Lisbon, 6-7 June 2019
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Visual modeling of text genesis in an electronic edition: “Videotext” project
As long as writing and printing exist, the usual object of reading is only a finished text. Civilization has developed a stable reader’s attitude toward the text as a finished product, even in case the written lines are only a moment in the process of creating and re-creating the text, both objectively and from the point of view of the author.
Modern electronic technologies have formed prerequisites for a significant restructuring of the perception of the printed text due to the potential of animation of graphic symbols, their external transformation and modification in real time. Animated text is widely used in media, but primarily for decoration purposes, without being fully used in the sphere of reading, since certain semantic functions are not assigned to the forms of transformation of typographic symbols.
For seven years the publishing scientific project “Videotext” has been working on solving the problem of animated multimedia presentation of the creative history of a literary text, using the experience of printed scientific publications on the one hand, and educational cinema experience of visualization of the genesis of various objects, on the other. During this time, the basic principles of preparing a new type of electronic publication have been developed. Such a publication makes a moving, “animated” text an object of reading.
Videotext as an animated media product is based on the text genesis script, i.e. on the formalized record of the sequence of the author's work on the text. The script is compiled by way of collecting all available text versions. However, different approaches to creative work, different creative methods require corresponding approaches to the drafting of the script and use of different ways of visualizing the genesis of the text. This is shown in the examples of videotexts of several poems demonstrating different creative styles and methods of the authors. It is also shown that animated representation of the text creation process allows the reader and the researcher to identify such features of the work and its creative history that were hidden from attention, being in the form of separate static manuscripts and printed materials.
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Modelling the Messy Complexity of Texts
“The Holy Grail of computer science is to capture the messy complexity of the natural world and express it algorithmically,” said Teresa Marrin Nakra who, as a musicologist, studies the art of conducting (Davidson, 2006: 66). Textual genetic scholars are no strangers to this messiness, nor to the desire to capture the natural world. And the allure of the manuscript is not only felt by textual scholars: the question of expressing information found on historical documents fascinates certain computer scientists as well. Collaborative efforts to find answers take the form of experiments with the prevailing XML/TEI technology (e.g., the genetic edition of Faust; see Goethe, 2016) or, conversely, they focus on creating new, non-hierarchical data models for text (e.g., the TAG model; see Haentjens Dekker and Birnbaum 2017).
This contribution presents ongoing research into the TAG data model and its modelling potential with regard to textual variation on a single document (i.e., intradocumentary variation). Contrary to the mono-hierarchical structure of XML which compels the encoder to choose either a documentary or a textual structure, TAG’s graph model allows for multiple structures to coexist. It also facilitates the expression of equally complicated but less famous features of historical documents, like nonlinear text or discontinuous text. Intradocumentary variation is a form of nonlinearity: deletions and additions “interrupt” the linear flow of the text (Bleeker et al., 2018). In the TEI/XML model, this phenomenon can only be expressed, queried and analysed with the use of intricate workarounds. The TAG data model, however, understands nonlinearity and is thus arguably closer to the nature of text. Consequently, it enables new forms of textual analysis. Using examples from a case study, we illustrate how different categories of variation can be expressed and queried idiomatically in TAG. The demo is embedded in a theoretical reflection on the different approaches to modelling variance, illustrating how the choices we make influence the ways in which variance is structured, processed and—especially—analysed. In short: how we can capture the messy complexity of the writing process, expand our textual awareness and enlarge our editorial knowledge.
References
Bleeker, Elli, Bram Buitendijk, Ronald Haentjens Dekker, and Astrid Kulsdom. 2018. “Including XML Markup in the Automated Collation of Literary Text”. Proceedings of the 2018 XML Prague Conference. <http://archive.xmlprague.cz/2018/files/xmlprague-2018-proceedings.pdf>
Davidson, Justin. 2006. “Measure for Measure: Exploring the Mysteries of Conducting”. The New Yorker: 60-69.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 2016. Historisch-kritische Faustedition, ed. Anne Bohnenkamp, Silke Henke, and Fotis Jannidis. Frankfurt am Main/Weimar/Würzburg. <http://faustedition.net/intro>.
