One of the  pleasures of working with the MVP is the close relationship we enjoy with the University of Victoria’s Libraries–especially its special collections. I’ve been fortunate to work with great librarians over the years; in fact, much of my PhD research could not have been accomplished without the friendliness shown by the librarians at Tulsa’s McFarlin library. Yet, there’s something special about the public outreach and service performed by the people of McPherson Library. For example, Dr. Laura Estill’s Nuts and Bolts series, sponsored by the ETCL, is frequently attended by librarians as they actively seek out how they can better serve the UViC community.

The benefit of having scholars and librarians working closely together was self evident this week at the MVP. John Frederick, a Special Collections Assistant at UViC, came across some strange material in the archive. Because he’s worked so closely with us over this past term, he knew that we would be elated with something he stumbled across in the archive. I’ll let him explain in his own words:

One of the perks of working in Special Collections is getting to browse ourclosed stacks. Being a fan of Ulysses and Joyce, I’ve come to know the contents of call number range PR6019.O9 very well but recently I came across an item I did not know we had. I was getting out a copy of Ellmann’s biography of Joyce and I happened to see a small envelope with U.S. District Court written on it. Not only did it contain a mimeographed copy of the court decision allowing Ulysses to be brought into the U.S. but I was delighted to find there was also a separate enclosure: a copy of the injunction brought by Joyce against Samuel Roth. [...] I knew Matt [Huculak] and others involved with modernist studies would be as excited to see the injunction and court decision as I was. (Frederick)

As we rush in to talk about big data, we sometimes forget that many of our archives are still underrepresented–or even missing–in our indexing systems. In this particular case, these two ephemeral items weren’t explicitly catalogued.

One helpful point of collaboration between the library and the MVP is that we can assist librarians in identifying rare and important materials in the formidable stacks of the archive; in turn, we gain access to this rare material and are able produce new scholarship.

Work Cited

Frederick, John. “Re: Blog.” Message to the Author. 21 March 2013. Email.

How did the chanter compensate for this deficiency?

By a periphrastic version of the general text.

I had the honour of giving the inaugural lecture for this term’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab‘s Brown Bag Lunch Series held on October 4, 2012 at the University of Victoria.

I am in the beginning stages of my project, “Ulysses Versioned: The Fluid Text,” as part of my postdoctoral research with the Modernist Versions Project (MVP). I first encountered James Joyce’s masterpiece (pace Wake scholars) as a graduate student at the University of Tulsa, where I had the opportunity to work as an Editorial Assistant with the James Joyce Quarterly (JJQ). Not only did I get to take an independent study on Ulysses with Sean Latham, the editor of the JJQ, but I also got to work with the vibrant community of Joyce studies. Joyce is one of the few modernist scholars who can support a robust journal industry on his own, and fans of his work extend well beyond the halls of academia.

Bloomsday (June 16th) is celebrated in Tulsa and Paris, Victoria and Sydney. The University of Tulsa celebrates the day with champagne and readings from Ulysses (the event is organized by the best managing editor I’ve ever worked for, Carol Kealiher). As a young man in Ireland, I marked the day in, what was then, a smoky pub in Sligo. The simple fact is, this book, for all of its difficulty, is loved around the world and is a cause for celebration.

I decided to focus on Ulysses for my postdoctoral work with the Modernist Versions Project (MVP) because of my past experience as Project Manager for the Modernist Versions Project (MJP), which has digitized the Little Review and the Egoist–the two magazines that published portions of Joyce’s novel in 1918 and 1919 respectively (Yale University Press will be publishing The Little Review Ulysses by Sean Latham, Mark Gaipa, and Robert Scholes in 2013/14). I am interested in the print life of Ulysses as it began as magazine pieces and moved into the publishing house. That is, I want to explore and chart what D. F. McKenzie Jerome McGann call the “socialization of texts.” I want to ask, what happens to Ulysses in print as it is published in over 50 English editions? (for a great chart on the Ulysses Family Tree, see Stacey Herbert’s work at Genetic Joyce Studies).

The primary mission of the MVP is to “Provide scholars of modernism with digital tools and resources to catalogue and explore textual variants among works that exist in multiple witnesses in an integrated, web-based environment” and “to enable scholars using Digital Humanities methods to generate new critical and interpretive insights on the basis of these collations.”

