Digital Darwin: Editing the Loves of the Plants As a Case Study of the Theory and Practice of Digital Editions
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Digital Darwin: Editing The Loves of the Plants as a Case Study of the Theory and Practice of Digital Editions by Alana Helen Rigby A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfillment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in English Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2016 © Alana Rigby 2016 Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii Abstract Digital scholarly editing is an evolving field that allows for the rendering of complex print works that are rife with paratextual material. Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants represents this kind of paratextually complex work: it is an eighteenth-century scientific poem of approximately 2000 lines, added to which are illustrations and extensive footnotes. Existing editions of the poem are 1) incomplete, presenting only a portion of the text, 2) lacking annotations, or 3) strip it of some of its paratextual elements, such as the footnotes or illustrations. This paper explores the use of digital editing methods to render Darwin’s most popular poem into the first-ever complete critical edition of part of Loves; using copy-text editing theory in the tradition of Greg and Bowers, an eclectic edition was created. A full transcription and annotations are included. Using the Text Encoding Initiative P5 Guidelines, a digital edition of the Front Materials, Canto I, and Interlude I was also created. The digital edition component of this project can be viewed at the Digital Darwin website. The password is “Snow Grimalkin”. The paper then explores the theory and practice of digital editing, charting its history from inception to present day applications. Ongoing debates in the field are discussed. Three other digital editions – Peter Robinson’s The Canterbury Tales Project; Morris Eaves, Joseph Viscomi, and Robert Essick’s The William Blake Archive; and Martin Priestman’s The Temple of Nature – are surveyed in detail with a focus on the various techniques for representing complex paratextual content. The essay concludes with the realization that digital editions have the capacity to overcome some of the pragmatic limitations encountered when creating scholarly print editions, especially in terms of representing paratextual content. However, this capacity comes with its own challenges and digital editors must, like editors of print, be rigorous in defining editorial goals and limiting scope. Also like print editors, digital editors must also maintain transparency in the application of their principles. iii Acknowledgements My project would not have been possible without the support of many people and organizations. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to the English department at the University of Waterloo, and to the several university librarians I consulted. I am also indebted to my supervisor Dr. Tristanne Connolly and my second reader Dr. Katherine Acheson for their guidance throughout. Many thanks are also due to my family and friends who have indulged my extended tangents, offered suggestions, and listened for far too long as I effused about “my Darwin”, not that “other Darwin”. iv Table of Contents Author's Declaration...................................................................................................................................... ii Abstract.........................................................................................................................................................iii Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................................................iv List of Tables.................................................................................................................................................vi 1.0 Introduction: Why Edit The Loves of the Plants? ............................................................................. 1 1.1 Choosing a Medium: The challenges of representing text and paratext ............................................. 5 1.2 Edition-building: Process and choices in the journey to a digital edition ......................................... 11 1.2.1 The Process ................................................................................................................................ 12 1.2.2 The Translation to Digital .......................................................................................................... 19 2.0 Survey of Digital Editing ................................................................................................................ 26 2.1 Debates in Digital Editing ................................................................................................................. 31 2.2 Diverse Digital Practices ................................................................................................................... 35 2.2.1: Looking Backward: Peter Robinson’s “The Miller’s Tale” ...................................................... 39 2.2.2: Looking Outward: William Blake’s “The Tyger” .................................................................... 42 2.2.3: Looking Inward: Martin Priestman’s The Temple of Nature .................................................... 45 2.3 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 48 Works Cited: ............................................................................................................................................... 51 Appendix A: TEI-XML Edition Code ........................................................................................................ 60 Validation Schema Code: ....................................................................................................................... 60 Front Materials Code: ............................................................................................................................. 61 Canto I Code: .......................................................................................................................................... 75 Interlude I Code: ................................................................................................................................... 134 Appendix B – Transcriptions and Annotations ......................................................................................... 145 Poetic Transcription .............................................................................................................................. 146 Annotations from Digital Edition ......................................................................................................... 254 v List of Tables Table 1 Publication history of The Botanic Garden; BG: The Botanic Garden ........................................ 12 Table 2 Editorial principles decisions ......................................................................................................... 13 Table 3 An overview of digital humanities tools and institutional support ................................................ 28 vi 1.0 Introduction: Why Edit The Loves of the Plants? In his 1982 book Kinds of Literature, literary critic Alistair Fowler defines three types of canon. The “potential canon… comprises the entire written corpus, together with all surviving oral literature” (214). The “accessible canon” represents all works of the potential canon that are readily available: documents that can be accessed via libraries, bookstores, and now the web, at a relatively low cost (215). And the “selective canon” consists of those books from the accessible canon that have been elevated by the “systematic preferences” of experts and intuitions (215). What belongs in each canon shifts as scholarly opinions vacillate and new discoveries are made, but the fluctuation has historically been a slow one (213). Recent decades, however, have witnessed an unprecedented and rapid change in the works that comprise Fowler’s three categories. As digital humanists Kenneth Price and Ray Siemens note, “mass digitization is adding to the accessible canon and reducing the difference in potential and accessible canons” (para 6). They cite the efforts of Project Gutenberg, a volunteer run archive of public domain works, and Google Books, the 2005-launched digitization project from technical magnate Google, as instigators in this drastic increase in accessible works of writing (para 7). Optical character recognition tools and other technological transcription advancements have enabled this trend to continue in scholarly spheres as well, and projects like Carnegie Mellon University’s Million Book Project and digital-copy collections such as Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) demonstrate the massive output that such technologies enable. Even the scholarly database JSTOR makes use of OCR technologies to digitize archived print editions of journals (Fenton and Duggan 246). The massive shift from potential to accessible canon begs the question: will we see a consequent shift of texts traversing from the accessible canon into the selective canon? Historically, movement between these canons could be observed in the editorial forms a text was allowed to take: French