AustESE Workshop II

The AustESE Project held its second workshop at the University of Queensland on 3 October.

After a summary of the project status from Roger Osborne, Anna Gerber, and Desmond Schmidt, the participants broke into groups to work on several mini projects that included the work of Katharine Susannah Prichard, Joseph Conrad, Walt Whitman, and Malcolm Lowry.

Stepping through the scholarly editing workflow, participants uploaded transcriptions and images.  They created metadata for the digital objects, the people involved, and the publishing and composition events that produced the artefacts under examination. They viewed the temporal and spatial data on the timeline and maps, and then sent their transcriptions to MVD to explore the versions.

AustESE Workshop II at the University of Queensland.

After lunch, the group returned to their projects to think about the textual situations with the newly developed reading view, and to create annotations. The AustESE project team received valuable feedback from the participants, all of which will go towards the refinement of the tools and workflow during the last months of 2013. Several large editorial projects are currently being prepared on the AustESE WorkBench and a number of projects will begin in the New Year. The field of scholarly editing in Australia will reap significant benefits from the work that has been done in this space.

Reading literary fiction makes you a nicer person – life – 07 October 2013 – New Scientist

Reading literary fiction makes you a nicer person – life – 07 October 2013 – New Scientist.

AustESE Workshop at University of Sydney

The AustESE Project was at the University of Sydney on 4 and 5 April for a workshop to facilitate discussion about electronic scholarly editing and to introduce the AustESE Workbench to participants. Participants travelled from Brisbane, Newcastle, Wollongong, Sydney, and Perth, bringing with them the needs of scholarship for Early Modern Women’s Writing, nineteenth century publishing, nineteenth and twentieth century fiction and poetry in manuscript and print, annotated editions, the serialisation of Australian novels, and twentieth century writer’s notebooks.

A symposium on the practice and theory of scholarly editing introduced participants to the problems faced by members of the AustESE Steering Committee (Paul Eggert, Tim Dolin, Mark Byron, and Roger Osborne). Roger spoke about his experience editing Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes for print publication, and compared that with the prospect of an electronic edition of Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life. Mark Byron spoke about the challenges of editing Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts. Tim Dolin spoke about his entry into scholarly editing from the perspective of a literary critic. And Paul Eggert summarised the discussion with an account of his long experience with scholarly editing, including his participation in foundational work in electronic scholarly editing in the 1990s.

Following afternoon tea, Paul Eggert continued the discussion with reference to his own work in Securing the Past, and recent writing on editorial theory from Peter Robinson, Hans Walter Gabler, Peter Shillingsburg.

These discussions primed participants for the hands-on component of the workshop on the following day.

Led by Roger Osborne and Anna Gerber, the workshop introduced participants to the AustESE Workbench, specifically the Repository and its ontology, MVD, and Annotations. Using the workbench, the participants entered bibliographical descriptions related to their own work and uploaded material where possible. They then looked at various examples of textual comparison generated by MVD, and considered how these activities satisfied the archival needs of their projects.

AustESE Workshop Participants

After lunch, participants were introduced to the newly integrated annotation tool, and participated in a session of collaborative annotation and discussion on the role of annotation in their own projects. This session concluded with a summary of the workshop and symposium and an agreement to meet for a further workshop in conjunction with the book:logic symposium to be held in Brisbane on 4 October. By that time, the AustESE Workbench will include a workflow engine and export facilities, enabling users to step through the tasks required to complete an edition. The second workshop will aim to complete the introduction for new users and showcase some of the projects that are are using the workbench.

AustESE at Six Months

The AustESE Project has recently passed the sixth month of development and the tools and workbench are starting to come together.

The project aims to support the necessary workflow for scholarly editing with an online workbench that employs a data model that identifies the entities and relationships that are often implicit in our discussions about literary works and scholarly editing. In addition to a simple Artefact/Version/Work/Agent ontology that helps to represent the material evidence, agency, and the conceptual properties that we attribute to that evidence, we are also exploring event modelling that will support the visualisation of timelines and other queries.

To achieve that in a reasonable timeframe, the project has begun to refine the foundational modules of the workbench.

Text and Image Upload and Description

A text and image upload facility supports the attachment of metadata to single files or to batches of files. It is here that the editor can assert the properties of the artefacts that they believe best describe the way those artefacts represent the work. Ultimately, this will support efficient navigation between images, transcriptions and agents and lay the foundation for the annotation service that will overlay the editor’s and/or reader’s commentary.

Text and Image Upload and Description

Text and Image Alignment

Two separate tools have been developed to support text and image alignment. One option builds on models developed for the Open Annotation Collaboration, offering an environment that enables manual linking between regions of an image and the related text of a transcription. Development of this tool has established the foundations for the annotation service and will be further developed to include the capability to draw polygons for more complicated documents when annotation receives more attention in 2013.