Haentjens Dekker, Ronald, and David J. Birnbaum. 2017. “It’s more than just overlap: Text As Graph”. Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2017. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 19. <https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol19.Dekker01>.
Haentjens Dekker, Ronald, Elli Bleeker, Bram Buitendijk, Astrid Kulsdom, and David J. Birnbaum. 2018. “TAGML: A markup language of many dimensions”. Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2018. Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 21. <https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol21.HaentjensDekker01>.
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Os Degraus do Parnaso, by M. S. Lourenço: edition of the manuscripts. Project. Stages. Visualization.
This panel seeks to present an ongoing experimental project focused on the edition of the draft version of M. S. Lourenço’s Os Degraus do Parnaso (´The Steps to Parnassus’). This collection of 25 short prose pieces, which are a landmark in Portuguese critical prose, originally came out in the newspaper O Independente, in 1989, were then published in book format in 1991 and went through a full-fledged revision for a new edition issued in 2002. All 25 texts, while touching upon a variety of topics, such as the styles of Wittgenstein, the end of literature, cultural policies, or the premiere of a play in Austria, argue for the musical nature of literature.
Each paper in this panel approaches a specific aspect of the ongoing edition: modelling (delivered by João Dionísio), textual variation according to writing and revision stages (by Carlota Pimenta), and the animated representation of these stages (by José Pedro Cavalheiro).
By modelling we mean the process of selecting a number of facts among those that are somehow related to the documents witnessing the corpus of the project. Since its beginning, the model of the edition was viewed not as a fixed structure determining a given understanding of the documents, but rather as a changeable conceptual device allowing to test, by trial and error, different analyses (Pierazzo, 2015: 37-39, 59, 62). In turn, these analyses are shaped according to the exploration of TEI P5 and the use of TEITOK, a web-based system for viewing, creating, and editing corpora with textual mark-up and linguistic annotation. Among the facts selected for analysis, one stood out from the start: for anyone who observes the notebooks in which Lourenço wrote the draft version of Os Degraus do Parnaso, it is immediately noticeable that he used several colour markers in accordance with sequences that bear interpretation. Therefore, we have modelled the edition to enhance questions addressed at the writing and revision stages observable in the draft in order to obtain a complex understanding of the genetic process, to gain a new insight into the terminology associated with it, and to identify the constraints derived from the mark-up language and the web-based system being used.
The second section of the panel is focused on regressivity as a core feature of writing. Writing is a complex process characterized by interruptions and frequent returns over what has already been inscribed, generally accompanied by reading and correction. Between the minimum degree of regressivity of immediate correction, which is made currente calamo, and the largely variable degree of regressivity of non-immediate correction, accomplished in stages of partial or general revision, one can consider an intermediate degree of regressivity. This intermediate degree is internal to a given working stage, bearing witness to a close connection between writing and correction and leading up to notions such as “immediate reading” and “partial rewriting”, proposed by Jean-Louis Lebrave thirty odd years ago (1986). With this in mind, the goal of this section of the paper is to present and discuss some problems raised by the identification and coding of writing and revision stages as documented by the manuscripts of Os Degraus do Parnaso. The identification of writing and revision stages depends on physically observable evidence such as ink, letter module and the topography of corrections, which, as in the case of this corpus, might not conduct to an unequivocal determination of the chronology of writing. Actually, whereas frequent changes of writing instruments in Lourenço’s notebooks clearly define successive textual sequences as to the writing stages, they can be interpreted in more than one way as far as revision stages are concerned. In these notebooks, features such as the topography of immediate corrections and the absence of module variation turn the precise identification of revision campaigns rather difficult, if not altogether impossible, especially in cases in which the author corrects with the same marker that he used in in cursu writing.
The matter of the third section of this paper is the experimental animation meant to represent the writing and revision stages of two essays belonging to the corpus. It is a description of how the animation has been designed by José Pedro Cavalheiro with the collaboration of other members of the project and made by students of the Faculty of Arts (U. Lisbon). Special attention is given to the techniques used to manipulate the digitized images of the two notebooks, as well as to the constraints that narration and animated image exert on each other.
