JSTOR English Journal: Two Versions

From a recent JSTOR news release to librarians:

“The English Journal was published in two versions, a regular edition and a “college edition.” JSTOR has recently discovered that we have digitized some volumes of the “college edition” in place of the regular edition. We will replace the incorrect volumes (published between 1928 and 1939) as soon as possible.”

First, I did not know that there were two version of “The English Journal.” This seems interesting. For example, how was the “college edition” different from the “regular edition”? Were some articles unsuitable for the “college” edition? Too difficult for undergraduates? Did they have same articles and special topics and editorial matter? Also, why do the “correct” volumes replace the “incorrect” volumes? Since work of digitizing is already done, why not sacrifice editorial purity for “richness” of resources.

As JSTOR notes, it’s sometime hard to find complete runs of back issues. What happens to these print copies? Root them out of print repository and destroy them? The electronic copies, destroy them too? As Theodor Seuss Geisel said, “sometimes progress progresses too fast.”

Texas A&M Digital Text Symposium

Thursday (10/19) through Saturday (10/21), I attended the “Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present, and Future” symposium at Texas A&M. Gig ‘em. Speakers included lots of people whose work I already knew, but that’s what’s useful about symposia. You get to hear the formal version of the talk. Speakers included Jerome McGann (of Byron edition, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, Rossetti Archive, and NINES–and one of my dissertation advisors), Ken Price (Whitman Archive, lead faculty here at UNL on the Lincoln-Whitman-DC project), Morris Eaves (editor of William Blake Archive), Peter Shillingsburg (Thackeray editor and now a long-time friend), Peter Robinson (Chaucer Editor, now at Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at Birmingham), Martha Nell Smith (Emily Dickinson editor), Julia Flanders (Women Writers Project and many other things, at Brown), and Matt Kirschenbaum (director of Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities and pioneering thinker about editing of digitital objects). Between-talk, after-talk, and poster-presentation discussions were often as illuminating talk-talks, and folks I met briefly, or shared a car ride or had food with, included Amy Earhart at A&M, Lisa Spiro from Rice, Ann R. Hawkins at Texas Tech, Aimee Kendall Roundree of U of Houston-Downtown, Katherine Harris of San Jose St., and Eugene Lyman of Boston U.

In such a large group compressed over such an intense time, it’s hard to pick things. But I thought I’d gig a few. I think “gig” means impale on sharp object, as in (top Google result for, probably unpleasant for some) frog gigging. Jerry McGann’s keynote set the tone with two observations. First, the scholar-publishes-book-gets-tenure model is dead. U of VA Press once published 1500 copies of scholarly monographs. Now, it publishes less than 200. In such a publishing climate, what needs to change? the tenure model or the publication model. He suggests that the MLA and hidebound senior scholars are out of touch. Departments need to change. He also noted that they don’t change. UVA English Department, his example, now has 5 scholars who are involved in digital scholarship. Twenty years ago, it had “4.” Yes, Dr. McGann is promoting NINES for peer-reviewed electronic scholarship as an alternative, but it was nice to have a senior scholar who in addition to discussing seems to be trying to change the status quo. We junior scholars lack the clout to advocate for such ideas.

Ken Price talked about the names of projects (edition, archive) and suggested “thematic research collection” as a form of digital scholarly enterprise. The hard part is figuring out what separates a scholarly from a non-scholarly site. I too now could have appreciated it if Whitman had had a good housefire. Thanks to Peter Shillingsburg for again reminding us that editors can try to fix things, if in doing so editors make their interventions explicit. Morris Eaves discussed the the problem of editing images and the ways that we can use words to describe pictures. His examples included the Blake Archive and ICONCLASS. It reminded me of a discussion that I had with a group of scholars. When they learned that I worked at the Blake Archive, they asked my opinions about the controversy that the WBA’s effort to name the pictures had aroused. Being unaware of the controversy (because I worked in a different wing of the Archive and was an Americanist), I passed. But the question that occurs to me now is that “sure, object if you like.” If you don’t like the names or the categories, you can rename every one of them according to your own system. Editors don’t have final answers. Every decision is interpretive. In Blake, to identify a punctuation mark as a comma or dot or period is an act of interpretation. Take the Blake quote about creating a system or being “enslaved by another man’s”–see if you can find it on the Blake Archive. It is in the Archive, multiple times, and the text is indexed in the search. But it’s not easy to find, because editors who try to identify punctuation marks must interpret to do so. Editors do things because editing is the act of doing. A choice not to do is just as much an interpretive choice as a choice to do.

Peter Robinson offered the electronic editing model of the Scholar + Tame Expert. That is, a scholar who wants to do X but does not have the technical skills to do so digitally seeks out a tame expert to do the implementation. This model flies in the face of digital humanities rhetoric, which prefers collaboration. The collaboration model functions in the sciences, but we’ll know that humanities has recognized “humanities computing” or “digital humanities” as a core discipline (and not some step child to be patted on the head when natural child gets hug) when a digital dissertation has two author names on the title page. A collaborative humanities dissertation. Is it even thinkable? From the perspective of a digital humanist, Julia Flanders, the digital/humanities collaboration is at the core of the work, even if, as she suspects, both the humanities scholar and the digital scholar will reside in the same head for collaboration between the two disciplines to occur.

