomplete. Thus, the goal of an edition or archive crafted around the works of a Dante Gabriel Rossetti (or, for that matter,a William Blake) is to “sort out the relationships of the documents and put all of those relationships on display” in a manner that conveys both the media poetics (so to speak) of theauthors’s works, as well as the historical context within which the works operated.19 To use the words of Hans Walter Gabler, the 70,000 digital files and 42,000 hyperlinks of the Archive are organized and designed within its architecture so that any given user is able to not merely shift their focus between the relationships between different types of documents and media forms, but are also able to generate and view material instantiations of the different webs of discourses running throughout a given digital edition.
Because computational media affords this mapping of relationships between works and versions of works as manifested in different documents, it is important that as many specificities of thedocuments’s original media are retained as possible. Mats Dahlstrom terms this process a media translation of materials from one medium or document type (print, poem, painting, codex, etc.) to a born-digital format that allows specific features of the document in question to be“preserved…carved into the flesh of the new medium and be expressed by its architecture and the language of its web of signs.”20 While Dahlstrom calls this a translation and Sahle calls it arepresentation, it would be more prudent to call this process a remediation (to use the term introduced by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin introduced in their book of the same name) or a transcoding (to use Lev Manovich’s term introduced in The Language of New Media). I say this because the latter two terms highlight in a more theoretically and media-specific manner how the process Dahlstrom describes constitutes an employment of new media for the purpose of representing not only the relationships between documents within a given historical context and milieu, but also a modeling of their medium-specific effects upon their readers.21 In other words,Bolter/Grusin and Manovich’s terms articulate how this process is constitutive of the effects of the shift to a digital/electronic paradigm on the construction of digital scholarly editions.
A definition of the digital scholarly edition would thus look something like this: “Scholarly digital editions are scholarly editions that are guided by a digital paradigm in their theory, method and practice.”26 However, even a definition as seemingly simple as this one contains complexities that must be teased out. For example, the first clause of that definition, “scholarly digital editions are scholarly editions,” connotes a point that Sahle makes two pages prior to his definition, namely that while “digital editions are essentially different from printed editions in their content, structure and role,” they still share the same subject and have the same goals eventhough the printed and digital editions may be working on different scales in terms of medium, format, and scale of materials.27 Even though he provides a definition of the digital scholarly edition, Sahle does not see himself as describing a fundamentally different object. Rather, he is describing the same type of object constructed on a different analytical and material level, the definition of which still falls under the general definition of the scholarly edition itself. The definition of the digital scholarly edition is needed to make the level distinction that is so important to textual critics such as McGann, as “changes in our technological and media environment make us aware of the fact that there is an alternative to the print edition. The print edition is no longer the edition but becomes recognizable as a particular form.”28 It is thisdistinction in form, or level in McGann’s words, that makes the necessary operations of digital scholarly editions such as the Rossetti Archive, operations that were not affordances of the print- based scholarly edition, available for their users.
While Sahle uses the singular form in the quote above, when directly addressing the distinctionbetween print and digital scholarly editions, he addresses the issue using plurals: “the differenceis not so much between editions and digital editions, but between the various forms of editions.”29 This underscores another anxiety that plagues discussions of the digital scholarly editions: for many, “there is no universally accepted definition of digital scholarly edition.”30When discussing digital editions, one must confront the fact that “scholars continuouslyexperiment with old and new tools in order to achieve the optimal digital experience of amanuscript and…the resulting projects often differ greatly.”31 Thus, while one can discuss the particulars of a project such as the Rossetti Archive, discussing the larger contexts of digital editions becomes difficult because one must confront the fact that, as Dahlstrom notes, “to eventalk about digital editions as one particular type of edition is…debatable.”32 When one does attempt to make a sharp distinction between the print and digital edition, what they are in fact dividing are the conception of the edition of the product of the affordances of a particular medium, and the edition as the product of specific “epistemological foundation[s] andtheoretically based [strategies].”33 Discussions of the digital scholarly edition that merge the two perspectives will have to discuss how particular approaches to merging the perspectives result in particular types of digital editions designed to provide specific perspectives on a document or a set of documents to its users.
