Kudos to Syd Bauman’ and Julia Flanders’ TEI Course

The Women Writers’ Project course on TEI encoding is well worth the attention of any scholar who is already involved in digital humanities or who is considering taking a leap into a project that includes encoding a text. While it’s not for everyone–I know some serious coding junkies–Syd and Julia succeed at casting a wide net.

If you have background (you’ve gone beyond handholding baby steps and wrangled a few texts on your own, you’ve drafted portions of an XSLT style sheet, and you’ve been involved at a digital project), the introductory sessions will be a bit slow. But the more advanced sessions would probably be helpful to even seasoned hands on electronic projects. Unless you’re interested in text encoding as an intellectual exercise of its own–and thus you devour guidelines with relish–work on a project can give you a limited sense of the coding possibilities available. It is easy to repeat what you already know how to do rather than venturing out.

This course encourages ventures. The emphasis on oXygen has also been useful. Although I’ve known oXygen to be around, I’ve always been annoyed by its interface. I’m not going to spend time learning an annoying interface when something needs to be done, so the sustained use of it for the course has been helpful. I had learned to encode XML using NoteTab clip libraries and tool directory (part of Rare Book School). While I won’t discard NoteTab (because I like much of its simplicity and quick loading), I’m rapidly becoming agnostic about the tool used for encoding. oXygen is a robust application, one that I expect would appeal to undergraduates familiar with commercial software.

I on the other hand was more pleased by the use of CSS to display encoding. I had not thought of that because I had always forced myself to write XSLT style sheets for the simple as well as complex tasks. So the course has given perspective on the alternation of tools. One caveat. External entity references ruin the simplicity of reviewing CSS display of XML in the Firefox browser. It has been a few years since my last serious efforts at writing ambitious XSLT style sheets, but I think a refresher is coming up in tomorrow’s sessions.

The class is highly recommended. If you have not done so already–and you have the opportunity–sign up.

Apostrophes, Single Quotes and TEI entities

Syd Bauman has again rescued me from faulty encoding, an encoding issue that dates from the preparation of my dissertation edition. I used a workaround to resolve an issue of display, but it turns out that an alternate fix (a better one) is available.

The problem revolved around what I consider to be a necessary distinction between closing single quotes and apostrophes. The logical distinction between closing quotes and apostrophes (one closes quoted speech, one usually indicates missing letters) relies on a reader’s basic conceptual distinction between identical type characters.

One crux of the issue can be found in the UNICODE standards. The curly right single quotation mark (Unicode Character 2019) portion of standard states that “this is the preferred character to use for apostrophe.” Likewise, the straight apostrophe section states that Unicode Character 2019 is “preferred for apostrophe.” The standard is clear–and consistent. We will pass over our aggravation that apos as apos will remain straight and recognize that it’s an historical problem not solved by someone of my interest.

In my dissertation edition, I created two entity references in my DTD to handle these. The apos entity resolved to 2019. The rsquo entity also resolved to 2019. But the display never worked. While the rsquo always displayed as a curly quote, the apos always displayed as a straight quote.

My workaround included replacing apos entities with character code sequences within my document. That workaround fixed the problem of display, but a more simple issue is at work.

The apos entity is reserved in XML. So the parser always resolved to the default display (the straight quote) rather than my DTD definition for the apos (the curly quote). The solution is to NOT use the apos entity for curly apostrophes. Instead, I need to choose an entity that is not reserved. So I chose “apost”. Now the parser will resolve apost with 2019, the curly apostrophe that is identical to the closing single quote.

Schema and DTD Entity References: You Can Have it All

Syd Bauman’s enthusiasm for the RELAX.NG schema is infectious. So I decided to use the schema instead of the P5 DTD I prepared in Roma application. He has almost convinced me that I can discard my DTD and use only a schema.

But I’m really partial to my entity references (which are not supported in schemas). So he told me that I can have it all, and I now have a way to include DTD entity references with my schema. The code within TEI document is as follows:

A small external DTD (UTC_Eds_Ents.dtd) need only to provide the list of entities. Or the entity reference portion of the DTD can be embedded within the document.

I’m very happy at the moment, but I’m slightly worried that Syd is about to convince me to discard entity references completely, in favor of encoded quotations with render attributes. Naah. That’ll never happen, but I’ll explain why in another post.

Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe: “The author of this great war”

In every article on, or edition of, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the writer is obligated to observe that Lincoln greeted Stowe in the White House as the “little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” The exact quote–and whether it was actually said–is in question, largely because it was first cited not in Stowe’s lifetime but after her death, in two alternate versions, in two biographies. The earliest printed source for a similar version of the quote–“Is this the little woman who made this great war?”–is Annie Fields’s 1896 biography Days with Mrs. Stowe, where this version of the quote is attributed to Stowe’s daughter. See page on Google Books. The second early printed source is Charles Edward and Lyman Beecher Stowe’s 1911 biography, which credits Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the “book” in the alternate form of the quote given first. See page 203 on Google Books.

At the moment I am not aware of a Stowe scholar to have uncovered additional evidence from the archives. Skeptics of the quotes, among them prominent Lincoln scholars, are hesitant to accept this thinly documented piece of Stowe family lore. For example, Don E. and Virginia Fehrenbacher do not include the quote in Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, 1996). See James M. McPherson’s Atlantic review, which addresses this quote’s absence from the Fehrenbachers’ work. But a possible instance of corroborating evidence has appeared in a 2005 auction catalog. The online auction house site offers an intriguing clue, an inscribed copy of Stowe’s Sunny Memories from Foreign Lands. The inscription, purportedly from Lincoln to Stowe, is as follows (to the best of my ability from the auction site image):

Mrs. Stowe,
The author of this great war,
A Lincoln
Nov. 19, 1863

See inscription for yourself. A web site for the Auction Gallery of Florence has an auction entry for the book. (Note: The liveauctioneers.com web site is erratic. A second and third attempt is sometimes necessary to view the page.)

I’m not a Lincoln scholar, so I can’t say whether the inscription is in Lincoln’s handwriting (but see UPDATE 2 below, which draws from a Lincoln scholar). But the Lincoln Log offers a few more connections between Stowe and Lincoln. On 26 May 1862 the Library of the Executive Mansion ordered two of Stowe’s books: Pearl of Ord Island and Agnes of Sorrento. Note: Actual title of first book is Pearl of Orr’s Island. On 16 June 1862 Lincoln borrowed Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the Library of Congress. Lincoln borrowed Stowe’s book a few months before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

But despite at least some evidence that Lincoln’s interest in Stowe extended to reading her books, I’m skeptical that Lincoln would have presented a signed copy of Stowe’s book to her. That a person (even a president) presents a signed copy of an author’s book to the author seems odd. (Note: I’ve inquired on the SHARP-L mailing list, and the consensus–though not corroborated definitively–is that it would be extremely rare, though again see UPDATE 2 from Lincoln scholar below.) My reasons for skepticism that this book was signed by Lincoln are these:

• The auction specifically states that “There is presently no completed Authentication Report accompanying the handwriting represented in this Lot.” Given the fame of the two figures, one would think it would be worthwhile to the auction house to verify the handwriting, if it could. If it could not, then the merely vague connections among Stowe, Lincoln, and Gettysburg (implied but not authoritatively documented) are suggestive that the item could be of great value while leaving the onus of determining whether the connection is genuine on the buyer. Such a claim is in the interest of the seller whereas a definitive authentication carries with it both the possibility of significant reward or of significant disappointment to the seller.
• The date on the inscription is suspicious. According to Stowe’s son Charles Edward’s earlier biography (1889), the date of Stowe’s visit to Lincoln was near Thanksgiving 1862. Also see “How Mrs. Stowe Wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ” McClure’s Magazine, 36 (1911) (on ProQuest). The date is important: Stowe visited after the first Emancipation Proclamation was signed in September 1862. If Lincoln inscribed this copy when Stowe visited at the White House, the date on the inscription would be expected to correspond. Instead, the inscription date matches perfectly with another of the war’s most famous events, the Gettysburg Address, on 19 November 1863. Stowe’s son Frederick was wounded at Gettysburg, but the connection implied in this uncanny coincidence–Lincoln signed a copy of Stowe’s book on way to, at, or on way back from Gettysburg–seems to me too cute.

I tend to believe that Lincoln greeted Stowe in one version of those words, as her family’s later 1911 biography claimed. It is sufficiently playful to qualify as memorable verbal banter. But I am too skeptical to accept this book inscription as Lincoln’s, given the evidence so far. The testimony of a Lincoln historian who is an expert in the president’s handwriting would be welcome.