There is a long history of textual criticism and genetic scholarship on which to base a versioned edition of Ulysses. Hans Walter Gabler’s famous “Synoptic Edition” created a version based on the principles of the German editorial school, and Genetic critics have examined Joyce’s manuscripts and notebooks. But to whom can we turn for an editing methodology in the digital age? Jerome McGann has produced the impressive Rossetti Archive (as well as a suite of theoretical methods with which to examine the social life of texts); yet, it was not until I read John Bryant’s The Fluid Text that I found a methodology to approach versioning in the digital age.

Bryant writes,

The very nature of writing, the creative process, and shifting intentionality, as well as the powerful social forces that occasion translation, adaptation, and censorship among readers—in short, the facts of revision, publication, and reception—urge us to recognize that the only ‘definitive text’ is a multiplicity of texts, or rather, the fluid text. (2)

What makes the fluid text different from other methodologies of editing? Bryant outlines four key aspects of his approach to editing:

1. Critical Editing: The purpose of a fluid text edition is to showcase revision…such editions manifest the energy or work that individuals and a culture put into the changing of a text from variant to variant and version to version.

2. Comprehensive: Fluid-text analysis of genesis and revision allows us to gain a sharper sense of the energies of literary work as the locus of interaction of individual and society…the idea of of an “edition” must be expanded to include nonauthorial materials as well.

3. Pedagogical: enable readers to discover textual fluidity, analyze potential meanings, and learn among other things the nature of textuality, the the interpenetration of individual intentions and social texts, and the relation of past language events to our present lives

4. Synergy of Book and Screen: Principles outlined above can best be realized, perhaps only realized, through the extraordinary hypertextual features of the electronic medium. (144-45)

Ulysses Versioned: The Fluid Text
“[Ulysses] will remain eternally cathartic, a monument like a record diarrhoea.” –Wyndham Lewis

Notwithstanding Lewis’s remarks, Ulysses is a prime candidate for this type of fluid text analysis. Corrections have been part of its DNA since its first full publication at Shakespeare & Company. In fact, Ulysses demands to be treated as suspect and in a state of flux. In the front matter for the Shakespeare & Company edition, Sylvia Beach writes, “The publisher asks the reader’s indulgence for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances” (image on right). Before we even read the text, we are warned by the publisher that we are reading incomplete material.

Since Ulysses indulges in its textual instability from its copy text to the over 50 English editions published since 1922, I will trace the interconnected relationships of English-language print editions in order to mark up (TEI) and visualize changes in the text–that is, I will chart the social life/practice of Ulysses in print. I’m building on Michael Groden’s work with Joyce’s manuscripts.

In “Ulysses” in Progress, I claimed that “only the combination of first-person narration and parodic exaggeration provides the double, two-eyed vision that is lacking in all the characters except Bloom.” Missing in this claim for “two-eyed vision” is the way in which the copybook scenes and the text itself work in terms of the relationship between the separate visions (or voices) rather than in terms of the ways in which the voices can be brought together. The passage in question, and much of the “Cyclops” copybook, illustrates very well Bakhtin’s claim that novelistic language “is a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other. (Groden 13)

Following Groden and Bakhtin, I suggest the multiplicity of printed texts also act as an ideological system that interanimate one another. By putting multiple versions online, we can trace these interanimations–in other words, chart the social life of the printed text.

Scope & Collaboration

“Ulysses Versioned: The Fluid Text,” is a collaboration with my colleague Matthew Kochis at the University of Tulsa and any member of the Digital Humanities community who wants to encode a portion or edition of Ulysses.

Critical Editing

We will be using the full TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) schema to encode our texts, but we will have two tiers of participation. The Tier 1 TEI schema will consist of a set of elements that participants must use, including:

• <p> (paragraph)
• <placeName> (place name)
• <rs> (referencing string–who is referenced and how)
• <said> (passages thought or spoken aloud)
• <title> (title of any kind of work)
• <foreign> (non-English words)
• <emph> (word that emphasized for rhetorical effect) [the cat’s "Mkgnao!"]?
• <distinct> (a word that is linguistically distinct)
• <teiHeader>
  • <publisher>, etc.

Milestones:

• Numbered page breaks <pb>
• Chapters/Episodes <div type= “chapter”>

The Tier 2 schema will be reserved for those who wish to use the full TEI tag set for encoding.

Comprehensive

Though Ulysses Versioned focuses on the English print editions, our use of TEI makes our work interoperable with any other TEI-encoded version of the novel. As copyright permits, we will post all available versions to our site.

