As some of you know, I’ve been working (with Paul’s invaluable help) on putting up the chunk of the Esposizioni that we’ve more or less completely encoded. This amounts to the Accessus, Canti I-III and most of Canto IV. Though this might not seem like much, let me assure you, it’s quite a bit of text, and the rest of the text is well on its way to being encoded as well. We probably won’t complete the encoding process until next fall, when Roberto may be able to join us again.

So. In order to put up the text in a useful way, that is, with at least some bells and whistles instead of what would look like plain text, we need to index it. Among other things, this means regularizing proper names. Those of you who did this with the Decameron will be feeling a slight chill and numbness as you read this; I’m thinking we need a better way of doing it.

Right now, I’m working on the index of people. This amounts to over 500 entries at last count. In order to make the index we need regularized names, a task that is complicated by the fact that sometimes Boccaccio refers to the wrong person, or refers to the right person but gives the wrong details about them, which makes their identity rather difficult to verify.

I’m far from an expert in historical work, but I’m working on coming up with regularized names for every entry, even if they are wrong. I’m doing this for several reasons. One is practical: I’ll soon be going away for a month and would like to put the thing up so that people can play with it. Another reason, though, is that this indexing business seems like a great opportunity to test out this online-collaboration thing we’ve been talking about. Here’s a detailed description of how this could work; it may sound definite, but I’m looking to y’all for opinions, suggestions and warnings of possible crash-and-burn.

We’ll have an index of names, coded in some way to distinguish between the names we’re pretty sure about (probably easiest would be with color – regular black for the ones we don’t need checked out, red for the ones we’re seeking help on). Each name will be a link to a page that will show you the context(s) for that name. From what I’ve seen so far, it would probably be enough to have the paragraph in which the name appears as well as the two paragraphs immediately preceding and following it.

I’ll set up a discussion forum, to which anyone will be able to post. We will advertise this everywhere we can: Kalamazoo, medievalist and Italianist and perhaps even history and comp. lit. mailing lists, individual emails to your friends who you think might be interested. Hopefully, there will be enough interest that people will post information about specific names on the forum, telling us the regularizations of these names, which of a set of people Boccaccio is likely to be talking about, and the source for this information.

The VHL team members will be the only ones who will change any of the information in the index itself. We’ll set up some sort of a checks-and-balances process, as appropriate.

The index will have only the names themselves (and any variants). Any additional information about the names will be put in as annotations to the text itself. If the annotation content has been research by someone who doesn’t have a participant-user account, we either make them a user (perhaps after a certain amount of input on their part, and with context-appropriate privileges) or one of us will post the annotation crediting the original author of the research and linking to their forum post.

How does this sound? What am I missing? Would you use such a system?

Just to let you know, the inaugural issue of the Digital Medievalist is up, featuring our article: ‘Towards the electronic Esposizioni: the challenges of the online commentary’. A full list of the other articles is here (I’m having my usual browser troubles, so this is via the MEDTEXT-L archive). Enjoy!

Saw this posting by Ray Siemens on the Humanist list. Looks interesting.

CFP: Renaissance Studies and New Technologies (RSA, San Francisco, 23-25 March 2006)

For the past five years, the RSA program has featured a number of sessions that document innovative ways in which computing technology is being incorporated into the scholarly activity of our community. At the 2006 RSA meeting (San Francisco, March 23-25), several sessions will continue to follow this interest across several key projects, through a number of thematic touchstones, and in several emerging areas.

For these sessions, we seek proposals in the following general areas, and beyond:

  a) new technology and research (individual or group projects)
  b) new technology and teaching (individual or group projects)
  c) new technology and publication (e.g. from the vantage point of authors, traditional and non-traditional publishers)

Proposals for workshop presentations or papers which focus on these issues and others are welcome. Please send proposals before May 15 to siemens@uvic.ca.

  Ray Siemens
  English, CRC Humanities Computing, University of Victoria

  and

  William R. Bowen
  Director, CRRS, University of Toronto

Vika’s detailed critique of Hillesund’s article deserves praise and a comment or two. I thought the article was interesting precisely for its shortcomings (or what Vika sees as its shortcomings). However, I do not want to turn this in a debate about the merits or demerits of Hillesund, but I see it as an opportunity for us to clarify a few (important) aspects of our own work.

Since in her comment to my original posting Vika asks for a clarification of my short and intentionally “open” comment appended to the two quotes I originally selected from the article, I’ll go back to that in this new posting. If you are interested in debating Hillesund’s positions, you should probably post a comment to Vika’s posting (ah, the intricate, branching nature of blog dialogues!). As far as I’m concerned, I’ll keep this new post as short as possible.