UPDATE: Annie Field’s 1896 version of quote (earliest known print version) added. Misprint on date of Charles Edward’s biography Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe corrected. I trusted Google title page, which has 1890. Copyright page has 1889. For both of these corrections my thanks to a SHARP-L correspondent.

UPDATE 2: In the initial draft of the post, I stated that I could not address
whether the signature was genuine. I contacted Daniel Stowell of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln. He shares the opinion of John Lupton, an expert on Lincoln’s handwriting, that the “signature is deficient.” Professor Stowell also informs me that dating forged signatures to significant events in Lincoln’s life (in copies of books originally published during his lifetime) was a common practice in the late part of the century, a “cottage industry.”

Otlet, Mundaneum, Classification, Books, and the Web

The New York Times today posts an interesting story about Paul Otlet, who in 1934 (before Vannevar Bush) proposed a prototype with various resemblances to the web. Otlet’s “réseau” (he wrote in French) included interlinked browsing of documents, images, and files, sharing of files, and social networking.

The title of Wright’s article, “The Web Time Forgot,” suggests the bent of this article on the Mundaneum Museum in Mons, which despite its emphasis on the work of this unknown web pioneer might also be classified under the Times section “Books” rather than under its current web sections “Science” and “Technology.” It would fit in the former section, and the article profiles a museum and a pioneer of information organization technology. The article describes card catalogs, provides a brief biography of the man (including the destruction of most of Otlet’s work by the Third Reich), and charts the correspondences between his seminal ideas and the Semantic Web.

One of the article’s most thoughtful observations is the following: “Just as Otlet’s vision required a group of trained catalogers to classify the world’s knowledge, so the Semantic Web hinges on an elite class of programmers to formulate descriptions for a potentially vast range of information. For those who advocate such labor-intensive data schemes, the fate of the Mundaneum may offer a cautionary tale.” The classification of the article–rather, its nonclassification in one section of the Times–offers yet another caution. The newspaper does not classify the article under “Books”: the oversight (in sense both of careful observation and error) speaks volumes about our conceptual split between books as paper objects (as well as the business of publishing and distributing them) and information as an abstraction tenuously related to its material form.

In digital space it only takes a link to re-classify “The Web Time Forgot” into another conceptual category. But that alternate conceptual category seems not to have suggested itself. The article is an altogether pleasing piece, one that will doubtless inform a wider range of scholars about a history that deserves greater attention. Maybe it’s time for me to open my Digg account and invest a bit in social capital by classifying this article, with every keyword that strikes my fancy. If I’ve with this post created a moral obligation to do so, then today’s inaction will have to be added to my many failings.

A Comma and a Thought About Textual Transmission

When I transcribe type, I sometimes find myself lost in a morass of the details of physical reality. For example, in volume I of a copy of the 1852 Jewett edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, page 21, line 24-26, Haley explains how he manages the unpleasant parts of the slave trade, which I transcribe as follows: “You see, when I any ways can, I takes a leetle care about the onpleasant parts like selling young uns and that,_”

I transcribed that line with care (transcribed it, digitally compared to another transcription, re-checked before posting it), but my transcription provides an unfaithful representation of physical reality in numerous ways. Let me count a few ways:

1. Digital typographic font for each character varies from typographic font inked on paper copy because the gap between analog and digital text representation makes such unavoidable.
2. Line break in original line is no longer present because (being prose) we agree to abstract.
3. The underscore character at line end is an abstraction for an em dash (which is transcribed thus as a convenience for collating and for conversion to typesetting and to text encoding systems).
4. The section is abstracted from a larger sentence, a larger page of type, a chapter, a particular copy of a book, a particular work, a moment in American cultural production, and a practically limitless range of associations.

But there are also a few ways in which I have sought to preserve items that I assume to have meaning. I assume that the words “leetle,” “onpleasant,” and “uns” inform Stowe’s reader about Haley’s level of cultural attainment. His dialect marks him as poser who cannot quite pull off the act of gentleman. At another level, while my transcription is an accurate representation of a particular copy, it does not fully represent this edition and might mislead about the work. Consider the image of the page below, which is taken from the Early American Fiction site. I apologize for the small size, but EAF provides low-res images.

Notice the comma after the word “parts”. My transcription does not have that comma. A mistake. Well, yes, but it’s not my mistake (this time). Below is a digital image of the copy that I was using to make my transcription, a copy that is labeled on the title page as part of the 70th thousandth printing.

