More than most fields in the humanities, DH is collaborative, and I have gained so much in knowledge and by way of friendships during these twelve years of working with the widespread community of scholars, students, and staff, both on campus and beyond, who have engaged with MITH projects, programs, fellowships, training, and courses.

My gratitude extends to the able administrators and their staffs who have provided staunch support for MITH, especially Deans of the College of Arts and Humanities, Jim Harris and Bonnie Thornton Dill; Deans of the Libraries, Charles Lowry, Pat Steele, and Babak Hamidzadeh; and former longtime Dean of the iSchool, Jenny Preece. Without doing a long roll call, I’d also like to thank the superb program officers of the NEH, IMLS, and Mellon Foundation, without whose support the Digital Humanities never could have flourished. They often asked telling questions that led good projects to be re-conceptualized into excellent ones.

Those who know me well probably expect a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley somewhere in this farewell. But I’m turning instead to the inimitable Casey Stengel, one-time manager of both the New York Yankees and the New York Mets, who has said, “Managing is getting paid for home runs that someone else hits.” I’m proud of all the home runs MITH’s extraordinarily talented staff has hit during my tenure, and I cherish the long-lasting friendships I’ve made here over the years. To MITH’s current staff–Trevor, Grace, Purdom, Stephanie, Kirsten, Raff, and Ed—I want to say what a great pleasure it has been working with you: I’ve enjoyed every single day at the office and will miss your constant company.

My deepest debt is to my brilliant colleague and friend Matt Kirschenbaum, who has been with me for the whole journey. He began as MITH’s Associate Director on the same day as I began as Director, and he acted in that capacity until recently becoming the founding Director of our Graduate Certificate Program in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities. Much of MITH’s success can be attributed to Matt’s vision, acuity, and intellectual breadth. Carl Stahmer, who joined Matt and me as an Associate Director during our first year, and Doug Reside who followed Carl, were instrumental in getting us off to a fast and sure-footed start, along with designer par excellence Greg Lord.

Ah! But Shelley is never far behind, whether or not I quote him. As I cycle off of MITH on July 1 and return to the English Department, I will begin an extended research leave dedicated to his works and those of Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Godwin—a thrilling prospect! In saying farewell, I know that I couldn’t possibly leave MITH in better hands than those of the remarkable Trevor Muñoz, who I know will lead MITH steadily along an ever-ascending trajectory.

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As with our earlier release of the Frankenstein manuscripts, these manuscripts all appear as high quality page images accompanied by full transcriptions, and they are encoded in a schema based upon the Text Encoding Initiative’s guidelines for “Representation of Primary Resources,” enabling researchers, editors, and students to pursue a variety of scholarly investigations. Our encoding captures important aspects of the composition process, tracing the revisionary evolution of primary manuscripts and enabling users to see and search for additions, deletions, substitutions, retracings, insertions, transpositions, shifts in hand, displacements, paratextual notes, and other variables related to the composition process.

Prometheus Unbound, itself, was first published in 1820 in a volume entitled Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, With Other Poems (hereafter 1820). No poem caused Shelley (PBS) more pains to compose or occupied him for so long. It took him almost a year and a half to write the principal parts of the poem, beginning in late August or early September 1818 and ending in December 1819. But he appears to have been planning the poem as early as March 1818, and to be revising it as late as May 1820.

The intermediate fair copy of Prometheus Unbound located in e.1-e.3 served as PBS’s safekeeping copy; and he recorded in it revisions made to the poem after the press transcript had already been sent to England from Italy. Mary W. Shelley transcribed for the press most or all of Acts 1-3 between 5 and 12 September 1819, and all of Act 4 in mid-December 1819. As was his usual practice, PBS appears to have corrected the press transcripts, making a series of small final revisions to prepare the poem for the press. It is by now a commonplace that he was extremely dissatisfied with the published text of 1820, the only edition of Prometheus Unbound to appear during his lifetime, for which he was not allowed to read proof. But the “formidable list” of errata he prepared for that text has been lost or destroyed—as has been the press transcript itself, which best would have reflected his intentions for the printed text. The last surviving manuscript of Prometheus Unbound in PBS’s hand, these notebooks are the necessary starting point for all those who desire to better their understanding of Shelley’s greatest poetic achievement.