References
Lebrave, Jean-Louis. 1986. “L’écriture interrompue: quelques problèmes théoriques”. Le Manuscrit inachevé. Écriture, création, communication, org. Louis Hay. Paris: CNRS.
Lourenço, M. S. Notebook “Harmonielehre”. [private collector]
Lourenço, M. S. Notebook “Notizbuch”. [private collector]
Pierazzo, Elena. 2015. Digital Scholarly Editing. Theories, Models and Methods. Farnham: Ashgate.
TEITOK: <http://beta.clul.ul.pt/teitok/site/index.php?action=about>
Text Encoding Initiative. P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. Chapter 11: Representation of Primary Sources. <http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/PH.html>
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On the specificity of the genetic process of a historiographical project: the case of Southey’s History of Portugal
In a ground-breaking essay, G. Thomas Tanselle (1978) drew the attention of editors to the fact that “historical documents” should be regarded in their specificity and should not be edited according to the same methodology used for “literary documents”. In the first place, Tanselle believed that the materiality of the former should not be underestimated by editors. The American scholar also claimed that private papers deserved an editorial treatment different from the one conferred to public texts. Hershel Parker (1984) and Jerome McGann (1991) discussed these ideas and dealt with the distinction both between literary and historical documents and between private and public texts. This prolific debate offers me the keynote to push the argument further in order to discuss whether the creative process of a historical text follows the same steps and puts into practice the same processes as the compositional genetics of a literary text. In other words, is there a specificity of the genetic process of a historical text? I intend to discuss this issue bearing in mind the case of Robert Southey’s History of Portugal project, which is both a historical and a historiographical work.
Thus, in this paper I will claim that the development of a historiographical project differs from the genetic process of a literary text. My argument will hinge on de Biasi’s (1996) classification of the stages and processes of composition of a work of literature (which I also intend to discuss) and I will attempt to demonstrate that this model is not completely apt to describe the genesis of a historiographical text. For instance, the chronology of the writing and revising stages identified by de Biasi does not fully apply to the methodology of the development of a historiographical project. I will also defend that exogenesis plays a crucial role in such a project since the information withdrawn from bibliographical sources is fundamental in a work that explains and interprets the past. I will illustrate my arguments with the case of Robert Southey’s History of Portugal project.
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Pessoa's working copy of The Tempest
According to a diary entry (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, E3/144N), the Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) read William Shakesperare’s The Tempest on 17th August 1906. Fernando Pessoa’s Private Library, currently held at Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, holds three different editions of the play: one, which is part of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited in Oxford by the Clarendon Press, a volume that was offered to Pessoa in Durban, in 1905; an edition from 1908 which Pessoa acquired already in Lisbon, and a 1921 edition by the Cambridge University Press. The 1908 copy of The Tempest edited in London, Paris, New York, Toronto & Melbourne by Cassell & Co Ltd., is signed by the author and exhibits verbal annotations on 102 of its 141 pages. Most of these annotations are attempts to translate the English play to Portuguese. Several documents of the author’s estate confirm that the author planned this translation intermittently for a period of at least 17 years (1906-1923). The annotations suggest that the 1908 edition was used by Pessoa as a sort of working copy being subject to different writing and revision campaigns. This is mainly attested by the use of at least 4 different writing instruments, sometimes one overlapping another, introducing variants, corrections and additions. This paper attempts to establish the chronology of the different writing stages in order to identify the author’s composition techniques and processes. This paper will also address some of the difficulties in genetically representing these annotations.
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Textual oscillation: from visual to conceptual and vice versa
The shift in understanding text as a process rather than a product disturbed the “equilibrium” of the perception of textuality, resulting in a two-way relationship between its inward and outward arrangement. The relation between textual composition-revision and visual applications of the latter, when shaped by additions, deletions, substitutions etc., might be regarded as internal; as this relation affects the external arrangement of a text, these two arrangements become interchangeable concepts. Given that quite rigid theoretical conclusions are abstracted by the means of a digital medium, it might be worth questioning the influence of visual text arrangement on the theoretical one and backwards.