Why do these two copies of the same book, one from the earliest printing and one from a printing made a month or two later (a guess, which may be revised after I check Parfait)? I imagine that the stereotype plates of the 2-volume edition were inadvertently knocked or dropped, and the comma after parts on right margin was lost. Because the line below has damage also to the letter “y”, we can surmise that the damage was accidental and not a deliberate editorial removal of the comma. I would briefly note that we presume the comma derives from Stowe’s manuscript because a comma also appears in the newspaper version (on which I believe the 2-volume edition was set, at least this part of the printing).

If this damage is insignificant, if this detail is simply a matter of the damage to a physical object through heavy use, why record a detail of printing history that will not affect reading. After all, most contemporary reprints claim to be set from the first edition. They are, but as we can see different copies of the first edition vary. The first printing–often used in reprints–does not include the corrections that Stowe made for the second printing. But in printing history this missing comma may have consequences. The publisher Jewett created two new settings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in late 1852, an expensive illustrated edition and a cheap edition “for the Million”. You can probably tell from the leading and length of the type line that the illustrated edition is the top image, the cheap edition the bottom.

A number of social contexts are at work here. It seems (even from these brief samples) that the illustrated edition was more carefully proofed for superficial matters of correction. Notice, for example, the spelling of “uns” now includes an apostrophe to indicate the omitted letters, though I don’t know which letters are presumed to be missing in the dialect form of “ones.” Does the apostrophe indicate that Haley has elbowed his way up in the scale of gentlemanliness since the previous printing? The illustrated edition also has over a 100 illustrations, an elegant gold-embossed cover (not my copy, though, which was rebound and thus affordable on eBay), more generous leading, and an ample margin. The cheap copy, in contrast, has two columns, minimal margins, tight leading, and no illustrations. It was issued in paper wrappers instead of hardcover.

From the perspective of literary interpretation, the difference is unlikely to shock. In the illustrated edition (and later printings of the two-volume edition), Haley identifies the “onpleasant parts” of slavery primarily with selling children from mothers. In the earlier printings of the two-volume and paperback edition, selling children away from mothers seems to be intended as but an example of the unpleasant parts. A subtle difference, yes, but its overall effect in the larger text is small because Haley’s language emphasizes the challenge of selling children away from their mothers, regardless of whether he is claiming that it is the primary unpleasantness or merely one of many.

But from point of view of textual descent (determining from which examplars of the two-volume edition the cheap and expensive were set), the missing comma in later copies suggests an hypothesis. The illustrated edition for this page was set from a later printing, from a copy that was set from the damaged stereotype plates. So the comma was omitted. The cheap edition page, in contrast, was set from an earlier printing of the first edition, from an undamaged plate.

My current hypothesis is clearly inadequate, because it is based on the slimmest of physical evidence, one comma missing or present in a text that runs to about 700,000 character. But whether the hypothesis is ultimately proven or disproven will depend on evidence from individual copies painstakingly gathered as I compare multiple copies and record physical damage to each. But since the hundreds of surviving copies represent only a part of the historical record, and since the limits of human diligence limit me to carefully reviewing a generous handful of surviving copies, all of this detail still represents a significant degree of abstraction.

But this is a reason to study textual transmission, because it suggests hypotheses about how the practice of printing altered the reading of Stowe’s work.

How to Be a Human Hinman Collator

In Joseph A. Dane’s Myth of Print Culture, pgs. 94-95, he describes how to be a “Human Hinman,” to collate pages from the same setting of type (or stereotype plates) without the aid of any external device. I learned about the process that Dane describes from Randall McCleod, who sent me an extensive email on the process. Over the past year I have adopted McCleod’s method for my own work, and with his permission I post his training regimen for turning one’s self into a Human Hinman here.

You may laugh. I laughed myself when McCleod first sent me this email on 31 January 2006 (which below I’ve edited slightly to emphasize method and discard most topical chit-chat) after I inquired about collating newspapers.

My collator has worked on Holinshed’s _Chronicles_, 1587, a bruiser of a book, but it is awkward. To work on bigger things, I have xeroxed parts of them and collated the parts separately.

What I suggest is that you use Mother Nature’s collator, which is totally free, once you have a xerox or positive microfilm print-out of your control copy printed to size. (It is possible to use this method with something printed slightly smaller too, but it is not very feasible if you go bigger).

