MITH's Lean, Mean Versioning Machine

MITH's Lean, Mean Versioning Machine

Martha
Nell
Smith

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
(MITH)
Martha.Nell.Smith@umail.umd.edu

Susan
Schreibman

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
(MITH)
Susan.Schreibman@umail.umd.edu

Amit
Kumar

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
(MITH)
amit@ccs.uky.edu

Lara
Vetter

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
(MITH)
lv26@umail.umd.edu

Jarom
McDonald

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
(MITH)
jmcdon@glue.umd.edu

Edward
Vanhoutte

Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie,
Belgium evanhoutte@kantl.be

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The presentation of multiple witnesses continues to be a formidable challenge
to both editing and publishing electronic texts. At the core of the theories
of such computer editions and computer assisted editions is the requirement
for a platform independent and non-proprietary markup language which can
deal with the linguistic and the bibliographic text of a work and which can
guarantee maximal accessibility, longevity and intellectual integrity in the
encoding of texts and textual variation. The encoding schemes proposed by
the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange have
generally been accepted as the most promising solution to this. The
transcription of primary source material enables automatic collation, stemma
(re)construction, the creation of (cumulative) indexes and concordances etc.
by the computer. With all of these advances, however, scholars have been
required either to rely on expensive commercial software such as DynaWeb or
to develop their own solutions (via major grant and institutional support)
to deliver and successfully display multiple witnesses. Thus scholars who
work in institutions that cannot afford to purchase or develop such tools
have no way to deliver richly encoded multiple versions of texts and have
therefore had their work impeded.
The Versioning Machine being developed at MITH is an open-source software
tool that will be freely distributed to individuals and not-for-profit
organizations under general public license to display deeply-encoded,
multiple versions of texts. To use this tool, scholars and students will
encode texts in XML (which must be well-formed, but will not necessarily
require a DTD), which will then be displayed through a browser plug in. The
tool will not only display multiple versions of text, but scholarly
apparatus appropriate to the version of the text being displayed. In
addition, the system would keep track of apparatus already read by users
(for example, a JavaScript routine would mark unread and read comments in
different colors) so that users would not waste time reading previously read
annotation. The papers featured in this session will, therefore, first
describe the versioning machine’s development, and then will show, via
specific projects, its value through diverse usages.