A digital humanities scholar with a lot going on in his head is Matt Kirschenbaum, who amused and horrified editors among symposium participants with the challenges of digital objects as material objects and the prospect of digital object editing as a thought experiment. First, from digital forensics, he showed that it’s almost impossible to erase your hard drive. Trash/recycle bin dumped, still readable. Digitally erase to US Dept. of defense standards, still readable. Burned in fire, still readable. Cut in pieces, still readable. Smashed with hammer, still readable. Every moment of every aspect of your virtual communication, recoverable if medium on which it occurred can be identified. It can be. Maybe melting your old hard drive would be a start.

Thanks to everyone at A&M for putting on the symposium. Thanks to Eugene Lyman and Peter Robinson for their models of electronic editions to aspire to. Thanks for Aimee Kendall Roundtree for going toe-to-toe with physicists on their interpretive digital models, Carlos Monroy for exhibiting the Donne project, Amy Earhart and Lisa Spiro for more to think about on mapping. Thanks to the Houston blogger, whose name I’ve misplaced, who had the interest and gumption to just attend, patience to listen to textual scholars, and the temerity to remind us that our concerns seemed narrow and provincial in a wider world.

And there’s of course another reading list. Scholars are never done, never caught up, barely sane.

Kudos to Robert Stilling

Kudos to Robert Stilling for his discovery of the Robert Frost poem. I met Robert (the student, not the poet) briefly at UVA when he volunteered to orally proof my transcription of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Aside from people I already knew (which I thank for their generous help), Robert was the only other grad student to volunteer when I begged for assistants to help orally proofread UTC in Era. Goodness may be its own reward, but it’s nice to see a good person doing good work rewarded with acknowledgment. He mentioned that he was working on Frost, but he did not mention anything about discovering a new poem, though from timeline in VQR I think he already suspected the poem was “unknown” when he volunteered.

What a neat coup for a graduate student.

UTC & American Culture, A&M DigitalText, and NORA

It’s been a very active week or two, and I wonder what percentage of blogs die after one or two posts. Professor Stephen Railton has kept me busy by his plan to have Era text of UTC debut on UTC & American Culture when it goes live in its XML interation. He gives me what one of what one of my UNL coworkers calls the “gift of a deadline,” but I have no shortage of gifts for myself.

The Era text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin goes public this week, in the first place where someone might see it, aside from kind relatives and friends from my hometown of less than 2,000, Weimar, Texas. From the exposure of my dissertation in family circles, I know that my mother and two of my aunts have read parts of my dissertation, thus with my spouse and my committee bringing the number who have read parts of the dissertation and edition to eight.

The preparation of the UTC Am-Cul text has been quite nerve-wracking. I removed line-breaks in prose while keeping important line-end hyphens. I removed extra spaces before or after em dashes (which my ORIG/REG coding was too dumb to handle). The revised iteration of encoding will need to go with witness tags. I also removed ligatured letters and curly quote marks. I found two errors in manually entered tags and corrected them, changed my mind about whether a chapter number was an error, and started next round of proofreading. I also wrote a “Historical and Textual Introduction” for the site and created a chart to compare UTC chapters in Jewett to installments in Era table for the convenience of readers.

Last spring I gave myself the gift for the far-off deadline that is now here, Digital Textual Studies: Past, Present, and Future, for which I planned to present a poster after UVA Victorianist and then English Department Chair Professor Chip Tucker suggested that an editor of a digital project (like myself) would be more likely to be able to produce a poster (than, say, folks who write articles and monographs and eschew charts and images). Seemed like a good idea (and welcome intellectual exercise) at the time, but a poster presentation demands a relentless focus on a single point to get across to an audience walking by. So now it’s time to go promote the dissertation project at the symposium, with a poster. Below the textual rationale of the poster, which is attached:

This poster highlights textual variants and material publication contexts on 18 March 1852, when for the first time two versions of Stowe’s work were public, the Era’s newspaper installment of Stowe’s work and the John P. Jewett edition (advertised in Era as published on that day). The newspaper serial continued through 1 April. On either side of this paragraph are images from facing pages in the Era. Opposite the page on which Simon Legree says “I don’t sell dead niggers,” the Era printed a report on a Greenville, South Carolina slave auction. Like Stowe’s story, the notice also includes a slave’s dead body. The box at bottom left highlights textual variation between the two versions. Bottom right is the Jewett edition.

Digital Text Poster (Large PDF, 2 ft x 3 feet) 

During graduate study I learned from Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is many of the horrors of slavery that sedate historians gloss over, but this article took my breath away as I browsed the Era while transcribing.

A little over a week ago I pestered Dr. Steve Ramsay at UNL about how to design databases, and I tried to throw a wrench into NORA visualization of UTC by suggesting that the “natural” prose textual division, chapters, was not so natural in the periodical text. See the visualization of UTC Social Networks (Java), which groups characters by their appearance in same chapters. He was able in return to offer unthought-of complexities for the recording of sources in a relational DB. Thanks, I needed that.