Then you place a column of your copy next to a column of the copy you want to compare it to, and cross your eyes, so that the left eye sees the right column and the right sees the left. When you do this, you will actually see four columns, two will be transparent and two will be opaque. By adjusting the tracking of your eyes, the four will suddenly collapse to three and will be stable there. The two on the outside will then be the transparent ones and in peripheral vision, but the middle column will be opaque and will be in your foveal vision, which is where you want it to be. This central column is a superimposition of the two columns you are comparing, and if there is a difference between them it will reveal itself through the visual oddities you experience on the Haley’s comet, Lindstrand, or McLeod.

Don’t be afraid to try this simple way! I use if for almost all my collating now and it is the favoured way of geologists working in the field who compare aerial photographs of terrain taken a few seconds apart.

But start by practicing on simple things. Sit facing a wall ten feet away and look at a small object on it. During this time raise your two index fingers to a position slightly below the object on the wall, so they don’t block it. Let them point straight up about four inches apart from each other. Be aware of the appearance of your fingers while you are still focused on the object on the wall. You will see that there are actually four finger images — all of them out of focus. As you move the fingers toward or away from each other, you will come to a point where two of the images lie on top of each other, and your eyes will tend to lock on this arrangement. That middle image of three is what my collator would deliver to your brain. The trick now is to hold your eyes in this configuration, but shift your focus from the object on the wall to the middle of the three finger images.

Let me explain. There are two independent functions of the muscles associated with the eye. Those outside the eye do the tracking, making the eyeballs converge or diverge, for example. The muscles in the eye control the focal length. Once we are a few weeks old, we track the two eyes in tandem, instead of letting them go their separate ways, and we also learn to focus at the point of intersection of the eyebeams. But this association of the two muscular functions is totally arbitrary and there need be no pain with disassociating them as an adult.

Consider the following. If you look at a single finger held four inches in front of your nose, you don’t think of yourself as cross-eyed. But if you take your finger away while holding your eyes in that position, you will experience double vision of whatever objects lie behind where the finger was, and someone looking at you would think you were a cross-eyed person. Yes, your eyes are crossed, but you have no ocular disorder — for all vision at distances less than infinity entail eyes crossed in varying degrees. Almost all our vision in life is double vision. We tend not to be aware of this doubleness because it is present in peripheral not in foveal vision, where our attention is concentrated. But once you are aware that most vision is double, you can take foveal vacations there. (I do. It is like walking in a jungle full of strange creatures. It is a fearful symmetry.)

So, now on to a meaningful example (which would be simpler for you to absord if I could show you, instead of resorting to painstaking instructions). Get two new dollar bills (or, if you can’t afford that, quarters with different dates) and put them in the position your fingers were when you were looking at the wall (and in the same orientation). Move them until the four images become three, and then work on getting your focus shifted to the plain of the bills, WITHOUT CHANGING THE TRACKING OF THE EYES (for if you let your eyes adjust the tracking, you will automatically go back to seeing only the two bills that are really there instead of the four images that are in your mental experience). When your focus is on the fused images of the two bills, you should get a visual buzz from the difference in the serial numbers. If ink spots are on one bill and not the other, they may seem to float, etc.

Now practice on some quarto pages, which are not so big that they will cause you eyestrain. If they are too big for comfort, you can shrink them on a xerox machine and/or hold them away from you at a greater distance — either manoeuvre entailing less extensive convergence of the eyes. To practise with, you can find variant title pages of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the 1944 Variorum edition by Hyder Rollins (or in my late 1970’s) SB article on the same title (see the biblio reference on the University of Toronto in Mississauga website under my name, under Dept of English and Drama) — or Fletcher’s massive photographic study of the variants in _Paradise Lost_ — from the 1940s, as I recall. Also, the Huntington Library has just published a big book on Holinshed, coauthored by Clegg and McLeod, and I have four states of part of a column there with the variants made vivid.

Anyway, don’t give up trying. This kind of collation is not really a hard thing to do, as you have all your life been taking two visual images and merging them. The problem now is that you are trying to do it under instruction, whereas a baby does it just by fooling around and seeing what works.