network of internal links and external connections that can be represented as conventions (that is, classifications), the total system must rest in a single perspective that reflects the conception of the system generally agreed upon by its users, and the system must have the flexibility to license and store an indefinite number of particular views of its artifacts, their relations, and the system as a whole.35 What this is meant to result in is an edition conceived as a philological machine that provides a set of materials and documents to the user for the purpose of studying the historical, cultural, and material means by which webs of discourses run throughout the edition’s contents.This is not a conception of the digital scholarly edition that only addresses either the medium or theoretical/epistemological foundations, but merges the two.
This version of the digital scholarly edition underpins his concept of a “philology in a new key,”which itself is the basis of the scholarly edition of a literary system introduced by Katherine Bode in her book A World of Fiction. Both McGann and Bode consider philology in a new key as an implementation of philological principles outlined above and their use for navigating the complexity of the documentary record to respond to the challenges posed by digitization. Fromthis, Bode describes the scholarly edition of a literary system as “a model of literary works thatwere published, circulated and read- and thereby accrued meaning- in a specific historical context, constructed with reference to the history of transmission by which the documentary evidence of those works is constituted.”36 This form of the digital scholarly edition is comprisedof a curated dataset that offers a “stable and accessible model of the existence and interconnections of literary works in the past, and a critical apparatus that reveals the hypothetical nature of that modeled literary system and establishes it as a reliable basis for analysis.”37 The scholarly edition of a literary system builds on the approach that projects such as the Rossetti Archive takes to its organization of materials by emphasizing not only the collection of the materials themselves, but the necessity of organizing them and constructing an apparatus around them that properly represents to the user the contexts within which the documents in question operate. It is an approach meant to use the theoretical and material apparatus of the scholarly edition to “attend to the specificity of collections from which documents weregathered, the different documentary manifestations incorporated, and the partiality of thedigitized record” and represent these facets of a specific set of documents to the user of a givenedition.38 In this sense, the scholarly edition of a literary system is a crystallized, theoretical reaction to the way in which new media has transformed perspectives on what the scholarly edition is, and how the use and objective of said scholarly apparatus has changed with use creation of digital scholarly editions alongside their print-based counterparts.
The immediate question that comes to mind for the WhatEvery1Says project is: can the WE1S project be considered as a scholarly edition of a literary system? Or, rather, is it a project that, while having similarities to Bode’s conception of where the scholarly edition is going, is something quite different? I would argue that the scholarly edition of a literary system and the WE1S project, while sharing a similar goal of charting the historical transformations of discourse as represented in a corpus of documents, are distinct in three ways: the two projects are conceptually different undertakings, they have materially different methods of achieving their goals, and finally, the way in which the workings of media ecologies figure in the goals of each project differ in a quite fundamental manner.
In other words, the WE1S project is not focused on how documents can provide a researcher with the sense of the documents’s historical context as a component of an interpretive apparatus. Rather, it is concerned with how the organization of words and phrases within a corpus of documents allows one to understand the relations of concepts by which discourses about the humanities and the liberal arts are advanced. To put it more simply: Bode is more worried about the relations between documents and the historical contexts that can be gleaned from said documents, while the WE1S project is more worried about the concepts about the humanities advanced via the language constituting the documents, and how that language runs across the corpus and throughout a given temporal window (currently 1981-2014).
digital apparatus, as well as how that digital apparatus allows for an analysis of those materials and their historical contexts. The WE1S project is more interested in creating a digital apparatus and methodology for decomposing the carefully collected documents constituting its corpus into words. The relations between the words themselves are analyzed for the purpose of seeing what kinds of concepts and relations between concepts are brought forth, as well as what longitudinalchanges in the discourse around concepts such as the “humanities” develop. It is for this reason that topic modeling has, to this point, been the main analytical tool by which the project pursues this goal.