Pedagogical

Ulysses is standard novel for both undergraduate and graduate classrooms. We will be providing images of the original publications as well generated texts (from the TEI) for public use.

Synergy of Book and Screen

Our work will go beyond simply showing page images and text side by side. Tools like Juxta, Versioning Machine, Voyant, and Mandala will allow us to show connections only possible on the screen. If you view the slideshow below, you will see great visualizations produced by Katie Tanigawa on her Nostromo project.

Finally, I would like to add one other tool to the Ulysses Versioned site that I call “Performing Ulysses Versioned. This would be an online form that would allow users to submit the time, place, and edition of a Ulysses reading around the globe. It would be curious to map where (and what) editions are being performed on Bloomsday or what editions are being read in classrooms. One strange example of classroom use is Gabler’s Vintage edition in North America, which is unavailable in Canada yet is a standard text in U.S. universities; Canadians generally read the Penguin edition.

Do check out the slideshow below. Comments are welcome.

In what common study did their mutual reflections merge?

In the fluid version.

Did it flow?

Yes

– James Joyce, Ulysses, “Ithaca”

In this talk, Matt Huculak will present his new project (under development with the MVP) “Ulysses Versioned,” a collaboratively built series of TEI-encoded editions of Joyce’s novel ranging from its first publications in magazines to later pirated editions in the United States. Ulysses continues to be performed as social text in pubs and classrooms, and Huculak will discuss the challenges of encoding such a popular work that has appeared in over 50 English-language editions alone.

On June 16th, my Twitter timeline lit up with news that Bloomsday 2012 was going to be a little different; a new digital project was launching, the Year of Ulysses (YoU), created and hosted by the Modernist Version Project. Between Bloomsday 2012 and Bloomsday 2013, YoU will be releasing three chapters of the original 1922 edition of James Joyce’s classic every three weeks. Coupled with the release will be lectures and Twitter chats; the first will be held today, June 22, at 2pm eastern, hosted by my fellow UVenus writer Janine Utell, #yearofulysses (be there!).

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing/year-ulysses#ixzz1yXkmbJWI
Inside Higher Ed

The following guidelines are designed to help departments and faculty members implement effective evaluation procedures for hiring, reappointment, tenure, and promotion. They apply to scholars working with digital media as their subject matter and to those who use digital methods or whose work takes digital form.

There’s some exciting news about the DH suite that we will unveil at this year’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria. Susan Brown’s CWRC team has been at work building the CWRCwriter, a browser-based TEI editor with an easy-to-use interface. We’re exploring how to wrap this powerful Javascript tool in Islandora’s Drupal framework so that EMiC scholars can create and edit TEI documents directly in the browser. This will also provide teachers a powerful tool in the teaching of TEI in the classroom.

I’m also preparing a Modernism and Digital Humanities course for the winter term at Dalhousie. We’ve got quite a waiting-list, which indicates to me the desire of our students to engage with literature in online environments. While prepping for the class, I came across Anouk Lang’s DH course at the University of Strathclyde. What impresses me most about this particular syllabus are the learning outcomes of the course:

By the end of the class, you should

• be able to articulate some of the benefits and the drawbacks of using digital tools to approach literary analysis and humanistic study more generally

• be able to situate developments in digital technology of the past several decades within the broader historical context of textual technologies, extending back to the printing press

• possess a working knowledge of a collection of digital tools that you can use to help you in your studies

• be able to critically interrogate the way you use the internet to get information, produce content and interact with others

• have attained a high degree of digital literacy, including the ability to critically evaluate online sources and navigate efficiently through large amounts of information

Transferable skills that you should develop

• the ability to express yourself across a range of written genres (eg. informative prose suitable for an encyclopedia entry; scholarly argument; writing appropriate to informal online discussions)

• the capacity to critically evaluate information

• a range of IT skills (including basic HTML, text mining applications, georeferencing applications, organising information using tags, using a blogging platform such as WordPress, and learning Boolean search terms)

• the ability to work with others in a digital environment (through collaborative activities such as co-constructing a document)

This encapsulates the power of DH in the classroom, where we can teach our students the literacies of paper and screen and prepare them for 21st-century reading and work environments.