Randy

PS As for your rash statement [i.e, I questioned whetjer McCleod's stand-based collator could hold a newspaper]. What my collator can¨”hold” is not the same as what it can “look at”. The design breakthrough of my collator is that I dispensed with symmetrical optics. But I sell the machine with the possibility of symmetrical optics. On my machine, each train is chamilion like, and can swivel in any direction. One could thus sit in a corner and have one eye trained on a poster on the left wall, and the other on a copy of the poster on the right wall (i.e., there is not any longer a reading stand to “hold” the objects being collated). Size is not now a problem. If the objects are giant atlases or newspapers, supporting them on the walls and getting them flat can a problem. But if the images are merely projected from slides, exit problem. Another thing you can do with a collator or with crossing your eyes is to get e-images of the objects your want to collate and scroll down each screen to cover the height of the column in stages. I have collated an original copy of a few pages of Holinshed with a web version on my lap top.

R

That’s all there is to it, from one of the contemporary masters of sight-based collating. This method is necessary when you need to collate two impressions from the same setting of type and either a) have no optical collator available or b) have a book or periodical that won’t fit in a collator. It is the cheapest and fastest option even if you have a mechanical device at your disposal. Cheap is obvious: there’s nothing to buy. To get to the point that it’s the “fastest” option takes a few hours of practice. But the more time that you spend with this method, the faster it becomes. It took me about 25 hours to collate two copies of the 600-odd pages in John P. Jewett’s 2-volume 1852 edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Happy collating.

Thoughts on Practices for Comprehensive Orals

A few weeks ago, a Ph.D. student at Nebraska shared the reading list for his (or her, to maintain anonymity) comprehensive examination, the third of four hurdles that almost all Ph.D. students in departments of English must overcome (the four being course work, language proficiency, comprehensive orals, dissertation). Although his or hers was a customized list, I was struck by the difference in approach at the University of Virginia (UVa) and the University of Nebraska (UNL).

At UVa, oral exams had to be passed before one could enroll in the dissertation seminar, where one would prepare and refine a prospectus. I was encouraged–nay, exhorted–to ensure that my reading list could withstand the scrutiny of almost any scholar in English literature, as its purpose was to ensure that I could carry on an intelligent conversation with other scholars (on the assumption that our past training would include some overlapping texts). While any scholar could point out omissions from a necessarily selective list of the equivalent of 30 to 40 novel-length works, the list preparer should be able to offer a rationale for inclusion and exclusion. The exhortation was no mere rhetorical exercise: the intellectually intimidating (though nice and altogether generous) chair of graduate studies at the time, Professor Chip Tucker, grilled me after I presented my list. That practice (of having to undergo the grilling of the graduate chair) was of brief duration in the department. What Professor Tucker intended (I think) as an invitation to talk intelligently about the list was understood by Ph.D. students as a formidable barrier that usurped the authority of advisers–the practice soon ended.

UVa offered three modes for reading lists: historical period, genre, custom. The historical period was required, and one could choose a previously recognized genre (epic, novel, lyric, etc.) or propose a custom list that departed from the “genre” formulation. For a custom list, one had to provide a written rationale for the choices, whereas one had only to provide oral assurance of one’s understanding of the historical period rationale for the required list. My lists, including my custom list in Bibliography, Textual Editing, and Electronic Texts, survive online on my CLIR portfolio page (too busy to link now).

In contrast, at UNL, I find a radically different process, which tends, I think, to use every step to prime the student for dissertation writing. The reader will please not hold me to exact account, as my familiarity with UNL process derives from a few chats with students from two different departments. The first marked difference is that students prepare a dissertation prospectus during their first year in the Ph.D. program. This prospectus, which I assume will influence course work, though not formally, also informs the comprehensive orals reading list. As compared with UVa, these lists at UNL tend to be comparatively more rich in both canonical works of criticism (for the historical period or the genre) and specific criticism.

Whereas I would never have thought of including E. Bruce Kirkham’s Building of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on my UVa historical period reading list–because one’s historical period is limited to at most a handful of monumental field surveys (Matthiessen, Fiedler, etc. in American literature)–I think that I could have included it under the UNL regime. The prospectus (prepared beforehand) would have provided an implicit rationale at UNL, whereas the emphasis on broad field survey (prospectus not yet prepared at UVa) would have almost certainly have nixed it. Put otherwise, UVa advisers would have looked askance a field survey that seemed to clearly to point toward a dissertation plan. You don’t do the reading for your dissertation as your orals list. Instead, you select the field of scholars for your dissertation after you’ve completed the broad survey and passed the orals exam. Scholars at UNL are encouraged, in contrast, to be looking forward to the dissertation that they might write.