designed to tell the researcher what cannot be immediately gleaned merely be reading the corpus of documents. It is for this reason that Bode finds modeling to be a potentially useful element of the data-rich literary history that the scholarly edition of a literary system is meant to present to agiven reader. As Bode notes, modeling “[offers] a mechanism through which to interrogate andrefine conceptions of literary works and systems.”46 However, modeling by itself does not provide a mechanism by which one can “recognize and represent the inevitably transactionalnature of the documentary record.”47 Because it cannot attend directly to the often-fraught history of the documents constituting an edition, it requires an apparatus that does attend to thosehistorical and material specificities for the researcher’s use.
These differences are magnified when one examines the differences in the scholarly apparatuses that each project employs to construct and analyze their objects of study. As with other editions, the scholarly edition of a literary system places tremendous importance on the integrity of the document itself, as it is through the material specificities of the document itself that a researcher will be able to glean the historical contexts within which the document works. It is for this reasonthat Bode’s work with the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) Trove database of digitized historical newspapers puts so much emphasis on the necessity of an “archaeology of a mass-digitization,” that is, a “critical analysis of the amplifications and exclusions created bycollection and remediation.”48 The conceptual underpinnings of such a call are not too different from those underpinning the use of Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards when representing texts employed in the creation of digital editions. Particularly, both share what John Lavigninoterms a “belief in transcription,” the ability to use text encoding practices to “reproduce…aselection of features from that object” that one is transcribing.49 In this sense, the belief intranscription underpinning Bode’s project is also the same belief informing Dahlstrom’s conceptof media translation, that practices of remediation and transcoding can be used to overcome the media-specificity of a document for the purpose of preserving the historicity of the document in a new format. The scholarly apparatus that emerges from such practices is, like the print-based and digital edition, an apparatus both constructed around the transcoded historical and material specificities of the documents within the apparatus. Accordingly, it is also built to excavate and articulate an argument about those selfsame historical specificities of the document to the researchers constituting its audience.
A discussion of the WE1S project’s scholarly apparatus, the WE1S Research Environment,begins with a discussion of the affordances of the topic modeling interface. Given that the objective of a topic modeling interface is to concisely and effectively render to a researcher the most important information needed to determine how words resolve into topics and how topics cohere into larger concepts, what an interface such as the DFR-Browser does and does not convey about the corpus becomes quite a trenchant issue. This is especially important one is invested in the relationships between topics and how the interrelations between concepts structure discourse about the humanities and liberal arts across time. For this reason, there is always a tension between the goals of the project and how the topic model interface obfuscates the full architecture of its topics for the sake of concision and effectiveness. This leads to problems such as top articles within topics that contain none of the top twenty words of saidtopic, and solutions such as the method Miriam Posner uses when engaging with an interface’srepresentation of knowledge: not only using a given interface to communicate knowledge about a given corpus, object, or discourse, but presenting it in such a manner that we are asked to“question the purpose of an interface” and what different interface designs ask of their users.50These problems closely mirror Bode’s investment in the historically situated document, in that both put a particular importance on the function of the object of analysis within the context of the goals of each project.
The difference between the two treatments of the principle objects of analysis emerges when one examines how each object is constructed for such analyses and considerations. While the method of constructing transcoded documents for digital editions is based around preserving as many of the qualities of the original document as the new medium will allow, the WE1S research environment decomposes documents into their component words, as it is on this level that the analyses of topics and the resolution of topics into concepts proceeds. Because it is through this algorithmic decomposition of the corpus’s documents that the creation of the DFR-Browser interface is possible, it is necessary that the WE1S Research Environment that creates these models be fed not representative facsimiles of its documents, but plain text versions of thosedocuments with accompanying metadata. Plain text, as “the most tractable format forcomputational analysis,” can easily be ingested, cleaned, processed, and rebuilt as the component parts of a DFR-Browser interface by the Virtual Workspace System employed by the WE1S project. In short, whereas the methods of working with the material affordances of documents within the scholarly edition of a literary system are fundamentally preservationist, the methods used by the WE1S project are fundamentally generative: one preserves the affordances and materialities of the original document as much as possible because the relevant histories the project is interested in inhere in those qualities, the other project generates new objects of analysis because it better allows its researchers to analyze the workings of its objects of analysis, that being the word, the topic, and the concept.