MITH’s Lean, Mean Versioning Machine
Susan Schreibman
Amit Kumar

Peter Robinson’s 1996 article, “Is There a Text in These Variants”
lucidly sets out the challenge of editing texts with multiple
witnesses in an electronic environment. The article raises questions
about texts and textuality exploring where “The Text” resides: is it
to be found “in all the editions and printings: in all the various
forms the text, any text, may take” (99), or is it in the imperfect
transmission of the text over time. His thesis, “to consider how the
new possibilities opened up by computer representation offer new
ways of seeing all the various forms of any text - and, with these,
the text beneath, within, or above all these various forms” (99) is
a challenge that the current generation of electronic editions has
not fully realized.
Projects like Robinson’s own Hengwrt Chaucer
Digital Facsimile and The Blake
Archive, are two electronic scholarly editions which are
excellent examples of projects that do not edit “from one distance
and from one distance alone” (Robinson 107), but explore the text
that emerges both in and between the variants, both in the text’s
linguistic and bibliographic codes.
Both these projects, however, utilize expensive software systems to
publish their editions. In the case of The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital
Facsimile, Robinson’s own publishing system, Anastasia: Analytical System Tools and SGML/XML Integration
Applications(<>), is utilized. In the case of The Blake Archive, Dynaweb() is used. Both these publication tools, in addition to being
expensive, require, in the case of Anastasia, some knowledge of programming to, in the case of
Dynaweb, a full-time programmer to
support the product.
The Versioning Machine that Amit Kumar and Susan Schreibman are
developing is an open-source tool that will be freely distributed to
individuals and not-for-profit organizations under general public
license to display XML encoded text which is both deeply-encoded and
which exists in multiple witnesses. A prototype of this tool,
developed by Jose Chua and Susan Schreibman, was presented as a
poster session at last year’s ACH/ALLC in New York . The present
project will build upon Chua and Schreibman’s work to create a more
robust tool which more fully addresses the various problems, both of
encoding multiple witnesses and displaying them.
The tool will also display scholarly apparatus appropriate to the
version of the text being displayed. Since the same comment may be
displayed across several versions, readers will need visual clues to
know if a particular comment was previously read. However,
persistence is not a goal of XML or XSL. The solution might lay in a
server-side application with the aid of client-side application
logic.
The first time user of the facility will be asked to register under a
name and password, so that the presentation layer is able to
customize view as per users interest. Session Tracking provided by
Java Servlets API will be used to track the users, and the different
witnesses along with their annotation will be stored in the server
side database. The server side database will be either an
Object-Oriented database or better still a XML Database. The
deletion, addition and transposition of the variation (which could
be word or punctuation), will be cued in the presentation, which
will create the impression of cohesion in the different versions.
The simplest solution would be to give each comment an identification
number. The Session tracker and the persistence database on the
server would keep track of which comments were already read and the
application logic could then take appropriate action. To give a more
concrete example, if an XSLT document transformed an XML document
into HTML, a JavaScript routine could mark unread and read comments
in different colors.
Another particularly challenging editorial issue has been the
representation of the intra-textual writing process. When working
with a particular manuscript draft, an editor may make an educated
guess as to when additions, deletions and emendations were made on a
particular manuscript draft (based on handwriting, ink colour, the
logic of the sentences, etc). Indeed, one of the beauties of
publishing facsimile editions of manuscripts is that no editorial
statement need be made in this regard - it is left up the reader to
decide on the writing process based on an examination of the
evidence. Of course, this textual ambiguity can be replicated in the
digital environment by publishing scanned versions of text.
Unfortunately, however, encoded texts allow no such ambiguity.
Representing the intra-textual revision process in an encoded
edition is a particularly interesting and challenging problem. In
these cases, relative ordering may alleviate the encoding process.
We are experimenting with assigning ordering comparative
identifications in XML, regardless of the exact revision time
relative to other emendations. In the case where two or more
revisions cannot be ordered, they are assigned the same ordering
identification. It is then up to the presentation logic to determine
how to display it.
Syd Bauman of The Scholarly Technology
Group at Brown University will be collaborating with Kumar
and Schreibman in developing a free tool to assist authors in
creating and editing multiple witnesses of texts. Most people used
to TEI encoding can follow the following marked up text without
difficulty:
<p>Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages
of the starship Enterprise. Its
<app>
<rdg wit="tos">five-year</rdg>
<rdg wit="tng">ongoing</rdg>
</app>
mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek
out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go
where no
<app>
<rdg wit="tos">man</rdg>
<rdg wit="tng">one</rdg>
</app>
has gone before.</p>

Although even this simple example is a bit difficult to follow
without the helpful whitespace. But even using only a relatively
simple subset of TEI markup (not using, for example,
<lem>, type=,cause=, hand=, or resp=, nor any markup
to indicate certainty; and using <witDetail> merely
for citation of the source), it is much harder to read a document
with 12 witnesses. Even the following example, only a few short
lines of a four witness set is challenging to follow:
<TEI.2>
<teiHeader>
<!-- <fileDesc> removed -->
<encodingDesc>
<!-- <samplingDecl> removed -->
<variantEncoding
method="parallel-segmentation" location="internal"/>
<p>In each encoded APP all witnesses are explicitly mentioned in
the wit= attribute of one of the RDG elements.</p>
</encodingDesc>
</teiHeader>
<text>
<body>
<p>Space<app>
<rdg wit="STtos2 STtos4 STtos ST2twok2 ST2twok3 STtng1
STtng2 STtng3 STtng4">, </rdg>
<rdg wit="STtos1">: </rdg>
<rdg wit="STtos3 ST2twok1">…</rdg>
</app><app>
<rdg wit="STtos1 STtos2 STtos3 STtos4 STtos5 ST2twok1 ST2twok2
ST2twok3 STtng2 STtng3 STtng4">t</rdg>
<rdg wit="STtng1">T</rdg>
</app>he
<app>
<rdg wit="STtos1 STtos2 STtos3 STtos4 STtos5 ST2twok1 ST2twok2
ST2twok3 STtng1 STtng3 STtng4">final</rdg>
<rdg wit="STtng2"><emph rend="slant(italic)">final</emph></rdg>
</app>
frontier<app>
<rdg wit="STtos1 STtos2 STtos3 STtos4 STtos5 ST2twok1 ST2twok2
STtng1 STtng2 STtng3 STtng4">.</rdg>
<rdg wit="ST2twok3">…</rdg>
</app> . . .
</witList>
</body>
</text>
</TEI.2>
If reading such instances is extremely difficult, editing them is
even more challenging (but could certainly be done almost completely
automatically, if the individual witnesses have already been
separately captured). Just keeping track of a single phrase across
multiple witnesses is demanding for the textual scholar. The tool
that Syd Bauman is proposing is one which would selectively hide the
markup pertaining directly to all but the witnesses currently being
studied, but left the rest of the markup and all the content visible
for editing.
Bauman believes that it should not be impossible for a developer of
an XML editor to implement these features -- any such editor already
selectively hides markup from other than the selected namespaces.
The only part that need be changed is the code for deciding which
markup is to be hidden and which is to be displayed.
This, however, raises the obvious problem of how to handle a request
by the user for additional markup which would overlap hidden markup
in a non-well-formed manner. Ideally TEI-aware software would, at
user option, automatically use one of the TEI mechanisms (e.g.,
part= if available on particular element in question, next= and
prev=, or <join>). Far easier to implement, of course,
would be to issue an error message. But again, the same basic
problem exists for selective display of markup based on namespaces
instead of witnesses.
The Versioning Machine, therefore, will
be both an editing and display tool to help textual scholars edit
and display multiple witnesses of deeply encoded text.