One disadvantage of the UVA system is that the post-orals/pre-prospectus period is a time of goofy indecision. You go into orals expecting to be asked to talk about any of 60 works in two broad fields, and you end up providing answers to about five questions that invite broad answers. Unfriendly examiners might grill you on finer points of individual texts, but I only had one such question.

If only I had thought to say that Moby Dick’s subject is man’s confrontation with hostile nature, my examiner would have had to come up with another objection.

A second disadvantage is that orals do little to prepare one to write a dissertation, so my dissertation is weak at placing itself within the broader sweep of literary and cultural studies at the present moment, a weakness compounded by my decision to edit a loooooong text, and to finish on a fast schedule rather than making a career out of graduate school.

With my UVa background, I would conceivably have been doomed had I accepted a tenure-track position on my way out–not a choice available to me!–because I did not have the broad range of field reading that I could have completed in a program like UNL’s. The recognition of that fact (as well as procrastination or unavoidable difficulties) led many students at UVa to stretch out their Ph.D. to sixth, seventh, or eighth years. As someone who escaped, I will merely sigh over the department’s Faustian offer for graduate students–the apparent offer of intellectual enrichment now and future rewards–against the Marxist reality that you are in the teaching proletariat and shall remain there until you complete your degree, at which point it is likely you will have to accept continuing membership in the proletariat of visiting instructorships or short-term fellowships. Not everyone gets stuck–every graduate program has stars–but it’s a depressingly familiar course for many. My mirage of intellectual rewards has just turned to what seems a pleasing reality, so my bitterness is expected to fade–but keep your own counsel.

Where was I? The reading lists and orals at UNL seem to prepare one to write a dissertation and book that are deeply engaged in the current moment of critical thought. At UVa, the reading lists cannot possibly serve that purpose because of the way it is timed. The reading and research for the dissertation will have to serve. So my postdoctoral fellowship has been spent in part reading criticism in my field so that I can join conversations with greater confidence. I don’t, on initial thought, believe that one method is significantly better than the other, but I do believe that the two models represent significantly different conceptions for the purposes of reading lists and comprehensive oral exams, which should be weighed carefully among the relative merits of individual programs.

I think that the broad field surveys (without a particular focus on intended dissertation research) will enrich my teaching, but they weakened the contemporary rhetorical relevance of the dissertation for students of American literature. I could have solved that problem by spending another year or two reading and writing (a choice that is altogether reasonable if one has time and money). On the other hand, my custom orals list and a long fascination with textual scholarship make those parts of my dissertation stronger, though I don’t think the orals list was consciously crafted to focus my research. I had read widely in textual scholarship for three years before crafting my list, and I took the opportunity to expand into areas in which I was not broadly familiar.

The observations on the discrepancy between the UVa and UNL practice respond tangentially to the fact that I work through Eric Sundquist’s monumental To Wake the Nations now–in partial response to reader comments on a submitted essay–rather than when I should have, before or while writing the dissertation. I know now that I could have benefited immensely from Sundquist’s work while writing the dissertation, but I did not know it then.

Superattention and the Scholarly Editor

In documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s blog entry of 10 April 2008 (which discusses Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire), Vanderbilt psychology professor Dan Levin offers a critique of people who worry about (and catalog) continuity errors in movies. Levin offers a critique which might apply equally well to scholarly editors:

ERROL MORRIS: And here’s my question. Why are people so interested in continuity errors in movies? What’s that about?
DAN LEVIN: I don’t know, maybe it’s about being the expert. Being the person that sees something that other people don’t see. Being aware of the deep workings of the movies or something like that. That’s my guess.
ERROL MORRIS: The person who pays more attention than anyone else?
DAN LEVIN: Yeah, the super attentive person, there’s this kind of idea that “I’m super attentive, I have a super attention system. I see all this stuff.”
ERROL MORRIS: But your belief would be, of course, that since they super attend to all this stuff, they’re probably ignoring something else.
DAN LEVIN: Yeah, they’re not paying attention to the stuff they should be paying attention to, which is the story, the ideas of the filmmaker, all this cool stuff. And a lot of psychologists have argued if you’re really paying attention to all this detail stuff, you’re missing the good stuff. You’re missing what you need to be paying attention to[....]

I would reply that the “detail stuff” is what anchors us to fact and helps inform our understanding of the act of artistic making. The artists mostly know the details, and they mostly have reasons why some details matter and some don’t. Levin, to me, suggests that vanity (and perhaps the desire to excel at snarky cocktail conversation–those scholarly editor cocktail parties are a riot, what with our emendations and accidentals livening up the whole proceeding) drives those who focus on details. I will merely say that to determine what one “should” pay attention to derives from the interest of the examiner. To me, the textual alterations are the “cool stuff.”

