No source: created in electronic format.
LP15
A central concern of digital humanities has been how satisfactorily a digital transcription or facsimile represents its object of study. Dino Buzzetti, noting that “every form of text representation entails the implicit or explicit assumption of a model,” has stressed the importance of a clearly defined digital text model to define a threshold for digital representation and critical study.1 Sarah Werner, in a related turn, has asked what happens if “we move away from reading text to studying the physical characteristics of text, characteristics that can reveal important information about the content of the text and the cultural and historical creation of the artifact.”2 Werner is particularly concerned with large-scale digitization projects’ inability to represent works with physical features integral to their interpretation. Andrew Jewell and Amanda Gailey, in their introduction to the journal Scholarly Editing, echo her concern with “quick and dirty automated methods” that “digitize vast quantities of texts” but invariably create “shortcomings in metadata, accuracy, representation of compositional and publication complexities, and annotation.”3 Integral to all of these interventions is a distinction between the material form and linguistic content of print and manuscript material, and a desire to create digital archives that bring audiences closer to both.4
Two prominent initiatives, FRBR and TEI, exemplify efforts to address these kinds of concerns. The first has its origins in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), which authored a study in 1990 “to delineate in clearly defined terms the functions performed by the bibliographic record with respect to various media, various applications, and various user needs.”5 The result of this study was a report on Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), released in 1997 and updated as recently as 2009. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) evolved from previous efforts to make texts machine readable through standardized markup practices. TEI states as its “chief deliverable” a set of guidelines “to represent all kinds of textual material for online research and teaching.”6 Particular communities within TEI such as the Manuscript Description Task Force, the Physical Bibliography Work Group, and the Work group on Genetic Editions have established specialized approaches for the markup of particular bibliographical and book historical data.7 TEI and FRBR share a vested interest in the responsibility of representation. Whereas TEI markup represents a mix of linguistic representation and bibliographic information, FRBR attempts to create hierarchies to differentiate record-level bibliographical attributes.8
I am developing a small-scale mark-up and metadata approach that reflects the strengths of TEI and FRBR.9 The strength of such an approach would be its applicability to items with noteworthy physical and/or bibliographical features. I have created the structure for a relational database that integrates FRBR-inspired metadata with a collection of digital texts, which will eventually include digital facsimiles and transcriptions. My paper will discuss my continuing project for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Digital Research in the Humanities to provide users with a dynamic, visually-rich, and critically nuanced history of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) as a set of different material objects in multiple forms, including but not limited to manuscripts, notable editions, notebooks, translations, and interviews. My project has the particular goal of advancing knowledge about the creation, production, distribution, and reception of Death Comes for the Archbishop. It is also a test case in creating digital representations of print culture artifacts, textual variances, and bibliographical relationships among items. Central to my presentation will be a discussion of questions of form and content a project like this one raises:
My presentation will engage with these questions and report on the challenges I have encountered in this process and explain some of the decisions associated with the project. I will compare and contrast my work with some of the approaches to book historical questions taken by significant digital projects, including but not limited to the Modernist Journal Project, Radical Scatters, The Walt Whitman Archive, and The Digital Scriptorium, and Folger Digital Texts. I will also compare my approach to other experiments in FRBRization.