The kinetics of visual and conceptual representation of text might be reflected in the manuscripts of Lithuanian poet Maironis (19th-20thcentury). Writing and revising models that can be identified in his works suggest deliberate semantic universalization, that is, variation of meaning from a more concrete to an abstract level. The concept of generalization, thus, can be drawn from schemata abstracted from different poems. Similarly, visualization can then be supplemented with theoretical reasons. To characterize this process in rather physical terms, the patterns of simple harmonic motion enable us to investigate the nature of representation of text and, therefore, textuality itself.
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Stenography and self-editing: Astrid Lindgren’s original manuscripts
Before becoming an author and an influential editor and publisher of Swedish children’s literature, Astrid Lindgren worked as a secretary, a profession through which she developed a method for writing in the Melin system of shorthand. Although Lindgren holds a unique position within Swedish literature, her creative process has for many years been hidden in her original stenographed manuscripts which typically include cuts, alterations, and revisions of specific sections.
Being an editor and publisher who also edited and published her own books, Lindgren is known for being a literary solitaire who refused every influence over her work. In this paper, I present the dual role of author and editor that Astrid Lindgren instead took in her own creative process. Using the final and – in the time for its publication – very controversial chapter of The Brothers Lionheart (1973) as example, I address firstly the creative advantages Lindgren found in the practice of short hand, as well as the writing method’s impact on her literary work. Secondly, I discuss Lindgren’s cuts and revisions in relation to the editorial credo and value system recurrently expressed by Lindgren in her public role; a value system where simplicity, artistic liberty, and a modernist view on the children and their upbringing is put at the centre.
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Layers of revision in texts with multiple levels: encoding challenges in poetry by Pedro Homem de Mello
Early 20th-century autographs (whether manuscript or typescript with handwritten revisions) constitute what Marita Mathijsen designates as “complexe documentaire bronnen” (Mathijsen, 2003: 47). Generally, these materials consist of a multi-layered network of “temporal unit[s] of writing”, which result in “a complicated web of interwoven and overlapping relationships of elements and structures” (Vanhoutte, 2006). This characteristic poses important challenges, not only to analogue transcription but also to digital encoding.
The international XML standard maintained by the TEI Consortium provides a robust schema to represent textual phenomena, including the intricate authorial revisions that occur in genetic documents, such as additions, deletions, and rearrangements. However, when the edition involves multiple witnesses where internal variation occurs, it becomes increasingly difficult to process all the revision sites.
Automatic collation programs are mainly performed on plain text and discard the markup employed in the manuscript transcriptions, while recent approaches to retaining selected markup or experimenting with native XML collation require high level of technical skill, in order to adjust the functioning of the algorithms in the software (Bleeker et al., 2018). On the other hand, manual collation and full encoding of the apparatus, using the methods prescribed by the TEI Guidelines, is often labelled as laborious and time-consuming, since it requires considerable attention, to designate networks among structural and textual nodes.
Following Gabler’s distinction between layers of composition – or intradocumentary variation – and textual levels – or interdocumentary variation – (Gabler, 1993: 198), this presentation will consider a few examples of poetry by Pedro Homem de Mello (1904-1984), which represent considerable encoding challenges. That is the case, for example, with block additions, retracements, cancellations, and displacements (involving several lines or stanzas), as well as some structural occurrences that affect the markup hierarchy. I will elaborate on possible workaround solutions and consider the most effective way to process intra- and interdocumentary variation in the ongoing digital edition, in order to achieve a full representation of the writing process.
