Fig. 1 Schematic representation of the encoding data model for a song, with TEI including MEI data. The song shown is When on the Altar of my hand. Facsimile from Early English Books Online.

The scholarship surrounding Lawes’s book and Early Modern song is at the nexus of literature and music and pays careful attention to both the literary and musical aspects of the songs. To reflect this duality in the data model of a digital edition, we use the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) format for the verse and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format for the notated music. You can find our encoded files on GitHub. Combining the two formats is becoming a fairly established practice (see for example the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum), but is not without challenges as existing tools and workflows are usually focused on either TEI or MEI. The hierarchical nature of these formats also requires one of the two to contain the other or, in other words, take a primary position. We have decide to prioritize TEI, partly because it has a well established metadata header in which we store bibliographical information. The MEI representing the music notation is then embedded within the TEI (see Fig. 1). We have decided to reproduce the underlying lyrics as a TEI-encoded stanza in order to provide our interpretation of how it may appear if formatted as subsequent stanzas often printed after the music.

For some songs, we are also dealing with multiple versions from other sources with or without music. In these cases, we produce a variorum edition, or a presentation of the text that showcases differences across the sources without privileging one over the other. Both TEI and MEI are well equipped formats for modeling textual variance, but both assume that one text will be the main reading text and only variant text will be encoded from other sources. To overcome this apparent limitation, we create a separate TEI/MEI document that only represents a collation; in other words, a document that lists where the differences between the sources of one song are to be located. This allows us to encode each source separately and to the degree of detail that we deem appropriate without worrying about tessellating multiple sources in one place (see Fig. 2). This approach has proven quite effective and I have had the opportunity to apply it to other projects at MITH and beyond, such as Digital Mishnah and the Frankenstein Variorum edition where, together with colleagues at Pittsburgh University and CMU, particularly Prof. Elisa Beshero-Bondar, we have begun to further develop, contextualize, and generalize this approach.

Fig. 2 Diagram of the data model of an hypothetical song with variants, showing three sources (A, B, and C) and a collation containing two variants that identify and connect diverging parts of the sources.

One goal of the Early Modern Songscapes project is to capture song as a multidimensional form, so we are complementing the edition with recorded performances of the songs, including variant version, under the direction of Prof. Katherine Larson (UoT). The musicians are Rebecca Claborn (mezzo-soprano), Lawrence Wiliford (tenor), and Lucas Harris (lute).

The UoT Scarborough Digital Scholarship Unit, under the direction of Marcus Barnes, has provided the backbone for the project through a robust implementation of Fedora for storing the Songscapes data and Islandora for the project website. My focus has been on providing a lightweight viewer for displaying the TEI, MEI, and adding interactivity for exploring variant readings and sources. The viewer is written in React/Redux and uses CETEIcean for rendering the TEI and Verovio for rendering MEI. Both of these tools offer a solution for rendering these data directly in a user’s browser, thus reducing the need for server-side infrastructure for TEI and MEI publications. They also provide isomorphic (that is one-to-one) renderings of the data, which allows to manipulate the rendering as if it were the actual underlying data. This, for example, makes it somewhat simple to write code to follow references from collation documents to the sources according to the variorum edition model described above. You can read more on CETEIcean in Cayless & Viglianti 2018 and on Verovio in Pugin 2106 (pages 617-631).

The first phase of Early Modern Songscapes has culminated with a conference at the University of Toronto, February 8-9 2019. As we plan the next phase, we are gathering user feedback on the site: we invite you to visit songscapes.org and fill in our survey!

Fig. 3 A screenshot of the current prototype showing a variant for the song Venus, redress a wrong that’s done (A Complaint Against Cupid).

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From the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies department blog:

In collaboration with the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH), TDPS presents a dramatic reading of Percy Shelley’s rarely-performed lyric drama, Prometheus Unbound featuring digital imagery of Shelley’s original manuscripts.

William Godwin, Percy Shelley’s father-in-law, is famously quoted as saying “God himself has no right to be a tyrant” and in many ways that is what Prometheus Unbound movingly professes. A condemnation of slavery in all forms, Prometheus Unbound is perhaps Shelley’s best-known and most beloved work. Inspired by Aeschylus’ classical Prometheia trilogy, Shelley adapts the mythological story of the Titan who gave man fire, refiguring the fate of mankind’s champion and the fall of the tyrant, Jupiter. It is a drama of Romantic ideals– suffering, endurance, and freedom– that is as relevant in today’s socio-political climate of resistance as it was two centuries ago.

Wednesday, October 25, 3-5PM, Cafritz Foundation Theatre

The post Dramatic Reading of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The first is the publication of the Scrope Davies Notebook in the Archive. Mislaid and then forgotten from 1818 to 1976, this notebook that Percy Bysshe Shelley entrusted to Byron’s friend Scrope Davies was famously discovered in a trunk in the vaults of Barclay Bank at 1, Pall Mall East in London. It is currently held on loan at the British Library. The notebook contains two previously unknown sonnets by Shelley (“Upon the wandering winds” and “To Laughter”) and alternative versions of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc” (Scene—Pont Pellisier in the vale of Servox). Digital images of these poems with full transcriptions can be accessed independently or in the order of the notebook as a whole, and may be found here.

Second, we are very pleased to announce the award of a grant from Queen Mary University of London for digitizing the manuscripts of William Godwin’s two greatest works, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Caleb Williams, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Overseen by renowned Godwin scholar Pamela Clemit, the project is a collaboration among QMUL, the V&A, and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). We expect to make these manuscripts available on the Shelley-Godwin Archive by the end of September 2017. More details about this project can be found here.

The post Two important S-GA announcements: Scrope Davies Notebook publication, plus a new grant! appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

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.