I’ll rephrase my original comment as a question: Is our work in the VHL to be seen as a contribution to the “workflow” of a “digital cycle”? Or is it simply a translation and re-production onto a digital platform of reading practices, born and developed within a non-digital cycle (dominated by printing)? My conviction (or wishful thinking) clearly is that we are indeed contributing to the emancipation of our intellectual “workflow” from the constraints inherited from the printing age, with its highly but “transparently” codified “objects” and the institutionalized ways we “exchange” them. At the same time, we are trying to preserve and adapt to the digital cycle practices and methodologies that were developed in trading with written/printed texts.

True, as Vika says, “any text (in his semiotic sense) that is represented digitally is “written” in ones and zeroes.” This is the fundamental “ontology” of digital “text” (any digital text). However, I am not interested in discussing a general theory of digital text, but rather the specific types of written/printed text we are working on. Or better, what I’m truly interested in is the possible “expansion” or “extension” of those texts from their original representation in written/printed form (inherited from our technological past) into new forms, specific to the “digital cycle,” our technological present and future. This, I believe, is “where our research emphasis lies.”

In other words, I do not think we are using digital tools in order to produce better, or different, printed editions of our texts (though printed editions may be one outcome of some of our projects, as is the case of Pico’s Oratio). Yet, is this clear to all of us?

The “expansion” or “extension” of existing texts directly affects (and in turn is generated by) the way we read them, where “reading” is conceived as the “last” (and “first”) stage in the “workflow” of any textual cycle (digital or non-digital, aimed at printing or not). The question is: how does reading and its possibilities change in the digital cycle? How and how much are we allowed to expand or extend our reading of texts that we inherit from our technological past?

As the acronym says, XML is conceived as a tool for a flexible extension and expansion, potentially encompassing all kinds of “texts,” including new genres and typologies. If I understand correctly, Hillesund however questions the capability of XML to provide a flexible enough framework for accomodating new genres and forms, those “new innovative digital text genres” that he leaves (in this article) unspecified.

In short, my question is: what kind of “expansion” do WE have in mind when WE approach the (semantic) encoding of texts such as the Esposizioni, or Pico’s Conclusiones - texts “written” or “composed” as tools for oral delivery and discussion? What kind of “reading” do we perform as we encode them? For example, are semantic encoding and collaborative annotating (made possibile by encoding etc.) to be kept separate in the intellectual “workflow” made possible by the digital cycle? Or should they tend to eventually become one?

These are some of the immediate questions that Hillesund’s article suggested to me.

I noticed in the two-vol Mondadori ed. of the Esp. that the paragraph number for 1.all.93 is missing. If anyone has the red Opere vol, could s/he check to see where it is?

I started this as a comment on Massimo’s post about “Digital Text Cycles: From Medieval Manuscripts to Modern Markup,” an article by Terje Hillesund recently published in the Journal of Digital Information. The comment got a bit long, though, so here it is in a new post.

Interesting article. It took me several hours to read, partly because some of its claims seemed inaccurate and required some poking around the web.

Some parts are both interesting and right on. I like his definitions a lot. For example, Hillesund distinguishes between electronic publishing (”a digitization process mainly based on principles of print”) and digital publishing (”an effort to use basic digital principles in a more flexible way of producing and distributing verbal texts”). He doesn’t go on to clearly detail said digital principles, which is a shame; but the distinction is a good thought exercise.

The phases of a text cycle (writing, producing, storing, representing, distributing and reading) are this close to a Proppian completeness. For the purposes of the article, this set does nicely; but I’m compelled to substitute composing for writing and put a semiotic disclaimer on reading, and then Hillesund’s system becomes applicable to all the semantic meanings of “text”. (Or does it? Readers?)

Section 5.4, par. 3 contains an off-handed remark that goes nowhere and yet is loaded: “…the Internet and the Web make up the distribution infrastructure of a global digital text cycle.” Where are the boundaries of this text? And what’s included in it? I wish Hillesund had pursued this further; doing so would highlight a discord between this and other things he says about what a text, and a text cycle, is. Perhaps next paper.

In the very next section, a poignant phrase: “Reading is the final goal of writing and constitutes the essence of all text cycles.” Again, if reading is to be understood as the active reception of information contained in a text, this could be applicable to any text (painting, piece of music, poem, etc).

Now I will focus on the negatives. The length of exposition they merit is definitely a sign that the article is useful in generating discussion.

- The core subjects would be much more interesting if Hillesund had not limited himself to “texts produced and represented in written forms.” For that matter, he fails to acknowledge that any text (in his semiotic sense) that is represented digitally is “written” in ones and zeroes.

- He says that texts have cycles, but then separates the phases of a text’s life into digital and non-digital cycles. This seems to defeat his stated aim of studying cycles of texts, in that it gives him leave to chop up any one text’s evolution into convenient chunks and ignore the transitions between them, and the influences they may (or may not) have on each other.