References

Peter
Robinson

Is There a Text in These Variants

Richard
J.
Finneran

The Literary Text in the Digital Age.

Ann Arbor
University of Michigan Press
1996. rpt. 1999
99-116

Witnessing Dickinson’s Witnesses
Lara Vetter
Jarom McDonald

Emily Dickinson’s writings resist the technology of print. In fact,
all of her writings need to be reimagined outside the print
translations that have seen the literary forms of her writerly work
as entities that fit comfortably into the genres designated by
previous editors and that conform to nineteenth-century notions of
what constitutes the poetic and epistolary text. Not only do
Dickinson’s verse productions defy conventions of lineation and text
division, punctuation and capitalization, but they perform
graphically and visually as she playfully reinvents the poem as a
living, generative textual body, infused with movement. It is this
feature of her writing that evokes Marta Werner’s call for
“unediting” Dickinson’s writings, for “constellating these works not
as still points of meaning or as incorruptible texts but, rather, as
events and phenomena of freedom.” To do so, or to “undo” so,
requires that readers unedit a century’s critical receptions to
recuperate a sense of the material documents as Emily Dickinson
herself left them. By offering full-color digital reproductions of
Dickinson’s holographs, the editors of the Dickinson Electronic
Archives have been working toward this goal of unediting; textual
transcription and encoding, however, is another matter. Representing
Dickinson’s compositions, astonishingly energetic and ambitious
creative endeavors not bound to and by the book and print
technology’s presentation of literature, presents unique challenges
to the textual editor struggling to remain within the bounds of the
TEI.
One of the major obstacles in encoding Dickinson’s literary creations
is the vast number of textual variants and versions that are found
amidst the thousands of extant manuscripts. Much of what people
recognize as the corpora of Dickinson’s “poetry” exists in
collections of manuscripts, or “fascicles,” bound by Dickinson
herself, which served as both a form of publication and preservation
as well as a repository for copy texts used when disseminating her
verse to her almost 100 correspondents. Working alone, and in
collaboration with correspondents, Dickinson began to conceive of a
model of the poem as fundamentally open and unstable, scripting
compositions that evoke a multiplicity of readings through alternate
versions and intratextual and subtextual variants.
Editorially, then, the project of encoding Emily Dickinson’s
manuscripts presents us with three types of variant or versioning
issues, each with its own unique challenges in markup and display:
Intratextual and subtextual variant words, phrases, and lines. In
both draft and “finished” compositions, Dickinson frequently
supplies multiple alternate words, phrases, and lines. Dickinson
does not appear to privilege one reading over another; additionally,
she does not always make clear how and where subtextual variants
might operate in the text. Our encoding practice must mimic these
facets of her writing by maintaining the integrity of the visual
layout of the manuscript while still linking variants to possible,
sometimes multiple, locations of substitution through the precision
of the double-end-point methodology.
Intratextual and extratextual variant line groups. Within letters or
a series of letters, Dickinson may offer different final stanzas for
an existing initial stanza, often in response to a collaborative
compositional process with her correspondent. Our practice must
recognize both the multiple suggested incarnations of the poem as
well as the chronological progression by which the iterations
evolved.
Multiple versions. Dickinson often sends the same poem, in identical
or variant form, to multiple correspondents. By encoding each
manuscript separately and constructing constellations of linking
between them, we acknowledge that each version possesses its own
context and genealogy while bearing some significant relationship to
its textual cousins; this practice also resists the notion that any
one version is privileged over another.
Faced with the instability of the Dickinson text, historical editors
have made difficult, individual choices in printing her poems as
singular entities, by choosing definitively a given word or phrase
among the many that she offers and ignoring the rest, or by
producing a “final” poem with a collection of “subset” readings
beneath it; invariably, intratextual variants, if represented at
all, are printed beneath the poem transcription. Hence, we must not
only reflect Dickinson’s multiplicity in textual markup, but in
final display. For example, one Dickinson manuscript offers 12
different word and phrasal intralinear and subtextual variants.
Rather than offering a hierarchical, top-down display of the text in
which the variants are viewed by a user as footnotes or
afterthoughts, we must utilize an environment that recognizes the
expansive nature of this strategy for poetic creation; this is not
one poem with 12 different variants, but, potentially, 144 different
poems. While there is only one encoded file for a given manuscript,
the technology allows us to write scripts that would recognize the
internal variants and allow the user to manipulate the result -- it
could be as rudimentary as multiple, client-moveable layers or as
complex as creating a dynamic relational database from the initial
document which plays out all 144 possibilities. With this approach,
we can de-hierarchize the various instantiations in all of their
visual and theoretical complexities, allowing the reader to
experience the textual creation in a spirit of “unediting” rather
than in a spirit of traditional print translation.

