But I’ve also been reflecting on the connections—and the gaps—between thought, (research, intellectual endeavor) and the tangible (the physical, the authentic object). Archivists have long been preoccupied with the authenticity of the original object, the power of evidence, of historical aura. And in so many ways, archivists have been attempting to connect their tangible collections with the thinking that preoccupies researchers and scholars. Archives, then, are also spaces in which thought becomes tangible (Porter’s letters are the tangible incarnation of her thought) and the tangible becomes thought (scholars interface with her letters and transform the physical paper into their own intellectual discoveries).

Archive as wireframe? The reading room offers an architecture in which intellectual innovation can take place. Behind the scenes, the stacks are skeletal, their shelves like the ribcage that houses and defends the heart. What happens, though, when archival collections move online? What role does authenticity play in the digital realm, and how can curators use technology to preserve and even enhance the magic of the original? If a digital edition facilitates access to otherwise untouchable material, in some way, it actually enhances tangibility. In thinking about the lives of archives in digital editions and in approaching these wireframes, I have also been thinking about stewardship, about the intermingled identities of the figures who interact with and shepherd a collection—the scholar, the editor, the digital humanist, the curator.

The wireframes I have created (please pardon the rough work of a first-time wireframer) attempt to invite interaction with the letters from the perspectives of each of the letters’ stewards: the author (Porter herself), the scholar (the advanced Porter researcher), the curator (the librarians and archivists who manage the collection), and the reader (significant elements of Porter’s audience, including secondary school educators and students and non-scholarly admirers of her work). The center of the digital edition is the Letter Viewer:

The Letter Viewer’s multiple display pane model enables the visitor to view many interpretations of a letter simultaneously by clicking on a word (“Image,” “Transcript,” “Author,” “Scholar,” “Curator,” “Reader”) in the horizontal navigation bar under the letter title and dragging it to a display pane. I envision the Letter Viewer existing in an expansive HTML5-enabled plane like those of the Mapping the Republic of Letters project or the web-based Prezi software. Side-by-side comparisons of image and transcription are just the beginning of the opportunities afforded by this interface.

The Author view presents an interactive timeline display that illuminates information about a letter in the context of Porter’s biography and bibliography:

The Scholar view provides visitors with access to annotations, related research, and the downloadable “data” underlying the project:

The Curator view illuminates the provenance of the Porter letters. Porter served as curator of her own letters in her lifetime and invested great thought into her legacy. Revealing the lives of the letters in the stacks of the Library provides insight into the physicality of the collection and the authenticity of historical objects:

The Reader view offers opportunities for interactivity and invites the participation of several crucial elements of Porter’s audience:

As a whole, these wireframes offer a test case for how a digital project can represent the life and stewardship of an archival collection in a university setting. In other words, this digital edition, itself, is a reflection on the practice of assembling, structuring, and preserving digital editions. Someday soon the project will transform from skeleton to tangible digital physique, and in the capable hands of the Maryland team, I know it will be as radiant and as bright as Porter herself. I am excited (and no doubt Porter would be, too) to imagine these rich letters taking on a new digital life.

Wendy Hagenmaier is a 2012 Master’s Candidate at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She is blogging about her Capstone Professional Experience Project involving a digital edition of letters from the Katherine Anne Porter Papers (http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1532) at the University of Maryland. Jennie Levine Knies, Manager, Digital Stewardship, Beth Alvarez, Curator of Literary Manuscripts Emerita, and Trevor Muñoz, Associate Director of MITH and Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research, University of Maryland Libraries, are supervising the project, alongside MITH-alum Tanya Clement, Assistant Professor, UT iSchool.

The post Wireframe as Metaphor: Architecting a Digital Edition for Katherine Anne Porter’s Letters appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Perhaps I spent a bit too much time at the Computer History Museum over Spring Break in my childhood home of California, where, between learning how to use a slide rule and Instagramming photos of the PDP-1, I developed a fascination with Ada Lovelace. The daughter of the poet Lord Byron and his mathematically-inclined wife Anne Isabella Milbanke (whom he called his “Princess of Parallelograms”), Ada displayed an uncanny gift for scientific thought. Her parents separated shortly after her birth, and Ada grew up with her mother, who attempted to save Ada from the perils of poetical tendencies by educating her in mathematics and music. Ada’s talent and training found legendary expression in her notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine—notes that included what many recognize to be the first algorithm to be processed by machine, and thus, made her the first computer programmer.

It is rumored that the adult Ada once asked in a letter to her mother, “If you can’t give me poetry, can’t you give me poetical science?” and indeed, Ada relied on access to imagination, metaphor, and simile in voicing her scientific thoughts. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,” she wrote at age twenty-eight, and I think of TEI, of an encoding engine and a tracing of patterns that seems agonizingly intricate, both purely practical and somehow inevitably creative. Could it be that Ada, Babbage’s “Enchantress of Numbers,” was equal parts programmer and poet? After all, both endeavors are rooted in language, in iterative rhetoric, and in choosing the right word…which is exactly what Katherine Anne Porter insisted on: “I beg of the reader one gentle favor for which he may be sure of my perpetual gratitude: please do not call my short novels Novelettes, or even worse, Novellas,” she urged in the introduction to her Collected Stories in 1965. “Novelette is classical usage for a trivial, dime-novel sort of thing; Novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything. Please call my books by their right names…”

In choosing the labels we use to refer to ideas and the tags we select to encode texts, we are using the mechanics of language to craft arguments and to reason. In some way, we are filtering what might be remembered, performing an algorithm of appraisal and selection just as an archivist might deem one photo worthy of preservation and “weed” the next. Porter knew as much about this figurative “weeding” and collecting as she did about tending the Geraniums and Forget-me-nots in her backyard garden. “Well, angel, here’s another long winded letter for you to send back,” she wrote to her sister Gay Porter Holloway in 1957, referring to her project of carefully constructing an archive of her own outgoing correspondence. “It’s odd,” she continued: “A friend just wrote me that she wanted to send me the letters I had written to her and her husband for years, she did not want them lost or scattered, but with my papers. And a man at Yale bought some letters of mine from somebody…and I have written to ask him if I may see them and copy them. I cannot imagine who is selling my letters, nor where he or she got hold of them.” Nearly a decade later, Porter donated this archive of letters to the University of Maryland. She died in 1980, the same year that the U.S. Department of Defense announced a programming language they had cultivated and groomed to become the universal standard (though it inevitably gave way to a constellation of child languages). They chose for it a palindrome of a name, a perfect trochee, “Ada.”

Wendy Hagenmaier is a 2012 Master’s Candidate at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She is blogging about her Capstone Professional Experience Project involving a digital edition of letters from the Katherine Anne Porter Papers (http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1532) at the University of Maryland. Jennie Levine Knies, Manager, Digital Stewardship, Beth Alvarez, Curator of Literary Manuscripts Emerita, and Trevor Muñoz, Associate Director of MITH and Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research, University of Maryland Libraries, are supervising the project, alongside MITH-alum Tanya Clement, Assistant Professor, UT iSchool.

The post Archives and Algorithms: Thinking about Encoding Digital Scholarly Editions appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The post Into the Electronic Reading Room: Stewarding Digital Scholarly Editions appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.