References
Bleeker, Elli, Bram Buitendijk, Ronald Haentjens Dekker, and Astrid Kulsdom. 2018. “Including XML Markup in the Automated Collation of Literary Text”. Proceedings of the 2018 XML Prague Conference. <http://archive.xmlprague.cz/2018/files/xmlprague-2018-proceedings.pdf>
Gabler, Hans Walter. 1993. “On Textual Criticism and Editing: The Case of Joyce’s Ulysses”. Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press: 195-224. <https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/5811/1/5811.pdf>
Mathijsen, Marita. 2003. Naar de Letter: Handboek Editiewetenschap. Den Haag: Constantijn Huygens Instituut.
Text Encoding Initiative. 2018. TEI: P5 Guidelines 3.4.0. <http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5>
Vanhoutte, Edward. 2006. “Prose Fiction and Modern Manuscripts: Limitations and Possibilities of Text-Encoding for Electronic Editions”. Electronic Textual Editing, ed. Lou Burnard, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and John Unsworth. New York: Modern Language Association of America: 161-80.
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Visualizing writing stages in a digital genetic edition: the case of scholarly uncertainty
One of the most exciting and demanding tasks of the genetic editions' venture is the thorough inspection of the author's manuscripts in search of these crucial indications that help define the writing and revision stages of the creation of a work. It often happens that a single document can contain more than one writing stage or/and revision campaign. It also happens that indications –such as topography or writing ductus– may appear at some point ambiguous or even conflicting. In those cases the editor is faced with an interpretation problem, whose solution depends on the editor’s abilities: observation skills, paleography knowledge, familiarity with the writing habits of the specific writer and resourcefulness. Nevertheless, despite the editor’s scientific adequacy, it seems that the solution to the problem often lies in eventually accepting and presenting both/all the alternative narratives of the writing process, which certainly increases the complexity of the visualization of the writing process.
This paper will discuss the ways in which ambiguous or even conflicting writing traces can be both evaluated in constructing the narrative of the writing process and handled in the very representation of writing stages within a genetic edition. We will be focusing on a specific case, the genetic edition of an incomplete elegiac ode written by the Greek national poet Dionysios Solomòs (1798-1857). Our approach takes place within the preparation of a digital scholarly edition of his manuscripts that will also include genetic editions of his major works (mostly unfinished and unpublished during his life time).
Bibliography
de Biasi, Pierre-Marc. 1996b. "What is a literary draft? Toward a functional typology of genetic documentation". Yale French Studies (89): 26-58.
Grésillon, Almuth. 1992. Éléments de Critique Génétique. Paris: PUF.
Tsantsanoglou, Eleni. 1982. Μια Λανθάνουσα Ποιητική Σύνθεση του Διονυσίου Σολωμού. Το Αυτόγραφο Τετράδιο Ζακύνθου αρ. 11. Athens: Ερμής.
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The plural text and the digital edition
This lecture questions the relationship between digital technology and the emergence of a renewed interest in the text as transmitted by documents, as well as the consequent increase in the production of diplomatic and ultra-diplomatic editions. From an analysis of the multifaceted textuality of the Middle Ages, the lecture moves on to review the social, economic and cultural motivations that led to the elaboration of the One Text as sanctioned by print. However, the stratification of modern authorial manuscripts takes the idea of the One Text to its breaking point. The digital medium, inherently plural and inherently prone to revisions and modifications, seems more sympathetic to the multifaceted textuality of draft and authorial manuscripts. However suitable, the digital environment comes at a price: the instability of digital content as well as the unpredictability of its fruition in terms of environment, modality and morphology, all this takes the plurality of text to another level, a level that threatens the existence of scholarly editors and their mediating role between the messiness of the authorial page and the eager reader.
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Making texts multiple. A proposal for digital edition in Calle María Mercedes Carranza
Calle María Mercedes Carranza is a digital research environment which aims to provide access to the archive of Maria Mercedes Carranza, a renowned Colombian poet. After discovering a number of drafts for certain specific poems and considering how to show them to the public, the research team proposed a visualization tool which enables the reader to navigate the stablished version of a text as well as its earliest textual witnesses simultaneously. This method, developed in HTML, CSS and Javascript, has resulted in an environment that allows the interaction with every variant of the text by clicking highlighted words which cycle through every possibility the author considered, transforming a single poem into several different versions of itself. This presentation of the text allows us to explore the way in which its form determines its interpretation and constrains its different readings, shedding some light into the different ways the digital medium may differ from a printed representation of the poem. The proposal holds the hypothesis that any possible interpretation lies in the different permutations a text may have, rather than a single, unique text which is typical in printed media. Textual criticism, then, is transformed into the study of a text that is, by definition, multiple, which greatly expands its possible readings.