Annotation Alignment

Manual linking might not be a reasonable option for projects with large amounts of documents and so automation, or, at least, semi-automation, is an attractive option. Desmond Schmidt has developed a working model for automated text and image alignment and has a description of this development on his blog. Whether the links between text and image are created manually or automatically, they will add to the descriptions of artefacts, versions, and works to support more efficient navigation, discovery and querying. Such an environment will satisfy the archival impulse of a scholarly editing project and offer a dynamic space for editing and commentary to begin.

HRITServer Alignment

Versioning and Comparison

The next step in the project is to integrate these modules with a tool that will support comparison of versions by offering a variety of views and visualisations. The AustESE Project is employing Desmond Schmidt’s nMerge MVD to deliver innovative views that will assist both editors and readers to engage with the sometimes very complex variation between versions of literary works. Current views include side-by-side, top-bottom, and a text and table view. The project aims to add to these options with other views and visualisations that help to identify the temporal and spatial intensity of revision. We also aim to support the filtering of revision according to the contributions of authors, editors, compositors, and other agents of change.

Apparatus Table View

Next Steps

In the coming months, we will be working to refine these foundational modules and to enhance the integration of tools and data so that we can begin working on the case-studies that the AustESE Steering Committee has brought to the table. An electronic edition of Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life is underway, and Paul Eggert’s Harpur Critical Archive will also provide complex examples of textual transmission to test the tools and infrastructure. An AustESE workshop is planned for April 2013 at the University of Sydney, offering Australia’s scholarly editing community an opportunity to test and contribute to the workbench refinement in order to ensure that it is useful to the widest variety of editorial projects.

In 2013, the project will begin to integrate an annotation service. The workbench design will move between support for scholarly editing and support for readers who will benefit from greater access to the archive and the opportunity to contribute commentary, queries and corrections. This will be supported by work already done for the Open Annotation Collaboration, ensuring that the integration of these modules remains re-usable and interoperable well into the future.

If you would like more information, access to the project Sandbox, or directions to the code, please visit the Project Website.

Book Logic Symposium 2012

Roger Osborne represented the AustESE Project at the annual Book Logic symposium, hosted by the University of Western Australia on 29 June 2012.

The Book Logic series of symposia was established in 2010 to bring together postgraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, independent researchers and academics whose work involves aspects of textual studies: the scholarly editing of literary works and historical documents, the study of versions of works, editorial theory, physical bibliography, codicology and history of the book. The program provides a forum to discuss the state of textual studies in Australia and New Zealand, and the development and funding of electronic editions.

The theme for this year’s symposium was “Text Editing and Digital Culture”. This attracted a healthy variety of papers that ranged from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Alexander Huang (George Washington University and MIT) opened the symposium with his discussion of the transmission and translation of Shakespeare’s texts across culture, and his introduction to the video and performance archive, Global Shakespeares http://globalshakespeares.mit.edu/. After morning tea, Ros Smith (University of Newcastle) revealed the cultural and practical problems associated with the editing of Early Women’s Writing, and Mark Houlahan (University of Waikato) discussed the challenges of editing the plays performed by the Queen’s Men http://qme.internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/.

After lunch and further discussion at the UWA Staff Club, Roger Osborne (University of Queensland) discussed his plans for an electronic edition of Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life and the development of the AustESE workbench. Paul Eggert (University of New South Wales) concluded this session with a reflection on his recent work on Henry Lawson and Charles Harpur, and stressed the need for more thought on a ‘reader-centric’ understanding of the editorial role.

Discussion from this session continued through afternoon tea, priming the audience for the final papers of the day. Will Christie (University of Sydney) discussed the broad notion of literature captured in the pages of the Edinburgh Review during the Romantic period, and demonstrated a relational database of the Edinburgh Review and its contributors. Teresa Swirski (Charles Sturt University) explored the applications of complexity theory and creativity within digital textuality, offering a framework for the analysis of improvisation and innovation. Willard McCarty (Kings College, London and the University of Western Sydney) closed the day with a thought provoking discussion that considered what it is we think we are doing when pointing at the intersections of natural and artificial intelligence.

Organisers Tim Dolin and Brett Hirsch gave thanks in speech and verse, inviting the participants and audience to continue discussion over drinks and dinner, an invitation that most were only too glad to accept.

The fourth Book Logic symposium consolidated existing partnerships and initiated new collaborations that promise to make a significant contribution to textual studies in Australia and New Zealand. Book Logic moves to Brisbane in 2013. Further details will be posted on this blog and elsewhere when they come to hand.