Finally, I would also note that there is a fundamental difference between the scholarly edition of a literary system and the WE1S project that emerges from how the two projects deal with themedia ecologies of their objects of analysis. The term is used by Matthew Fuller to describe the“massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter” that coalesces into a mode or dynamics that “properly form or make sensible an object or process.”51 Both projects are invested in the workings of media ecologies and what they express about the historical transformations of discourses. However, both the scholarly edition of a literary system (and scholarly editions in general) and the WE1S project are focused on the workings of quite different media ecologies. The scholarly edition of a literary system is focused very tightly on the media ecology of the document, and how the material and conceptual“dynamics of arrangement” governing the coalescence of “words, concepts, footnotes, [and] the mechanics of a book” in general coalesce into an object that expresses a kind of historical situatedness that a scholar can convey to a reader through the scholarly apparatus of the edition.52The WE1S project focuses more broadly, on media ecologies through which topics interrelate and congeal into concepts that generate and direct discourses over time. It is for this reason that, while the project began by building a corpus of newspapers published over a 30-plus year period, it has since begun to expand its scope to other forms of journalistic media such as television, radio, and podcasts. Because the objects of analysis are the word, topic, and concept rather than the document itself, it allows the WE1S project to incorporate a wider range of materials than the scholarly edition of a literary system, or scholarly editions, would be able to. Perhaps this is ultimately the solution to the problem of the print edition that McGann perceived when working on the New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse so many decades ago: while still retaining its lessons regarding the necessity of a scholarly apparatus for interpretive work, as well as many of its conceptual underpinnings, one must move away from the edition paradigm altogether in order to create an apparatus proper for the work one must do with digital materials.
The relationship between the objects of analysis and apparatuses built to facilitate the analysis of said objects differ between the two types of projects. The scholarly edition of a literary system, because it is so centrally focused on the integrity of the document, must be an apparatus built to preserve the integrity of the document through all transcodings and remediations given that it is through the affordances of the document that historical analysis is possible. The WE1S Research Environment, is built to decompose the document into its component words, and generate DFR-Browser interfaces that allows one to glean the relations between words, topics, and concepts.
Both the scholarly edition of a literary system and the WE1S project are analyzing media ecologies at different scales. The scholarly edition of a literary system is very tightlyfocused on the workings of the document’s media ecology, while the WE1S project ismore concerned with multiple media ecologies, and how concepts work across them to structure discourse about the humanities, the liberal arts, and the arts.
This is not to say that nothing can be learned by looking at the edition; as one can see above, the scholarly edition of a literary system (and the edition writ large) shares much with the WE1S project, particularly as it relates to the historical focus of both projects. However, I believe that it is very important that the WE1S project differentiates what it is doing from what editions do with documents conceptually and theoretically. Doing such work will not only emphasize the importance of the work the project is doing with tracing the workings of concepts within its corpus, but will also emphasize the importance of the fundamental concepts underpinning the creation of the edition as they apply to the methods employed by the WE1S project.
Blei, David M. “Topic Modeling and Digital Humanities.” Journal of Digital Humanities, vol. 2, no. 1, 2012, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/topic-modeling-and-digital- humanities-by-david-m-blei/. Accessed 24 July 2017.
Burton, Matt. “The Joy of Topic Modeling.” mcburton.net, 21 May 2013,http://mcburton.net/blog/joy-of-tm/. Accessed 24 July 2017.
Bode, Katherine. A World of Fiction: Mass-Digitization, Nineteenth-Century Australian Newspapers, and the Future of Literary History. U of Michigan P, forthcoming.
Burnard, Lou, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth. Electronic Textual Editing. Modern Language Association of America, 2006.