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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.

The post The Shelley-Godwin Archive: From a Textual to a Digital Condition appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

For the first time together, the archive will make available online the manuscripts of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The public can take a deeper look into the creative process of literature’s most iconic texts.

Building on MITH’s leadership and innovation in the field of digital humanities, the technology driving the archive provides high-quality, zoomable page images, as well as transcriptions of each page created on the fly from TEI encoding. The first public release of the archive will be the fully transcribed and encoded manuscripts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein notebooks, with page images provided by the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

“We encoded each stage of the composition process, tracing the revisionary evolution of primary manuscripts from rough draft to final copy,” said Neil Fraistat director of MITH and an eminent Shelley scholar. “The added value here is far greater than basic transcription that only displays text as it appears on the page without embedded contextual information.”

Users will search and see for themselves insertions, deletions, shifts in hand, and other variables related to the composition process. Future archive releases will encourage “participatory digital humanities,” which aims to provide web-based tools that help the archive function as a work-site for scholars, students, and the general public. Contributions will come in the form of transcriptions, corrections, annotations, and TEI encoding.

“This website is an excellent illustration of research in the humanities,” said Bonnie Thornton Dill, UMD’s dean of the College of Arts and Humanities. “The archive illuminates complexities in Frankenstein with regard to gender and the digitization makes this information visible and accessible to a wide range of scholars and interested people.”

The archive was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was created in partnership with the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the New York Public Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle.

To learn more about the Shelley-Godwin Archive, visit shelleygodwinarchive.org on the evening of Thursday, October 31, 2013 when the site is scheduled to launch.

Public Launch on October 31, 2013 in NYC

To celebrate the launch, the New York Public Library will host a free public program on October 31 at 6 p.m. in the Margaret Berger Forum at The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.  On hand will be Neil Fraistat and David Brookshire from MITH, who will discuss the creation of the archive’s first transcribed and encoded manuscript, the Bodleian Library’s Frankenstein Notebooks of Mary Shelley. Elizabeth Denlinger, curator of The New York Public Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, will give a brief overview of the archive’s generation and birth. Charles Robinson of the University of Delaware will give a more extended talk on the novel’s composition, illustrating how the Shelley-Godwin Archive functions in real time. Treasures from the Pforzheimer Collection will be  specially shown this evening only, including the 1818 first edition of Frankenstein, the first illustrated edition of 1831, playbills from early stage productions of Frankenstein, a 1931 edition showing photographs from the James Whale film, as well as original manuscripts from both Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Please note: an rsvp is required to attend the NYPL event and can be made by emailing elizabethdenlinger@nypl.org or calling 212-930-0717.

About the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

MITH is a leading digital humanities center that pursues disciplinary innovation and institutional transformation through applied research, public programming, and educational opportunities. Jointly supported by the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and the University of Maryland Libraries, MITH engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of technology and humanistic inquiry. MITH specializes in text and image analytics for cultural heritage collections, data curation, digital preservation, linked data applications, and data publishing.

The post It’s Alive! The Shelley-Godwin Archive Launches this Thursday! appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Due to a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Shelley-Godwin Archive is currently digitizing various works of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft. Humanities scholars, curators, and information scientists are partnering from MITH, The New York Public Library (NYPL), the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, and the British Library, to put manuscripts and early editions of these Romantic writers online and freely accessible to the public.

The text encoders will be responsible for producing XML-encoded transcription of materials from the five partner institutions according to the widely-adopted Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard.

Applicants must have strong computer skills; be well-organized; have strong attention to detail; and have an interest in electronic publishing and digital technology. Experience with XML technologies; a background in English, Literature, Library and Information Science, or a related field; and experience with version control systems and software (especially Git) is preferred. Wages are commensurate with experience, with a range from $12-15 per hour. Positions begin January 15, 2012 and end December 15, 2012, with the potential for a second year renewable based on availability of funds.

Interested applicants should submit a cover letter and CV to mith@umd.edu with SGA Encoder in the subject line. Applications will be accepted until the positions are filled. Please visit the job announcement to read further details.

*Update- Janauary 6, 2012: Thank you for your interest in the Shelley Godwin Archive. The application submission process is now closed.*

The post Shelley-Godwin Archive Seeking Applications for Text-Encoders appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

TAPAS seeks to offer long-term TEI repository and publishing services, with special focus on supporting scholars who lack access to XML publishing infrastructure or expertise at their own institutions. Supported by a planning grant from the IMLS and now by a two-year IMLS National Leadership Grant and an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant, the TAPAS service will make it possible for scholars to use TEI in their teaching and research without mastering the full suite of XML technologies. The service will also provide access to consulting, training, documentation, and community-developed tools. This talk will explore the conceptual and strategic challenges in developing TAPAS, and in particular the problem of how to harmonize—or transcend—divergent approaches to TEI encoding.

The post Julia Flanders: “Small TEI Projects on a Large Scale: TAPAS” appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The Ajax XML Encoder (AXE) allows users with limited technical knowledge to add metadata to text, image, video, and audio files. Users can collaboratively tag a text in TEI, associate XML with time stamps in video or audio files, and mark off regions of an image to be linked to external metadata. With an intuitive, web-based interface, AXE makes the process of preparing online digital editions and archives more efficient and accurate. AXE also facilitates collaboration in the digital humanities by permitting multiple scholars to work on the same document or archive at the same time from various locations, and will track all work so that variant versions can be collated and all versions can be archived. The Ajax XML encoder, with its intuitive Web-based interface, will come as a breath of fresh air to those who have previously been frustrated by text-centric tagging tools which require an expert knowledge of mark-up languages.

The post The MITHological AXE: Multimedia Metadata Encoding with the Ajax XML Encoder appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.