Perhaps the mistake of another filmmaker in a New York Times interview will suffice to illustrate my point. When Robert Altman described himself as feeling like Stowe’s Eva on the ice being chased by dogs (Kornbluth, June 1997), Altman’s mistake (he meant Eliza) went unremarked by his interviewer. It seems likely that the editors of the New York Times did not notice either. They knew the important stuff, and a factual error that two generations earlier would have marked Altman and his interviewer as lunkheads was allowed to stand (though a reader’s letter noted the error). To cite Uncle Tom’s Cabin but falsely remember the white child as the one fleeing slave traders is to indicate something profound about cultural amnesia (even if one must recognize Stowe’s clear hierarchy of mulatto over pure African–in matters other than Christian forbearance). By cultural amnesia I refer to the reading of antebellum slavery through the lens of minstrelsy. Postwar minstrelsy’s deep workings included obscuring the horrors of antebellum slavery and thereby detracting attention from the South’s effort to re-impose practical slavery through disenfranchisment, erosion of civil rights, legal racial terrorism, and the organized extra-legal terrorism of lynching.

Similarly, when John Updike in his review of Gates’s edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin unknowingly exchanges Dinah and Prue, the editors of the New York Times magazine did not notice. Updike in “Down the River” explains Uncle Tom’s attempt to console Dinah, a “hapless servant.” Prue is not a servant to the St. Clares, and Dinah is far from hapless. My interest here again is that the editors/fact checkers for Updike’s review failed to notice the error. Had the book under review been Huckleberry Finn, would such an obvious error–i.e., confusing the Duke and the King, an error which I submit you would be unlikely to recognize without double-checking–have gone undetected?

If we push a little bit on Altman’s and Updike’s mistakes, I think we can at least detect signs that the minstrel remaking of Stowe’s work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century continues to influence our contemporary reading. Maybe continuity mistakes in film and literary criticism are just what Levin say–the stuff that we need not pay attention to when paying attention to the good stuff–but mistakes, in addition to indicating that our cultural elite are not familiar enough with Stowe’s work to notice the error–may indicate a widespread cultural tendency to discount the continuing relevance of slavery’s legacy. Those who ignore the “deep workings” may also be missing something. But it may be the “important stuff” that they’re missing.

Meta-Post: or, Why are Readers Here?

The WordPress tools provide a way to see why a reader has arrived at this site. The most interesting (to me) is search terms. And here’s the lifetime list, ranked according to frequency.

Search Views
wesley raabe 24
amanda gailey 5
bibliography of nineteenth century ameri 5
gerry mcgann blog 5
the fayetteville observer + digital news 4
raabe juxta 4
“wesley raabe” 4
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joshua bell video metro station 3
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19th century periodicals gale 3
american periodicals, 19th century 3
jewett dunnet shepherdess summary 3
chesnutt + ivanhoe 2
nineteenth century american periodicals 2
“ken price” greenville 2
fatima tennyson 2
“type damage” tanselle 2
robert stilling 2
sarah orne jewett 2
english phd blogs 2
sarah orne jewett the town poor 2
a dunnett shepherdess 2
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emily dickinson handwriting 2
“vault at pfaffs” -site:lehigh.edu 2
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quotes by emily dickinson 2
textual collation exercises 2
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emily dickinson there is a word 2
aprille raabe washington dc 2
“digital textual studies” 2
“converting mla to chicago style” 2
“amanda gailey” 2
wesley raabe author:w-raabe 2
gettysburg address script 2
“pat bart” 2
phd english market 2
periodical, new york, 19th century 2
brooklyn newspaper 19th century digital 2
joshua bell washington post video 2
“peter robinson” scholar “tame expert” 2
new york digitized periodicals 2
digital literary scholarship 2
alice cary uncle christopher’s 2
english phd job search 2
“english journal” “college edition” 2
dummy version of the book scarlet letter 1

I’m glad some people find my blog by searching for some variant on my name, although I expect I’m responsible for finding myself at least some of the time. It’s as easy to Google your own blog as it is to type in a URL. I’m sympathetic to the poor fellow or gal who searched for “dummy version of the book scarlet letter” and ended up on my site.