Putting Time back in Manuscripts: Textual Study and Text Encoding,
with Examples from Modern Manuscripts
Edward Vanhoutte

It’s interesting to observe how many theorists of electronic
scholarly editing have advocated the transition from universional
editions in print to universal electronic editions which can in
theory hold all versions of a work (Dahlström 2000), but have
passed over the practicalities underlying the production of such an
edition. The envisioned model of the versioning edition,
representing multiple texts (Reiman 1987) in facsimile as well as in
machine-readable form, in concordances, stemmata, lists of variants,
etc. has already been applied to editions of older literature and
medieval texts (e.g. Robinson 1996, Solopova 2000), and more
interesting work in several fields is currently under way (e.g.
Parker 2000). At the core of the theories of such computer editions
and computer assisted editions (e.g. Gants 1994, McGann 1996, and
Shillingsburg 1996) is the requirement for a platform independent
and non-proprietary markup language which can deal with the
linguistic and the bibliographic text of a work and which can
guarantee maximal accessibility, longevity and intellectual
integrity (Sperberg-McQueen, 1994 & 1996: 41) in the
encoding of texts and textual variation. The encoding schemes
proposed by the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and
Interchange (Sperberg-McQueen & Burnard 1994) have generally
been accepted as the most promising solution to this. The
transcription of primary source material enables automatic
collation, stemma (re)construction, the creation of (cumulative)
indexes and concordances etc. by the computer.
Although the TEI subsets for the transcription of primary source
material "have not proved entirely satisfactorily" for a number of
problems (Driscoll 2000), they do provide an extremely rich set of
mechanisms for the encoding of medieval manuscripts and documents
with a fairly "neat", static, and stable appearance such as print
editions. The real problems arise when dealing with modern
manuscript material.Whereas medieval manuscripts form part of the
transmission history of a text, evidence of which is given by
several successive witnesses, and which show the working (copying)
process of a scribe and the transmission/distribution of a
work/text, modern manuscripts are manuscripts "qui font partie d'une
genèse textuelle attestée par plusieurs témoins successifs et qui
manifestent le travail d'écriture d'un auteur" (Grésillon 1994:
manuscripts which form part of the genesis of a text, evidence of
which is given by several successive witnesses, and which show the
writing process of an author). The french school of Critique
Génétique primarily deals with modern manuscripts and their
primary aim is to study the avant-texte, not so much as the basis to
set out editorial principles for textual representation, but as a
means to understand the genesis of the literary work or as Daniel
Ferrer puts it: "it does not aim to reconstitute the optimal text of
a work; rather, it aims to reconstitute the writing process which
resulted in the work, based on surviving traces, which are primarily
author's draft manuscripts" (Ferrer 1995, 143).
The application of hypertext technology and the possibility to
display digital facsimiles in establishing electronic dossiers
génétiques, let the editor regroup a series of documents which are
akin to each other on the basis of resemblance or difference in
multiple ways, but the experiments with proprietary software systems
(Hypercard, Toolbook, Macromedia, PDF, etc.) are too much oriented
towards display, and often don't comply with the rule of "no
digitization without transcription" (Robinson 1997).Further, the TEI
solutions for the transcription of primary source material do not
cater for modern manuscripts because the current (P4) and previous
versions of the TEI have never addressed the encoding of the time
factor in text. Since a writing process by definition takes place in
time, four central complications may arise in connection with modern
manuscripts and should thus be catered for in en encoding scheme for
the transcription of modern primary source material. The
complications are the following:
Its beginning and end may be hard to determine and its
internal composition difficult to define (document structure
vs. unit of writing): authors frequently interrupt writing,
leave sentences unfinished and so on.
Manuscripts frequently contain items such as scriptorial
pauzes which have immense importance in the analysis of the
genesis of a text.
Even non-verbal elements such as sketches, drawings, or
doodles may be regarded as forming a component of the
writing process for some analytical purposes.
Below the level of the chronological act of writing,
manuscripts may be segmented into units defined by thematic,
syntactic, stylistic, etc. phenomena; no clear agreement
exists, however, even as to the appropriate names for such
segments.

