Words’ End

Eugene Lyman is an Early English scholar at Boston University. The full title of his paper is “Presenting an electronic critical edition of Piers Plowman B.” The B refers to one set in a multitude of manuscripts of this Middle English alliteraative poem, comprising only one of its versions.

EL frames his talk with the following two quotes:

“Computers compute, of course, but computers today, vfrom most users’ points of view, are not so much engines of computation as venues for representation.” –Matthew Kirschenbaum

Understanding the poetics and principles of electronic scholarly editing means understanding that the primary goal of this activity is not to dictate what can be seen but rather to open up ways of seeing.” –Martha Nell Smith

Lyman has created software that allows you to look at the existing manuscript pages from ten different manuscripts, enlarge portions of those pages, read the transcriptions, look at erasures that tell us interesting things about how people might’ve edited in medieval England. You can search within the dataset, visualize the text in various ways, view the underlying XML markup… yesterday (or was it the day before?) EL actually gave some of us an informal demo of this thing, and it is sweet.

How to make a continuity of presenting a single text that exists in multiple manuscripts?

EL created the Elwood Viewer, which looks at documentary editions of texts. Its aims:

- tight coordination of text and image

- visual cueing to guide/reinforce reader’s attention

- handy tools, all within a metaphorical arm’s reach

- ease of navigation, especially at opportune moments

- parsimonious use of screen real estate

- simple, no-cost programming environment, open to change [this is all JavaScript, I think... -vz]

The software allows you to extract data for further analysis. One such analysis called into question the notion that scribes were totally random with respect to the ways in which they encoded [marked up, oh yes, for markup exists in many forms including punctuation and embellished first letters] their texts.

This is all a cricital edition: you take a group of witnesses, compare them, note the variations, and choose the variations you think were on the author’s agenda when she was writing the text. The notion of a critical edition, which effectively “leaves behind” the actual manuscripts, is pretty controversial; nevertheless, at the moment critical editions have a lot of weight in literary studies. [vz: I'm leaning toward the camp that's sceptical of critical editions, but only in the sense that I don't tend to consider them definitive, while many others do.]

EL has a prototype version of the critical edition. I haven’t found any screenshots of it on the web, but here’s the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive hosted at the University of Virginia. It seems more a worksite than a ready-made resource, but is worth poking around.