For this release, the S-GA team invested in refining the design of the site to improve users’ experience of navigating the rich contents of the Archive. Most notably, the contents of S-GA can all be accessed by Manuscript (with page images ordered by their sequence in the manuscript), or by Work (with page images ordered by their linear sequence in the work, e.g., Acts and scenes). The Frankenstein manuscript page images have been refactored so that they can be accessed in all of the complicated arrangements and rearrangements through which they have descended to us over time.

Our next planned release for S-GA in late Spring 2016 will increase its contents by an order of magnitude, with several thousand as yet untranscribed page images. We continue to work behind the scenes on opening the Archive to participatory curation.

The post The Shelley-Godwin Archive Releases the <em>Prometheus Unbound</em> fair copy notebooks appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The most immediate goal for the Archive’s current first phase is to provide access to page images under open licenses of as many of these manuscripts as possible, through a series of public releases. These began on Halloween with the release of the fully transcribed and encoded Frankenstein Notebooks, containing all known draft and fair copy of the novel. Frankenstein will be followed in the Spring by the fully transcribed and encoded fair-copy manuscripts of Percy Shelley’s greatest poem, Prometheus Unbound. Typically, given the limits of funding and labor, the digitized manuscripts of the Archive will be publicly released in one of three forms of development:

• page images with transcriptions that are fully corrected and TEI-encoded (as with Frankenstein and Prometheus Unbound);

• page images with transcriptions that have not yet been corrected (as will be the case for most of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s manuscripts at the Bodleian Library);

• page images only.

The curatorial status of each page in the Archive is color-coded so that during the first phase users will understand the relative trustworthiness of transcriptions. In the Archive’s subsequent phases the color-coding will also serve as an indication of what type of curatorial work users might best contribute.

The innovative technical infrastructure of the Shelley-Godwin Archive builds on linked open data principles and emerging standards such as the Shared Canvas data model and the Text Encoding Initiative’s Genetic Editions vocabulary in order to open the contents of the Archive to widespread use and reuse, and to support distributed user curation in subsequent phases of the project. Users of the Archive can see and search for additions, deletions, substitutions, retracings, insertions, transpositions, shifts in hand, displacements, paratextual notes, and other variables related to the composition process.

Currently, users of the Frankenstein Notebooks have several available views of the data, beginning with the choice of selecting a “physical” or “logical” view to order the page images. For instance, the page images can be browsed in their Notebook order, or by chapter sequence. Once that choice has been made and an image has been selected, the default page view aligns side by side the page image and transcription. Other possible views include the XML-encoded transcription, or a redacted clear-reading text that omits deletions, inserts additions in their appropriate location, transposes text as indicated in the draft, and arranges text fragments in their intended sequence. Users can also zoom in on individual page images until they fill the entire window, or choose to limit their view of the transcription so that only the text written by Mary or Percy Shelley is highlighted.  Those interested in searching the Frankenstein Notebooks for the word “monster,” for instance, will see thumbnails of all the pages containing that word. This list can be filtered so that only the pages with the word “monster” in Mary Shelley’s or Percy Shelley’s hand appears, or once can choose to see only the pages in which the word “monster” has been added, or only those in which it has been deleted in either or both hands.

The kind of networked, distributed transcription and encoding a the heart of the project has been pioneered during the Archive’s first phase by a team of students in two graduate seminars at the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia, who transcribed and encoded roughly a third of the manuscript pages of Frankenstein, overseen by an expert encoder and a Shelley scholar. By scaling up such experiments in its next phase, the Archive will help to move textual scholarship into the classroom and, eventually, out to the public so as to make students and citizen humanists active, knowledgeable, and critical participants in the great cultural transition now underway from a Textual to a Digital Condition.

By making the Shelley-Godwin Archive material massively addressable in a form that encourages user curation and exploration, we will be transforming it into what some are calling an “animated archive,” an archive as work-site rather than simply a point of access, that can ultimately take the form of a commons through which various discourse networks related to its texts intersect and interact. Most important of all, we will be pioneering, modeling, and building an open source participatory platform through which other archives dependent on manuscripts can effect similar transformations—helping literary manuscripts to thrive in a digital world.

News of the Archive’s launch appeared in such venues as the the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and some 60,000 unique visitors viewed the site within 24 hours of its launch. We invite you to see for yourself by visiting the project’s website.