These four complications are exactly the ones the TEI Guidelines cite
when trying to define the complexity of speech, emphasizing that
"Unlike a written text, a speech event takes place in time."
(Sperberg-McQueen and Burnard 2001, 254). This may suggest that the
markup solutions employed in the transcription of speech could prove
useful for the transcription of modern manuscripts, in particular
the chapter in the TEI Guidelines on Linking, Segmentation, and
Alignment (esp. 14.5. Synchronization).Building on this assumption,
this paper will address the relationship between theory of texts and
the design of electronic markup, and will be illustrated with
examples from four projects I am currently involved in at the
Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie<> (Centre for
Scholarly Editing and Document Studies): The transcription of the
Finnegan's Wake notebooks by James Joyce, the electronic edition of
the diaries of Daniel Robberechts, a genetic edition of a manuscript
by Willem Elsschot, and the transcription of all of the extant
witnesses of a novel by Stijn Streuvels. This paper will revisit
Michael Sperberg-McQueen's "Text in the Electronic Age: Textual
Study and Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts."
(Sperberg-McQueen, 1991) and will define a research agenda for the
new TEI Working group on the transcription of modern
manuscripts.

References

Mats
Dahlström

Digital Incunables: Versionality and
Versatility in Digital Scholarly Editions

Paper.
ICCC/IFIP Third Conference on Electronic
Publishing 2000, Kaliningrad/Svetlogorsk (Russia):
Kaliningrad State University, 17th-19th August 2000.
Accessed on November 29, 2001

2000

Accessed on November 29, 2001. <>

M.
J.
Driscoll

Encoding Old Norse/Icelandic Primary Sources
using TEI-Conformant SGML

Literary & Linguistic Computing

15
1
81-91
2000

Daniel
Ferrer

Hypertextual Representation of Literary Working
Papers

Literary & Linguistic Computing

10
2
143-145
1995

David
Gants

Toward a Rationale of Electronic Textual
Criticism

Paper.
ALLC/ACH Conference, Paris, 19 april
1994. Accessed on November 29, 2001

1994

Accessed on November 29, 2001. <>

Almuth
Grésillon

Eléments de critique génétique. Lire les
manuscrits modernes

Paris
Presses Universitaires de Paris
1994

Jerome
McGann

The Rationale of HyperText

TEXT

9

11-32
1996

D.
C.
Parker

The Text of the New Testament and Computers:
the International Greek New Testament Project

Literary & Linguistic Computing

15
1
27-41
2000

Donald
H.
Reiman

Chapter 10:
'Versioning': The Presentation of Multiple
Texts

Romantic Texts and Contexts

Columbia
University of Missouri Press
1987
167-180

P.
M.
W.
Robinson

The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM

Cambridge
Cambridge University Press
1996

Peter
M.
W.
Robinson

New Directions in Critical Editing

Kathryn
Sutherland

Electronic Text. Investigations in Method and
Theory

Oxford
Clarendon Press
1997
145-171

Peter
Shillingsburg

Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly
Editions, and Tutorials

Richard
J.
Finneran

The Literary Text in the Digital Age

Ann Arbor
The University of Michigan Press
1996
23-35

E.
Solopova

The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales on
CD-ROM

Cambridge
Cambridge University Press
2000

C.
M.
Sperberg-McQueen

Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and
Text Encoding, with Examples from Medieval Texts

Literary & Linguistic Computing

6
1
34-46
1991

C.
M.
Sperberg-McQueen

Textual Criticism and the Text Encoding
Initiative

Paper presented at MLA '94, San Diego

1994

Accessed on November 29, 2001. <>.

C.
M.
Sperberg-McQueen

Textual Criticism and the Text Encoding
Initiative

Richard
J.
Finneran

The Literary Text in the Digital Age

Ann Arbor
The University of Michigan Press
1996
37-61

C.
M.
Sperberg-McQueen

Lou
Burnard

Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and
Interchange. (TEI P3)

Chicago and Oxford
Text Encoding Initiative
1994

C.
M.
Sperberg-McQueen

Lou
Burnard

TEI P4 Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding
and Interchange
XML-compatible edition

Oxford, Providence, Charlottesville, and Bergen
The TEI Consortium
2001