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Blind revision: the role of the typewriter in Jalmari Finne's writing process
The Finnish writer Jalmari Finne (1874–1938) is a rare example of an early 20th century author who composed directly on a typewriter. As Hannah Sullivan has demonstrated in her The Work of Revision (2013: 39–40), generative typing did not become common until after World War II. Before that, typewriters were mainly used for typing up manuscripts.
In his autobiographical writings, Finne stressed that speed of writing was the reason why he used a typewriter. This observation is in striking contrast to Friedrich Kittler’s (1990: 195; 1999: 202–204) thesis that the most remarkable feature of the typewriter was not its speed but its ”spatially and discrete signs,” which enabled one to type without having to look at the text while writing. According to Kittler, this ”blindness” of typing broke the ”media-technological basis of classical authorship.”
By examining the typescripts of the historical novel Vuosisatain vaatimus (The Claim of the Centuries, 1918), I will show how Finne’s use of the typewriter adds a new sense to the metaphor of blindness that Kittler draws from the mechanical properties of the typewriter. Finne’s speedy writing process involved a sort of ”blind revision” in that he did not read and correct what he had written, but inserted a blank paper in the machine and typed an altogether new version of the text without copying the earlier text versions.
References
Finne, Jalmari. 1918. Vuosisatain vaatimus. Helsinki: Otava.
Kittler, Friedrich. 1990. Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
— —. 1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthorp-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Sullivan, Hannah. 2013. The Work of Revision. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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The genesis of titles in Fernando Pessoa’s editorial projects
The “Digital Edition of Fernando Pessoa. Projects and Publications” (http://www.pessoadigital.pt/) results from a collaboration between researchers of the “Estranhar Pessoa” research project, based in the Institute for the Study of Literature and Tradition (IELT) of the New University of Lisbon, and the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) of the University of Cologne. The website includes an edition of Pessoa’s lists of editorial projects, elaborated between 1913 and 1935 (still presented in a beta version), as well as of the poetry published by the author in lifetime, in periodicals, from 1914 onwards.
One of its main goals is to enable a deeper understanding of the development of Pessoa’s projects, in articulation with his publications during lifetime. This is achieved namely through the tracing of the genesis of titles of projects and publications: on a micro-level, within each document, and on a macro-level, regarding the occurrences of titles in the documents throughout time. On a micro-level, different modalities of transcription of each document (diplomatic, first version, last version) allow for the tracing of the textual genesis, using a text-oriented TEI encoding which includes two writing stages. On a macro-level, a general index of titles and a timeline of documents and publications (http://www.pessoadigital.pt/en/timeline) enable the user to follow their chronological development and modifications.
Specific timelines for the works attributed to one particular name, concerning namely the titles related to the work of the heteronym Alberto Caeiro, are currently being developed (see http://www.pessoadigital.pt/de/timeline-caeiro). While the timeline of documents and publications is based on metadata encoded in the TEI header, the index and timelines of titles depend upon the identification of works mentioned in the documents and require a semantic encoding.
This presentation will discuss aspects of the genesis of titles developed in the context of the work attributed to Caeiro, focusing on the challenges which the work of Pessoa, covering planning and publication, poses for the text encoding, and on the possibilities of usage and interpretation offered by the different modalities of transcription, the index and the timelines.