Dahlstrom, Mats. “How Reproductive is a Scholarly Edition.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 19, no. 1, 2004, pp. 17-32.
De Bolla, Peter. The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights. Fordham UP, 2013.
Deegan, Marilyn, and Kathryn Sutherland. Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print. Ashgate, 2009.
Driscoll, Matthew James, and Elena Pierazzo, editors. Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices. Open Book Publishers, 2016.
Franzini, Greta, Melissa Terras, and Simon Mahony. “A Catalogue of Digital Editions.”Driscoll and Pierazzo 161-182.
Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. The MIT Press, 2005.
Gabler, Hans Walter. “Theorizing the Scholarly Edition.” Literature Compass, vol. 7, no. 2, 2010, pp. 43-56.
Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. The MIT Press, 2002.
Jockers, Matthew L. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. U of Illinois P, 2013.Lavagnino, John. “When Not to Use TEI.” Burnard, O’Keeffe, and Unsworth 334-338. McCarty, Willard. Humanities Computing. Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.
−−−−−−. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. Palgrave, 2001. McKenzie, D.F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge UP, 1999.
Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F.
Klein, U of Minnesota P, 2016, 32-41.
Cultural Heritage: A Guide to Rich-Prospect Browsing. Ashgate, 2011.
U of Pennsylvania P, 2002, 42-79.
Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Foreword.” Burnard, O’Keeffe, and Unsworth 1-6.
1 Patrick Sahle, “What is a Scholarly Digital Edition,” 23.2 Ibid.
6 Unlike Sahle, I am hesitant to limit the elucidating operations of the scholarly edition to its historical function.
Given the fact that, when one looks at the Norton Critical Editions catalog, the publisher not only produces critical editions of texts originally produced between the Early Modern Period and the late 1930s, but also produce critical editions of works by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Adrienne Rich, it seems necessary to note that the critical edition has a necessarily cultural function to it, in that it articulates not only the historical specificities of a given text, but its expression of certain cultural (I hesitate to use the term“subcultural” or “countercultural,” given the canonical and belletrist function of the critical edition)particularities in its construction as well.
7 D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 13.
9 Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters, 39; 78. Emphasis his.
11 Ibid., 13. Emphasis mine.
12 Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality, 55.
16 Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality, 57.
17 Hans Walter Gabler, “Theorizing the Scholarly Edition,” 44.
18 Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality, 62.
20 Mats Dahlstrom, “How Reproductive is a Scholarly Edition,” 23.
21 The term “media-specific” is taken from “media-specific analysis,” as described by N. Katherine Hayles in Writing Machines. See N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines, 29-33.
24 Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, Transferred Illusions, 65; 67.
25 G. Thomas Tanselle, “Foreword,” 4.
30 Greta Franzini, Melissa Terras and Simon Mahony, “A Catalogue of Digital Editions,” 162. Emphasis theirs.
36 Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction, 7.
39 Peter de Bolla, The Architecture of Concepts, 4.
40 Building upon the work of Quentin Skinner, de Bolla notes that while “concepts are historical in nature,” it is less certain that “concepts as such are historical forms” (27). The historicity of the concept inheres instead in the “relation between words and concepts,” which is more obviously susceptible to historical analysis according tode Bolla, and which is one the main foci of our analytical methods (27).
42 Stan Ruecker, Milena Radzikowska, and Stefan Sinclair. Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: Guide to Rich-Prospect Browsing, 166.
43 Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis, 128.
44 For this reason, it is key that any researcher or project employing the topic modeling method take great care in selecting the interface best suited for their needs. The WE1S project selected Goldstone’s DFR-Browser from a collection of 14 different systems and interfaces. DFR-Browser emerged as the one best suited to the project’sobjectives at the end of the evaluation process.
45 Willard McCarty, Humanities Computing, 23.
49 John Lavagnino, “When Not to Use TEI,” 338.
50 Miriam Posner, “What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities,” 38.
51 Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies, 2. Emphasis his.