Search

This panel addresses the TEI critical apparatus as a data model, investigating how it has expanded the capacity of scholarly editions to articulate and analyze phenomena of textual variation and multiplicity. We will discuss how the TEI critical apparatus, as a structure that mediates distinct versions of a work, is expanding horizons for multidimensional and pluralistic document modeling. Our panel surveys recent experiments with the critical apparatus that have led to new kinds of scholarly research and in some cases to revisions to the TEI Guidelines. What kinds of research questions and applications can we support with the TEI critical apparatus, and what practical challenges do we face in working with it in inline and stand-off ways? We begin by investigating how the TEI critical apparatus has transformed the expressive capacity of scholarly editions to prioritize textual multiplicity. We continue by sharing data models that apply TEI critical apparatus as a stand-off “spine” for connecting independently encoded witnesses. We conclude by inviting the audience to discuss with us the scalability of these methods for texts with large numbers of witnesses, and the technological challenges and opportunities of stand-off methods in light of recent changes to the TEI Guidelines.&nbsp

Mary Russell Mitford, Rienzi (ed. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg) Mary Russell Mitford’s Rienzi demonstrates the continuing importance of revolution as a dramatic theme into the nineteenth century. The five-act tragedy, first produced at Drury Lane in October 1828, was acted 34 times in its first season. Published that same year, the play sold 8,000 copies in its first two months. Tracing the political rise and fall of Cola di Rienzi, the play exemplifies Mitford’s skilled writing of historical tragedy for the stage, and its dramatic characterization and suspense offer a window into pre-Victorian tragic drama.

This article considers the impact of the digital turn on feminist efforts to restore value to women's literature of past centuries, and positions the Digital Mitford project as a next step in site-specific excavation following the large-scale surveys of women writers of the Orlando Project and the Women Writers Project. The Digital Mitford departs from these earlier projects by concentrating on an influential and prolific yet non-canonical woman writer who would otherwise garner only passing selective treatment in digital survey work. The very problem of Mary Russell Mitford's literary success over multiple decades and genres has led to a faulty collective memory of her that is fragmented along Romantic vs. Victorian period boundaries in literary studies. To redress this memory loss, the Digital Mitford team has initiated a network analysis study drawn from its TEI XML markup to call attention to the literary and historical figures together with the publications Mitford wrote about frequently in t...

This chapter features the Digital Mitford Archive’s work to construct a scholarly edition as a digital database. The chapter presents a view of the once popular and prolific Mary Russell Mitford as a writing node in a network of people and publications that shaped nineteenth-century literary and theatrical genres. The first half of the chapter applies distant reading methods to construct a model of Mitford’s correspondence network from extant records of over 2,000 letters held in public and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The chapter further investigates networks of reference within Mitford’s letters and writings from the 1820s encoded thus far in the Digital Mitford Archive, to explore which people and fictional characters Mitford discussed the most in years of career-defining productivity. The network analyses serve to highlight Mitford’s close relationships with male correspondents and her strong interest in female characters in the literature of her moment.

These two ambitious studies share a diachronic approach to British Romanticism as a distinctively global consciousness evolving and responding to the wars with France and imperial expansion. In Got...

Digital editions were young in the 1990s, and the expansive possibilities of hypertext in that decade sharply distinguish early digital editions from the productions of our moment. The accessibility and simplicity of early HTML code made for innovative experiments with the size of a “page” and the way one might handle displays of variants, before “diffing” tools like the Versioning Machine and Juxta came to define how we usually imagine the digital comparison of texts. This paper investigates the serious problems and vexing potentialities of “up-translation” when standards change, concentrating on work underway on a Bicentennial Frankenstein project. Our project is to produce a new, freshly collated digital edition in TEI based on the Frankenstein texts digitized by Romantic Circles, and incorporating a little-known publication of 1823 together with 1818 and 1831 versions currently represented. Readers in the past century are likely to have encountered either the 1818 or the 1831 edition but not the 1823, and we think that folding this text into our collation may help us to understand more about when and about how gradually some of the major alterations in the 1831 text (for example, to Victor Frankenstein's family members and the compression and reduction of a chapter in part I) occurred. The three print editions will be compared in parallel, and we will incorporate pointers to the Shelley-Godwin Archive’s edition of the MS Notebooks. To prepare the collation we returned to the simplest original form of the current edition, the Pennsylvania Electronic Edition prepared by Stuart Curran and Jack Lynch in the 1990s. Exploring that edition exposes the ambitious intellectual scope of early web editions and raises important questions about how we built editions then vs. now. We do not build a new edition to replace the earlier work, which yet “lives” and is available on the web. But our work is a fresh start, not a seamless integration. This particular project’s encounter with an impressive early hypertext edition raises more general questions worthy of reflection towards theorizing the up-transformation process: How do we understand the relationships among generations of digital editions? What aspects of the old hypertext editions (or editions in formats not consistent with our own) transcend or exceed the structures we currently consider sustainable? What perspective might a thorough review of the first still extant hypertext editions contribute to our scholarly editing practice now?

Romance poetry, drama, and theatrical productions shared common elements in the early nineteenth century, reflecting a hybridization of genres characteristic of Romanticism. In both published and performed work, the verse romances, dramatic poems, and staged historical tragedies of Mary Russell Mitford and Felicia Hemans bear comparison in featuring silence and withdrawal in the parts of lead characters. Mitford's and Hemans's use of antitype characters to represent large-scale national crises reflects their mutual grounding in German theater and drama, particularly that of Friedrich Schiller. Each poet has been associated with liberal idealism in representing corruptions of language as a sign of tyranny, and each poet develops characters who resist and evade the dictums of authority through silence. Nevertheless, Mitford's approach differs from Hemans's in the deployment of silent resistance to test problems with liberal idealism. Hemans emphasizes futility to alter a patriarchal script of destiny so that her resisting characters can only connect with audiences in a future time and cannot affect their own moment, while Mitford brings alternate possibilities within reach of her resisting characters in their time, leaving them to face a tentative future yet to be defined.

In August 2015, Pitt-Greensburg digital humanities instructors implemented the DHClass-Hub, a GitHub repository designed to familiarize students with GitHub through daily usage. This GitHub environment functions like a cooperative garage where students are both the clients and the mechanics. In the repository space they share code from assignments and projects that they need help with debugging, so that they and their fellow students and instructors can inspect, advise on, and repair it together. Although the DHClass-Hub was established primarily to help students gain confidence with GitHub in order to improve their management of their own semester projects, the repository unexpectedly became the locus of a flipped learning experience, where the liveliest learning activity of the coding courses occurs in dialogues initiated by students. The DHClass-Hub is openly available to the public, maintained continuously over semesters, and shared by two courses, making its archive of open and closed Issues an increasingly beneficial searchable resource over time for the students and for the wider GitHub community. The repository’s development was the initiative of a student who became a teaching assistant in the course and wrote its accompanying tutorial on accessing GitHub at the command line. The authors find that the most important benefit to using GitHub is not to support the short-term priorities of a semester-long course, but, rather, to encourage sustainable and well-documented digital development, both of student projects and the course itself.