b. Materials of the Project

The Devonshire Manuscript (British Library Additional MS 17,492) contains approximately 200 items (Southall, 1964: 143, Remley, 1994: 47), including poems, verse fragments, excerpts from longer works, anagrams, jottings, and doodles by a coterie of men and women centered on the court of Queen Anne Boleyn. Inscribed in over a dozen hands, the manuscript has long been valued as a source of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetry. In addition to 129 of his poems, the volume contains other transcribed lyrics and original work by numerous court figures, including Mary Shelton, Lady Margaret Douglas, Mary (Howard) Fitzroy, and Lord Thomas Howard (Southall, 1964: 143). These multiple contributors often comment and evaluate each other’s work through marginal notation and in-line interjection. In addition to a consideration of the volume as “a medium of social intercourse” (Love and Marotti, 2002: 63), the multi-layered and multi-authored composition of the Devonshire Manuscript make it an ideal text for experimentation in social editing.

The Social Edition of The Devonshire Manuscript project manifests Ray Siemens’ earlier argument that social media environments might enable new editing practices (Siemens et al., 2012a). In building an edition of an early modern text on the principles of open access and editorial transparency in both production and dissemination, we have integrated scholarly content into environments maintained by the social-editorial communities that have sprung up on the web; most notably, these include the Wikimedia suite of projects (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource). We have run an experiment to see how one might build an edition which is scholarly in a traditional sense, but which extends the editorial conversation into multiple pre-existing social media platforms including blogs, wiki discussion pages, dedicated Renaissance and early modern online community spaces, Skype-enabled interviews with our advisory group, and Twitter.

2. The Complexity of the New Scholarly Editing Community

a. Iterative Publication

Perhaps more than any other editorial choice, the iterative publication of the social edition of the Devonshire Manuscript departed most clearly from traditional scholarly editing practices. We have, in effect published (or are in the perpetual process of publishing) two versions of the edition in two mediums: a fixed PDF version, distributed to the project’s advisory board, and a version housed on the publicly-editable Wikibooks. We are currently working with multiple publishing partners to produce a second online edition, an e-reader edition, and a print edition to meet the needs of a broad and varied readership. These versions were planned to productively inform and influence each other’s development, with cross-pollination of editorial input across platforms. Although they did so, each medium also engendered difficulties in communication, coordination, and expectations to be overcome or accommodated—with varying results.

b. Communities of Interest and Technologies of Communication

As outlined above, a central aim of the project was to facilitate knowledge transfer and creation between multiple editorial communities, all of whom were invested differently in the project. These ranged from individual academics giving feedback as advisors to interested members of the public in contact with project staff via Twitter. These groups adopted, considered, and, at times, rejected different types of communication technologies in fascinating ways. Wikibook discussion pages were considered by established academics to be spaces meant for peer review; wiki editors explained that they were in fact where confrontations over edits usually occurred. Wiki editors were very helpful with questions of coding and technical production of content, while other communities felt deeply uncomfortable editing posted content. Sustained discussions in the Iter Community space proved difficult, while members of the public interested in Tudor culture followed our work avidly and often interacted with us on Twitter. Bloggers focused on the early modern period helped to generate discussion and disseminate reports as our edition building progress, but chose to limit their direct involvement with producing the edition. In often surprising ways, the technologies of communication each group used came to define, in some cases, the communities of interest and their respective investments. Considered as a whole, our project suggests that social media technologies can be harnessed for productive interaction and discussion by those scholars invested in a content area or project, but that they require comprehensive oversight by dedicated staff to develop and maintain participation in knowledge construction and dissemination.

c. Self-Directed Learning

Wikimedia content is openly editable by any individual. Project staff quickly reconsidered this theoretically nonexistent barrier to entry, though, when coding of the edition began in Wikibooks. Resembling a cross between HTML, XML, and CSS, Wikitext language is idiosyncratic and required a great deal of time and experimentation on the part of project staff to use effectively. Given the central importance of lab staff to the production of this edition, we have realized that this ad-hoc program of self-directed study produced a new community: young scholars, mostly masters level and younger doctoral students, who have shown interest in digital scholarly production. In other words, those usually construed as “assisting” in large projects here took on increasingly centralized roles in coordinating community input, coding the social edition in Wikibooks, discussing the project with various communities, and writing and disseminating critical research on the project as a whole.

3. Conclusion

a. The Open Source Edition?

The basic structures of the social edition are completely open for manipulation and repurposing. The formation, maintenance, and oversight of multiple communities, however, is central the success of any such open edition. Community investment provides a foundation for a technologically facilitated, process-driven approach. As our full paper will discuss in more detail, developing such communities is often difficult, with success depending on intensive and regular engagement and oversight. It is difficult for disparate communities, even when facilitated by social media technologies, to effectively come together for intellectual production. As even the well-regarded Transcribe Bentham project has widely discussed, crowdsourcing textual transcription—much less scholarly editing and production—is fraught with difficulties we are only beginning to navigate (Cause et al., 2012a; Causer et al., 2012b). In this reconfigured landscape of scholarly production, where we are likely “witnessing the nascent stages of a new ‘social’ edition existing at the intersection of social media and digital editing” (Siemens et al., 2012a: 446), however, we are not without models: the open source community, especially those groups devoted to general tool building and knowledge construction (OpenOffice, Wikimedia, Linux, Mozilla) is a powerful articulation of possible ways the technologically facilitated social production of intellectual content may fruitfully develop—given a robust and vibrant community of interest.

b. Ways Forward

The past two years of work suggests that some blend of intensive oversight and engagement with defined communities, along with a receptivity to spontaneously formed communities of affinity—as supported by both the Transcribe Bentham project (Causer, 2012b) and our own observations—is necessary to effectively implement social scholarly production. Only by becoming effective promoters, facilitators, and instigators can digital humanists provide an effective locus around which multiple communities can cohere. Although we encountered certain difficulties in facilitating knowledge exchange among various communities, on the whole we learned how to effectively facilitate community interaction across and between mediums and communities to produce scholarly knowledge in new ways.

References