Sub-point: in section 6.2, he says: “A text is part of a cycle and in different text cycles all phases are related and interconnected.” Now that’s more like it!, except that it contradicts the above. It seems an inconsistent use of terminology, a relatively minor point but useful to keep in mind when reading the article.

- Discussing oral communication, H. says that “the participants… must be in the same place at the same time to communicate. To be passed on to others the oral message must be stored inside the body of the messenger, in his memory or brain.” Both of these conditions are incorrect: think, in the first instance, of a voice mail message, and in the second, a music or spoken-word recording.

- When discussing Gutenberg, Hillesund falls into the usual trap (which did not become apparent to me until I looked into it today). Gutenberg was not the first person to invent either the printing press or movable type. The Chinese predated him by several centuries. He did bring it to Europe; but since we’re talking about text cycles here, why isn’t there any consideration of Chinese texts between the 11^th and the 15^th centuries?

- There is no discussion at all about born-digital texts (written or not) and their cycles.

- Hillesund discusses XML without once referring to its utility as a semantic encoding tool, nor good examples of semantic encoding. He writes: “When XML experts analyze existing (printed) text genres, they extract structures consisting of element types like <title>, <paragraph> and <table>. Well, yes; but this isn’t where we stop, nor really where our research emphasis lies. “The aim of XML is to overcome the shortcomings of HTML and to extend the possibilities of the Internet,” claims the article. It is my understanding that XML aims for neither of those things. It exists quite independently of any network, and is not concerned with the same problems as HTML.

- Finally, Hillesund makes predictions about “new innovative digital text genres” without considering any of a number of examples already in existence.

I have more, but these are the main points that lent an air of suspicion to my reading. Comments?

I would like to bring to your attention the following article:
“Digital Text Cycles: From Medieval Manuscripts to Modern Markup”
by Terje Hillesund
University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway
Journal of Digital Information, Volume 6 Issue 1
Article No. 309, 2005-03-09

You can find it at: Digital Text Cycles

I find the following quotes particularly interesting:

From the point of view of publishing, XML is an effort by computer scientists to make text production and text distribution compliant with basic features of digital technology. In digital text cycles, storage and representation are separated into two different phases. XML is developed to make the most of this separation, which is the reason why text content and text presentation are separated. This separation gives both intelligent storing and extended flexibility in text representation; the same content can be given different presentations. Text formats based on XML are thus suitable for re-flow (digital reading) and for cross-media publishing.”

“Paradoxically the XML-related principle of “single sourcing” or “one input - many outputs” also strengthens the dominance of print in digital publishing. In a single source workflow, texts are written and edited once and stored as XML, before they are published in a variety of printed and digital formats: one input - many outputs. As long as the source documents in this workflow are made for print it is obvious that content structures of printed texts will pervade the central XML documents and consequently all the produced texts in the flow. As long as print dominates publishing, the principle of single source will prolong this domination.”

Hence: “…the whole multi-use notion of single sourcing is a gross overestimation of the possibilities of XML…”

Now, what we are trying to accomplish with the VHL is to develop new tools specifically adapted (adaptation does come into play) to the “workflow” within the digital cycle: a process that begins with printed texts (or manuscripts) to be translated into and adapted to the digital platform, but goes beyond textual representations limited to/by the printing cycle…

This past Saturday I presented a paper titled “Commentary, Annotation and the Virtual Humanities Lab” at the annual NEMLA conference, conveniently held in Cambridge, MA this year. I was an odd fit into the panel on adaptation, but it seems to have worked out beautifully.

Sadly, Kim Honeyford didn’t make it to the convention because of illness. This left three presenters. Being held as it was at 8:30am on a Saturday, we weren’t really expecting much in the way of an audience. We got two people, which was… intimate, but actually rather lively.

Michael V. DiMassa, a librarian from Yale, talked about adaptations of Ivanhoe, particularly the 1952 film, which took something like a decade and a half to make and in the end was a surprising mix of faithfulness to period detail and complete disregard for some important plot points.

Mark Rowell Wallin, who organized the session, talked about adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. He discussed at length the broken-telephone chain of the 1995 BBC series (starring Colin Firth, and very much worth watching in your humble narrator’s opinion) and then Bridget Jones’ Diary, which is an adaptation not of Austen’s novel but of the BBC series.

And I presented the VHL. The audience was not very familiar with humanities computing, so the paper was mostly a basic introduction to semantic encoding and its possible function as a scholarly argument. A significant portion of the talk is about collaboration, but this part is a bit superficial and I plan to expand that topic much further, so any comments and criticisms and pointers to literature are most welcome. Naturally, I was inclined to talk about adaptation, which I address in the end of the paper. If you’d like to read it, you can find it here (PDF, 108K). The handout I gave to people is here (PowerPoint file, 999K).