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Text as a hedgerow: seasons of cultivation
As in our reasoning we operate in abstract nouns specifying human activity, the image that we choose considerably affects the direction of thinking. For example, Hans Zeller saw a text as a structure, and hermeneutic etymological memory prompted him – and is prompting us – to bring up images of builders and aligned troops. The suggested image of a hedgerow for a text certainly evokes the motif of a work as a plant. However, beside the spontaneous pull towards the sun (of fame), this image implies the concept of conscious grafting, orderly pruning and planned shaping. Perhaps even more important is the tension within the image of a hedgerow between the function prescribed by the owner of the field (author? editor? copy-editor? reader?) and an uninhibited and unpredictable growth. Not less confrontational is the function to separate, conceal and cover, as well as a possibility to peep in through a gap and to slip through, true, sometimes getting pricked all over. A hedgerow is always alive, but in winter it is asleep, and in certain periods its change is quite obvious. Trimming must also be performed when the season is right. Is there any potential to apply these analogies in textual theory and the editing situation? In my presentation I am going to reflect on the fruitful and unfruitful periods of self-revision of the text that is constantly changing in the autographs of writers of the modern period, and to develop the concept of fluid text proposed by John Bryant. I will also discuss the means to present not only individual variants of the text, but also meaningful stages of the development of the work in a digital genetic edition in a manner easily comprehensible to the reader. I will demonstrate the experiments with the xml encodings of the manuscripts and authorized publications of poems by the Lithuanian poet Maironis (1862–1932) by using the Edition Visualization Technology tool (2 beta 1).
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What Is a Version? Revision in Digital Genetic Criticism
In 2009, Marita Mathijsen announced the end of genetic editing due to born-digital writing: ‘the physical circumstances in which a work comes into being nowadays have changed so much that one can speak of a new era of scholarly editing, and of a radical shift which might well herald the end of the genetic method of editing’ (Mathijsen 2009, 234). But the genetic orientation in digital scholarly editing is more vibrant than ever, as this paper will try to show.
In the research field of Writing Studies, there is a long tradition of research into born-digital texts. In literary studies and textual scholarship, this type of research is less developed, although recent studies show interesting results with regard to the possibility of applying digital forensics to textual scholarship. Usually the differences in approach between Writing Studies and Genetic Criticism result from the fact that the latter is often unable to work with living authors. Similarly, Textual Scholarship usually develops from editorial projects relating to the most canonical, dead authors, such as Shakespeare or Goethe. Nevertheless, a rapprochement would be beneficial to all of these disciplines.
This paper tries to take a step in the direction of such a rapprochement by zooming in on the notion of the ‘version’ and investigating whether born-digital literature forces us to radically abolish this concept. Its thesis is that the notion of the ‘version’ does not necessarily become obsolete when dealing with born-digital texts. The digital medium does not make it irrelevant, but it does challenge the logic of the version and invites us to sharpen our working definitions of this concept. The paper’s starting point is that the notion of the textual version is often employed too imprecisely in textual scholarship and genetic criticism, and that it is necessary to always specify the size of the textual unit. Only then can the concept prove its relevance in the digital medium. Born-digital literature therefore impels us to reassess the existing theories, mostly inspired by stucturalist theories of the 1970s, and prompts us to re-examine how the concept can remain a valuable tool in the study of literary geneses.
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Visualization of the genesis of verse as a research tool: sound repetitions
The sound composition of the poem (as far as we can regard the text as the result of creative work) is the moment at which the search for phonetic forms in their interaction with semantics and syntax is completed. The process of creating a poem at the sound level can be visualized by combining the “Phonotext” web service (cf. http://phonotext.syllabica.com) as a tool for automatic detection of sound repetitions and the “Videotext” technology (cf. http://videotekst.ru/en.php), a digital system that enables the user to kinetically visualize textual genesis. The paper, based on the material of Russian and English poetry, examines the dynamics of changes in sound links of the verse at all stages of revision, which are characteristic of the two main types of the poem genesis which may be defined as phonocentric (i.e., typical of a genesis starting out with a rhythmic and synctatic gesture) and logocentric (in which the initial idea “pops up” as a compressed utterance). Phonocentric and logocentric principles of text creation refer primarily to the formation of the basic concept and to the initial creative impulses reflected in the first sketches. Neither of these models dictate the whole writing process, but each manifests itself as a variable dominant.