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Raffaele comes to MITH from the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London (KCL), one of the foremost institutions in the world for digital research in the humanities, where he was most recently a Post-graduate Research Assistant. At King’s, he contributed to several major digitization and text encoding projects while also completing an MA in Digital Humanities and pursuing his PhD. Raffaele holds a BA in Digital Humanities from the University of Pisa (Italy).

Raffaele’s research focuses on the production and publication of digital scholarly editions of music, and he brings to MITH valuable expertise in the performing arts. His dissertation investigates digital approaches in musicology through a case study of a critical edition of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, a project in which Raffaele is collaborating with the Weber-Gesamtausgabe at the University of Paderborn (Germany). Raffaele is also an advisor for the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), which produces guidelines for the digital representation of music notation with a focus on scholarly requirements, and the convenor of the Text Encoding Initiative’s Special Interest Group (SIG) in Music, which addresses issues and delivers recommendations for the digitization of texts with music notation.

At MITH, Raffaele’s deep knowledge of encoding practices and theory and his experience in developing software and systems for humanities research will be an invaluable addition to projects such as the Shelley-Godwin Archive and ANGLES. The MITH staff and its partners are delighted to welcome Raffaele!

Follow Raffaele on Twitter as @raffazizzi

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David was a Senior Vice President at GlaxoSmithKline, where he led the bioinformatics group for 13 years. He is now an independent consultant and serves on a number of scientific advisory boards. He holds an adjunct appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where he was formerly Research Associate Professor of Genetics.

He received undergraduate degrees in Life Sciences and Philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, a Ph.D. in biology from the Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA, and an MSE in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include systems biology, macromolecular linguistics and data integration. For more information including a list of recent publications, please visit his academic homepage.

We are pleased to welcome David as a key contributor to this event.

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We look forward to seeing you during the upcoming semester. The first Digital Dialogue is scheduled for September 20th!

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I am currently in attendance at SCI9, and recently gave the following talk about centerNet and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) during a lightning round with Jim Chandler, Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago:

As Jim suggests, both humanities centers and digital humanities centers have been historically positioned to help set the agenda for the new humanities to come. Disciplinary innovation and transformation are their institutional legacy and obligation. Their ultimate success at what Percy Shelley has called “the far goal of time,” will not only be measured by whether the two kinds of centers have become one, but whether they have helped to produce a more profoundly interdisciplinary, collaborative, and internationalized humanities, one that incorporates quantitative and computational methodologies and emerging technologies, one that is no longer the “other” to science. Well, “You say you want a revolution. . . We’d all love to see the plan.”

How can these two networks help to bring this transformation about? Beyond the initiatives Jim has mentioned, the two organizations have agreed to work together to build scholarly and technical capacity in the humanities by way of shared grant projects, shared training, and shared events, beginning with the very successful joint conference recently held at the University of Toronto. In the short term, we’ll be working together also on such issues as credentialing humanities work that is collaborative, interdisciplinary, or digital; on impact assessment of humanities work and advocating for its importance; on further internationalizing the membership of our coalitions; on developing new curricular models and degrees; on making students active agents in knowledge production; on supporting new and innovative models for the publication and refereeing of humanities scholarship; on reaching beyond the academy to create a more truly public and interactive humanities; on working with funders to shape new opportunities that foster international collaborations; on advocating for our funders; and on nurturing a new generation of hybrid scholars, working in staff positions that combine service and research components. All of these initiatives are crucial to achieving the larger changes we seek. And those changes are social, cultural, and even economic, as much as they are technological. Achieving them means making common cause with University Libraries and iSchools, two academic units that are converging with centers in powerful ways to constitute the digital humanities and to reconstitute the humanities. It also means working with scholarly associations, university presses, and cultural memory institutions. We have passed beyond what has been called the “Jacobin Imaginary” and may have entered an era of the “Consortial Imaginary”: to make a revolution in the humanities we must be centers with large circumferences.

Follow the discussions at SCI on Twitter under hashtag #sci9.

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Emma arrives at MITH from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, where she worked for three years as text-encoder and project manager for the Accademia di San Luca research database (http://www.nga.gov/casva/accademia). When she wasn’t tagging, Emma organized digital humanities discussions with various institutions, including University of California, Los Angeles, University of Virginia, Library of Congress, and the British Museum. Emma is greatly interested in the capacity of new media and technologies to enhance humanities scholarship and issues involving the relationship between text and images, and visual perception.  She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Italian from Harvard College.

We’re very much looking forward to working with her!

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