I have been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Editing Modernism in Canada for just over a year now, so it gives me great pleasure at this midpoint in my position to announce two major partnership agreements signed last week. First, EMiC has finalized it contract with Islandora at the University of Prince Edward Island to build our very own Digital Humanities module. Second, EMiC has partnered with another DH project with which I am involved: The Modernist Versions Project. Both partnerships promise to provide resources, training, and infrastructure not only EMiC scholars, but to the DH community as a whole.

1. Integrated Digital Humanities Environments: Islandora

Anyone who has been in DH for a while knows that there is a long history of tool-creation for our scholarly endeavours. Some of these projects have been successful (The Versioning Machine, Omeka, etc.), and some, unfortunately, have not. One “problem” we face as DH’ers is that there is simply so much to do. Some of us are interested in visualization software and network relations  (Proust Archive), some are interested in preserving disintegrating archives (Modernist Journals Project), and others of us are firmly rooted in TEI and textual markup. Moreover, with the growth of GIS software, mapping texts has become a great way to have students interact with texts in spatial terms and to communicate with a non-academic public using a language most of us are familiar with: maps.

But what happens in DH when we move into the classroom?

I recently read a stunning syllabus created by Brian Croxall at Emory University, in which he provides his students with a solid (and diverse) introduction to the Digital Humanities. But one thing researchers and teachers like Brian, or any other DH’er faces, is providing students integrated learning environments where they can edit texts in a common repository AND have all the tools they need at their disposal in the browser. If you want to teach TEI right now, you have to buy Oxygen (a life-saving program when it comes to XML markup); For versioning, you must install Juxta or The Versioning Machine. For publication/exhibition you must install Omeka. But what if we had ALL of those things in one learning environment, in one common and open system? This is what we’re trying to accomplish with the EMiC Digital Humanities Sprout.

EMiC Digital Humanities Sprout

An issue EMiC faces in providing tools for our researchers is the sheer diversity of work being undertaken right now by EMiC scholars who have varying levels of experience with digital environments. EMiC needed to find a way to allow its members to preserve, edit, and publish digital editions of archival material in an intuitive way; moreover, we wanted to make to sure our archival practices conformed to international standards. Moreover, most of us are teachers too. How do we teach our students what we are doing in our research? Enter Islandora.

Islandora

Nine months ago, I Googled the phrase “TEI, ABBYY, XSLT” on a whim (actually, I was being lazy: I was looking for an XSLT sheet that would transform ABBYY HTML to simple TEI). The first result listed was a page from the University of Prince Edward Island—just down the road so-to-speak. Not knowing much about Prince Edward Island outside of L. M. Montgomery, I keep browsing, and to my amazement, found that the library at UPEI had created a project called “Island Lives,” a resource developed using the home-grown Islandora digital repository. Mark Leggott, Donald Moses, and others, had built precisely what I was looking for: a digital asset management system using a Fedora Commons repository wrapped in Drupal shell. Islandora allows users to easily upload an image of text to its database, edit that image (TEI), and then “publish” a complete text (book, pamphlet, etc.) to the web. Dean Irvine and I realized that if we could expand this system to fit EMiC’s needs, we could create a Digital Humanities module that would serve our members perfectly. We decided to focus on the core issues facing EMiC editors: Ingestion (including OCR based on Tesseract), Image Markup, TEI editing, Versioning, and Publication (for the full list of what we’re building, see below*). Moreover, Islandora is tested and true and is being used by NASA, the Smithsonian, among many other institutions.

Thank You, DH.

We have years of successful work to emulate for this DH module. And just as the DH community has given to us, we expect the give back to the DH community by keeping the DH module open to use. Yes, we plan on creating an EMiC/Islandora DH install that you can download and use in your classrooms.

If you’re interested in what we’re building, please email Dean Irvine or Matt Huculak with your questions.

As part of this initiative, I have moved to Prince Edward Island to work with the Islandora crew as we develop this module. There’s some other news about what I’ll be digitizing there to “test” our system—but you’ll have to wait to hear about that. In the meantime, we are planning unveiling our functioning module at DHSI2012.

2. Modernist Versions Project

If you haven’t been to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute hosted by Ray Seimens at the University of Victoria, do plan on going! It is an incredible week of DH training, and it is one of the most memorable “unconferences” I have ever attended. One wonderful result of this year’s camp was the creation of the Modernist Versions Project (MVP), an international initiative to provide online resources for the editing and display of multiple witnesses of modernist texts. In what was truly a conversation over coffee, Stephen Ross shared with me his desire to create the MVP. Having served the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) at the University of Tulsa and Brown University for over six years, I said, “Stephen, let’s do this!” And we did. With the help of James Gifford, Jentery Sayers, and Tanya Clement (who along with Stephen and I serve as the Board of the MVP), we have secured tremendous support for a major SSHRC application this fall. The MVP promises to be an important project in the field of Digital Humanities and modernism.

