Encode all the things... or not. Remixed from image by Allie Brosh of Hyperbole (hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com).

Update 4/24/2012: Oh, neat!: this post got the DH Now Editor’s Choice on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012.

Team MARKUP evolved as a group project in Neil Fraistat’s Technoromanticism graduate seminar (English 738T) during the Spring 2012 term at the University of Maryland; our team was augmented by several students in the sister course taught by Andrew Stauffer at the University of Virginia. The project involved using git and GitHub to manage a collaborative encoding project, practicing TEI and the use of the Oxygen XML editor for markup and validation, and encoding and quality-control checking nearly 100 pages of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript for the Shelley-Godwin Archive (each UMD student encoded ten pages, while the UVa students divided a ten-page chunk among themselves).

Team MARKUP is currently writing a group blog post on the process, so I’ll use this post to concentrate on some specifics of the experience and link to the group post when it’s published.

The Creature speaks.

Six takeaways from the Team MARKUP project:

1. Affective editing is effective editing? One of my favorite quotations–so beloved that it shapes my professional work and has been reused shamelessly on my Ph.D. exams list, a Society for Textual Scholarship panel abstract, and at least one paper–is Gary Taylor’s reasoning on the meaningfulness of editing:
   

   “How can you love a work, if you don’t know it? How can you know it, if you can’t get near it? How can you get near it, without editors?”*.

   Encoding my editorial decisions with TEI pushed me a step closer to the text than my previous non-encoded editorial experience, something I didn’t know was possible. My ten pages happened to be the first pages of the Creature’s monologue; hearing the voice of the Creature by seeing its true creator’s (Mary Shelley’s) handwriting gave me shivers–meaningful shivers accompanied by a greater understanding of important aspects of Shelley’s writing, such as the large editorial impact made by her husband Percy and the differing ways she crossed out or emphasized changes to her draft. Moving between the manuscripts images and the TEI encoding–so similar to my other work as a web designer and developer–also emphasized the differences in the writing process of my generation and the work that went into inscribing, organizing, and editing a book without the aid of a mechanical or digital device.

2. Project management. Because we didn’t know what to expect from the project until we were in the thick of encoding–would everyone be able to correctly encode ten full pages? how would we control quality across our work? what would our finished pages look like in terms of encoding depth?–we spent most of the project functioning as a large team, which was both sometimes as unwieldy as our large GoogleDoc (trying to find a time when eight busy graduate students can meet outside of class time is difficult!) and sometimes made sense (I was one of the few people on our team comfortable with GitHub and encoding at the start of the project, so I helped with a lot of one-on-one Skype, in-person, and email sessions early on). If I did the project over, I would have held a single Bootcamp day where we all installed and pushed within GitHub and encoded one page of manuscript up on the projector screen, then delegated my role as team organizer by dividing us into three subgroups. I also might have insisted on people agreeing ahead of time on being available for specific in-person meeting times, rather than trying to schedule these one or two weeks beforehand. I do think things worked out pretty well as they did, largely because we had such a great team. Having the GoogleDoc (discussed more below) as a central point for tech how-tos, advice, and questions was also a good choice, though in a larger project I’d probably explore a multi-page option such as a wiki so that information was a) easier to navigate and b) easily made public at the end of our project.
3. Changing schemas and encoding as interpretive. Encoders who started their work early realized that their efforts had good and bad results: because the schema saw frequent updates during our work, those who finished fast needed to repeatedly update their encoding (e.g. a major change was removing the use of <mod type>s). Of course it was frustrating to need to update work we thought was finished–but this was also a great lesson about work with a real digital edition. Not only did the schema changes get across that the schema was a dynamic response to the evolving methodology of the archive, it prepared us for work as encoders outside of a classroom assignment. Finally, seeing the schema as a dynamic entity up for discussion emphasized that even among more seasoned encoders, there are many ways to encode the same issue: encoding, as with all editing, is ultimately interpretative.
4. Encode all the things! Or not. Depth of encoding was a difficult issue to understand early on; once we’d encoded a few pages, I began to have a better sense of what required encoding and what aspects of the manuscript images I could ignore. Initially, I was driven to encode everything, to model what I saw as thoroughly as possible: sums in the margins, different types of overstrikes, and analytical bibliography aspects such as smudges and burns and creases. What helped me begin to judge what to encode was understanding what was useful for Team MARKUP to encode (the basics that would apply to future encoding work: page structure and additions and deletions), what was useful for more advanced encoders to tackle (sitting in on the SGA staff meetings, I knew that some of our work would be subject to find-and-replace by people more experienced with Percy and Mary’s handwriting styles), and what our final audience would do with our XML (e.g. smudges and burns weren’t important, but Percy’s doodles could indicate an editorial state of mind useful to the literary scholar).
5. Editorial pedagogy. Working on Team MARKUP not only improved my markup skills, it also gave me more experience with teaching various skills related to editions. As I mentioned above, acting as organizer and de facto tech person for the team gave me a chance to write up some documentation on using GitHub and Oxygen for encoding work. I’m developing this content for this set of GitHub Pages to help other new encoders work with the Shelley-Godwin Archive and other encoding projects. Happily, I was already scheduled to talk about editorial pedagogy at two conferences right after this seminar ends; the Team MARKUP experience will definitely become part of my talks during a panel I organized on embedding editorial pedagogy in editions (Society for Textual Scholarship conference,) and a talk on my Choose-Your-Own-Edition editorial pedagogy + games prototype at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute colloquium in Victoria.
6. Ideas for future encoding work. I’ve started to think about ways to encode Frankenstein more deeply; this thinking has taken the form of considering tags that would let me ask questions about the thematics of the manuscript using Python or TextVoyeur (aka Voyant); I’m also interested in markup that deals with the analytical bibliography aspects of the text, but need to spend more time with the rest of the manuscript images before I think about those. So far, I’ve come up with five new thematic tagging areas I might explore:

• Attitudes toward monstrosity: A tag that would identify the constellation of related words (monster, monstrous, monstrosity), any mentions of mythical supernatural creatures, metaphorical references to monstrosity (e.g. “his vampiric behavior sucks the energy out of you”), and reactions/attitudes toward the monstrous (with attributes differentiating responses to confronting monstrosity with positive, negative, and neutral attitudes). I could then track these variables as they appear across the novel and look for patterns (e.g. do we see less metaphorical references to monstrosity once a “real” monster is more prevalent in the plot?).
• Thinking about doodles: We’re currently marking marginalia doodles with <figure> and a <desc> tag describing the drawing. In our section of the manuscript, many (all?) of these doodles are Percy Shelley’s; I’d like to expand this tag to let me identify and sort these doodles by variables such as complexity (how much thought went into them rather than editing the adjacent text?), sense (do they illustrate the adjacent text?), and commentary (as an extension of sense tagging, does a doodle seem ironically comic given the seriousness or tragedy of the adjacent text?). For someone new to studying Percy’s editorial role, such tagging would help me understand both his editing process and his attitude toward Mary’s writing (reverent? patronizing? distracted? meditative?)
• Names, dates, places: These tags would let us create an animated timeline of the novel that shows major characters as they move across a map.
• Anatomy, whole and in part: To quote from an idea raised in an earlier post of mine, I’d add tags that allowed “tracking the incidence of references to different body parts–face, arms, eyes–throughout Frankenstein, and trying to make sense of how these different terms were distributed throughout the novel. In a book concerned with the manufacture of bodies, would a distant reading show us that the placement of references to parts of the body reflected any deeper meanings, e.g. might we see more references to certain areas of the body grouped in areas of the novel with corresponding emphases on the display, observation, and action? A correlation in the frequency and placement of anatomical terms with Frankenstein‘s narrative structure felt unlikely (so unlikely that I haven’t run my test yet, and I’m not saving the idea for a paper!), but if had been lurking in Shelley’s writing choices, TextVoyeur would have made such a technique more visible.”
• Narrative frames: Tags that identified both the specifics of a current frame (who is the speaker, who is their audience, where are they, how removed in time are they from the events they narrate?) and that frame’s relationship to other frames in the novel (should we be thinking of these words as both narrated by Walton and edited by Victor?) would help create a visualization of the novel’s structure.

