Abstract for ESTS 2019: Textual Scholarship in the 21st Century (16th annual conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship), 28–29 November, Málaga, Spain.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Eastern Finland
What do editors state as their practices, and what have they actually done with their sources? This paper charts editorial practices in 60 editions of 17th- and 18th-century English letters.
The quickest way to compile a linguistic corpus of historical manuscript texts is to use texts already published in editions. The results of such “philological outsourcing” (Dollinger 2004) may be suitable for research on content, grammar, lexis and pragmatics, but not necessarily for orthography, punctuation, and visual pragmatics, even when the editions used claim to have retained original textual features of the manuscript(s). This compromise has nonetheless been accepted in order to create historical corpora, such as the 5-million-word Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC), consisting of 12,000 English personal letters spanning the years 1400–1800.
This paper presents the work of the ERRATAS project, which has surveyed editions used in the CEEC, analysing the extent to which editors have changed aspects of their source manuscript texts. The survey charts both the editorial principles of each edition, and the actual practices as seen in the edited texts. Features examined include spelling, capitalization, word division and punctuation; abbreviations and special characters; and the editorial apparatus.
Studies of Early Modern English spelling have largely been based on printed and/or literary texts (e.g. Scragg 1974). One aim of the ERRATAS survey is to enable us to identify which spelling features in editions of historical manuscripts have been reproduced faithfully, and thus facilitate a broad diachronic survey of the history of English manuscript spelling, using previously edited sources.
One aim of the project was to see if it is possible to assign editions a rating of ‘philological reliability’. Preliminary results suggest this may not be feasible, as editions (and editors) have proved more variable than expected.
References
CEEC = Corpora of Early English Correspondence. Compiled by the CEEC project team under Terttu Nevalainen at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. <www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/CEEC>.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2004. “ ‘Philological computing’ vs. ‘philological outsourcing’ and the compilation of historical corpora. A Late Modern English test case”. Vienna English Working Papers 13(2): 3–23.
ERRATAS is part of the multidisciplinary project Interfacing Structured and Unstructured Data in Sociolinguistic Research on Language Change (STRATAS) at the University of Helsinki, Aalto University and the University of Tampere. <www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/varieng/interfacing-structured-and-unstructured-data-in-sociolinguistic-research-on-language-change-stratas>.
Scragg, D.G. 1974. A History of English Spelling. Manchester: Manchester UP.