But what does this have to do with EMiC?

I am impressed by two aspects of EMiC. First, the recovery of modernist Canadian texts in our project is truly spectacular. Second, the training EMiC facilitates at the University of Alberta, Dalhousie University, The University of Victoria, and Trent University (among many other institutions) is edifying. Just look at our graduate student editors who are engaged in serious textual editing projects across Canada: http://editingmodernism.ca/about-us/. We are really building the future of Canadian studies here.

As an international scholar, I am concerned, like many of you, with the networking of Canadian modernism across the globe. How does Canadian modernism fit into the greater narrative of modernity across the world? (this is a topic we’ll be exploring in Paris 2012: http://editingmodernism.ca/events/sorbonne-nouvelle/).

The Modernist Versions Project is one way of creating networks of modernist textual criticism and production across the world; that is, the MVP is interested in the editing and visualization of multiple textual witnesses no matter where those witnesses were created. Though located in Canada, the MVP’s scope is much larger, and EMiC’s partnership with the MVP will allow EMiC scholars interested in “versioning” to use MVP resources as they are developed. The MVP has already developed partnerships with the Modernism Lab at Yale University, Modernist Networks at Chicago, and NINES, which is letting us use and develop their Juxta software for periodicals and books.

Dean Irvine has been very generous in allocating my Postdoctoral hours towards the formation of the MVP. Once again, EMiC is nurturing young projects and helping create a truly global network of digital modernist studies. And I think I’ll end on this note: EMiC’s primary focus has been collaboration: collaboration among peers, and now collaboration among projects. And by collaborating with other projects around the world, we hope to create tools that will last, be useful, and really change the face of modernist studies.

Welcome to EMiC. Let’s go build something.

*Details of the EMiC Digital Humanities Sprout

Existing Islandora Code

1. Islandora Core
a. Integration with the Fedora repository and Drupal CMS
b. Islandora Book Workflow
c. Islandora Audio/Video
d. Islandora Scholarly Citations

New/Enhanced Functionality for the EMiC Module

1. Smart Ingest

a. Use open source Tesseract OCR engine
b. Integration of TIKA

2. Image Markup Tool

Proofs of concept and models:

Image Markup Tool (IMT)

Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE)

YUMA

3. TEI Editor

Proofs of concept and models:

Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) – CWRC Writer

Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools (HRIT) – Editor

4. Collation Tool

Proofs of concept and models for development:

Juxta

The Versioning Machine

InContext tool

5. Version Visualization Tool

Proofs of concept and models:

On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces

Sea Dragon

6. Dynamic Version Viewer

Models:

Internet Archive Viewer

Hypercities database: Transparent layers interface

7. Digital Collection Visualization Tool

Proof of concept:

The Visible Archive

“Modernist Versions Project Partnership

The Modernist Versions Project (MVP) is delighted to announce that it has signed a Partnership Agreement with Islandora/DiscoveryGarden. The Agreement provides the MVP with substantial resources and support for its objective to build an integrated digital environment for collating and comparing modernist texts that exist in multiple variants. With this Agreement, the MVP becomes one of the most exciting and innovative projects in the Digital Humanities.

The MVP is based at UVic, and is co-directed by Stephen Ross (UVic), Jentery Sayers (UVic), James Gifford (Fairleigh Dickinson University) and J. Matthew Huculak (Dalhousie University). Islandora/DiscoveryGarden is a spin-off company from the University of Prince Edward Island. Islandora is an open-source software program that allows for ingestion and mark-up of digital or digitized texts. DiscoveryGarden is an open source software provider that provides services surrounding Islandora software. Islandora/DiscoveryGarden counts among its clients the Smithsonian Institute, Oakridge Labs (US Department of Energy and NASA), Berkeley Labs, and the Universities of California (Los Angeles), Manitoba, South Carolina, and Pittsburgh.

The Partnership was enabled in substantial part by MVP’s affiliation with Editing Modernism in Canada. This Partnership Agreement consolidates the support the MVP already receives from the Electronic and Textual Cultures Lab at UVic, directed by Ray Siemens.”