I expect that playing around with such tags and a distant reading tool would yield even better thinking about encoding methodology than the structural encoding I’ve been working on so far, as the decisions on when to use these tags would be so much more subjective.

* From “The Renaissance and the End of Editing”, in Palimpsest: Textual Theory and the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (1993), 121-50.

“Metaphors will be called home for good. There will be no more likeness, only identity.”

Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl

Some interrelated thoughts on cyborgs/metaphors/prosthetics. Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (“my mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), bringing into a work already quite aware of the mimicries between body and text the idea of blason, the style of poetry that praises but pieces individual pieces of the loved one’s anatomy through metaphor (“she goes on”). Ever since I encountered the etching above, with its parodic response to such blason conceits as eyes like suns darting rays, cheeks like roses, and teeth like pearls, I’ve been unable to read that form of poetry as intended (i.e. describing a harmonious whole); the etching questions whether we can fashion the ideal from constituent ideals. Victor Frankenstein describes his Creature as an almost-functional blason figure (“I had selected his features as beautiful”), but precedes this claim by admitting another qualifier on his choices for materials: “His limbs were in proportion”. As with the etching, the Creature’s monstrosity comes partly from the failure of these parts, beautiful and proportionate as they may be, to coexist.

I’ve been thinking about extending these questions of the harmony and juxtaposition of parts of a whole (text/body) to prosthetics, whether these prosthetics are more metaphorical (e.g. prosthetics of memory) or physical additions like our cyborg mobile devices. When my group was developing a Cyborg’s Definition of “Women”, we identified “that species” as a group that faced extinction after failing to make use of certain prosthetics/tools; for Wollestonecraft, the tool in question was education. Success through the use of prosthetics was a mark of cyborghood.

With the addition of prosthetics, we’re facing (as with blason) the juxtaposition of disparate parts–except in this case, the metaphors by which we’re extending our bodies aren’t pulling us apart into unbalanced monsters. Certainly they can go either way, but I’m seeing a pattern where metaphors applied onto figures can create monsters like the one in the etching, and metaphors growing out of or chosen by a figure have greater harmony and utility. Perhaps prosthetics are a way of marking these piece-making bodily metaphors not as even more-idealized (and thus less utilizable?) objects, but as tools defined by their individual uses and qualities? I’d be interested in listing and comparing the Creature’s bodily parts with the Patchwork Girl’s; given their gender difference, it’s interesting to see the Creature’s parts as typical of blason inutility (lustrous black hair!) while the Patchwork Girl’s parts are defined (sometimes indirectly via anecdote) by their abilities to dance, dissemble, act.

Read on for more on distant reading…

DH Tools. I’d intended to write my next blog post as a follow-up on my discussion of DH tools, using a few of these tools to ask questions about Frankenstein while pointing out the limits and specifics of what the digital tools’ answers actually say. I didn’t get around to that… but I thought I’d share some tips for distant reading work I’ve used with my English 295 students:

1. Look for outliers. Is there anything in the visualization that doesn’t look the way you expected? Or, if everything looks the way you expected, what does that say about the text?
2. Can you imagine a visualization of the text that you’d like to make, but can’t find an appropriate tool to do so? Describe this imagined tool and what you would expect to discover about your text with it. Why do you think such a tool doesn’t exist yet? What would a computer need to be able to do–and if computers would need to do something “more human” than they can now, can you think of a way to train a computer to achieve that? (Think about topic modeling and sentiment analysis.)
3. It’s okay to ask questions with no previous expectations, questions based on hunches of what you might see, or questions where you there’s a tiny possibility of an interesting result, but you want to check for it anyway. When I was thinking about demoing how to work with the TextVoyeur tool, for example, I was planning on tracking the incidence of references to different body parts–face, arms, eyes–throughout Frankenstein, and trying to make sense of how these different terms were distributed throughout the novel. In a book concerned with the manufacture of bodies, would a distant reading show us that the placement of references to parts of the body reflected any deeper meanings, e.g. might we see more references to certain areas of the body grouped in areas of the novel with corresponding emphases on the display, observation, and action? A correlation in the frequency and placement of anatomical terms with Frankenstein‘s narrative structure felt unlikely (so unlikely that I haven’t run my test yet, and I’m not saving the idea for a paper!), but if had been lurking in Shelley’s writing choices, TextVoyeur would have made such a technique more visible.
4. Think carefully about what a visualization means. For example, I wanted to make a visualization of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield; the protagonist is given a name change about halfway through the novel, and I wanted to track what other changes co-occured with this name change and see whether there was a pattern in the characters who used the new name over those who stuck with the old name. This problem is a great candidate for a graph showing name frequency (“David”, the old name, versus “Trotwood”, the new name). Using the TextVoyeur tool, I was able to quickly create graphs of when the two names occurred through the novel:
   (Note that TextVoyeur lets you overlay multiple word frequency graphs, something I didn’t realize a year ago when I made these images. I’d have run a new graph for this post, but both instances of TextVoyeur/Voyant have been non-functional for the past two days… so be aware that the y-axes are slightly different in the two graphs… also that TextVoyeur is a fantastic tool, but sometimes unavailable when you’re hoping to use it.) There are issues, of course, with just accepting a visualization made by dropping the text into a distant reading tool. “David” was both the protagonist’s name and the name of his father; some characters used nicknames for David instead of his given name, etc.: these issues meant that I needed to be careful about what I could claim when reading a visualization of the protagonist’s naming. If I were marking up a transcription of David Copperfield for use in a project concerned with questions of naming and appellation, I’d want to consider tags that let me search for and count names by their speaker, meaning (is a diminutive used lovingly or condescendingly?), and other nuances. I’d also want to read the data I’m focusing on against other, similar data; for example, do other names (e.g. Betsy, Agnes) also occur less frequently in the second half of the book, perhaps because of changes in the monologue style or the physical location of the protagonist? A distant reading visualization should always be accompanied by a careful description of what it does and doesn’t show.

Here’s the full list of tweets if you’d like to run them through other tools. The UCSB Toy Chest and the DiRT Wiki are good places to find more tools.

Also: how do doppelgangers fit into our definition of the monstrous?

Ernest gets little page time. He isn’t mentioned in a letter to Victor in which Elisabeth does spend time discussing his other brother (William), and he oddly drops out of Victor’s remembrance instead of becoming more dear as his last remaining family member. (Stuart Curran’s Romantic Circles edition of Frankenstein collects the few references to Ernest here) What is Ernest even doing in the novel? I’d love to compare his place in the different versions of the work–I think it was Curran who suggested that Ernest is written slightly differently in the 1831 edition, and the fact that he remains in the book by that point (with Victor’s forgetting uncorrected) suggests Ernest’s vanishing role is worth exploring.

2. What do you make of the strange painting of Victor’s mother posed by her father’s coffin (a particularly creepy subject for Victor’s father to specifically commission)? Does this fit in with Steven Jone’s Freudian reading of Victor’s dream? Or were such subjects par for the course at the time? (Photographs of recently deceased children made to look like they were sleeping weren’t abnormal for the Victorians–though why paint a remembered person as dead/encased in a coffin when you could imagine him as alive within the painting? Did showing his true state conform to some sort of belief about naturalness/reality as reflected by painting?)

I gazed on the picture of my mother, which stood over the mantel-piece.  It was an historical subject, painted at my father’s desire, and represented Caroline Beaufort in an agony of despair, kneeling by the coffin of her dead father.  Her garb was rustic, and her cheek pale; but there was an air of dignity and beauty, that hardly permitted the sentiment of pity. (Shelley, Frankenstein, unknown page located in Project Gutenberg e-text)

3. In Jones’ Against Technology, he refers to “the story of Frankenstein’s creature who turns into a monster” (my emphasis, 1), an assertion that writes the character as first simply a creature, later monstrous. Is the monster’s monstrosity a result of his manner of birth, his grisly components and visage, or his evil actions? Does he become more or less monstrous during the novel as he gains knowledge, civilization, and other attributes of “humanity”–or does he perhaps simultaneously approach and recede from humanity?