Annotation and Electronic Scholarly Editions

Annotation and Electronic Scholarly Editions

Chris
Tiffin

Univ of Queensland
c.tiffin@uq.edu.au

Graham
Barwell

Univ of Wollongong
g.barwell@uow.edu.au

Phill
Berrie

Australian Defence Force Academy
p.berrie@adfa.edu.au

Paul
Eggert

Australian Defence Force Academy
p.eggert@adfa.edu.au

2003

University of Georgia

Athens, Georgia

ACH/ALLC 2003

editor

Eric
Rochester

William
A.
Kretzschmar, Jr.

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

This paper considers the purpose of annotation in scholarly editions and the
methods by which annotation should be provided in the electronic
environment.
There is a consensus that the most important task in scholarly editing is to
prepare an accurate and reliable text, according to transparent criteria. The
second task is to supplement that text with apparatus to enable the modern
reader to read it more adequately. While some of the more influential guides to
editing procedure (Center for Editions on American Authors, Committee for
Scholarly Editions) suggest that annotation will not in all cases be required,
the annotative process can be high on the list of editor’s satisfactions and may
therefore be accorded disproportionate effort. As Mary-Jo Kline reports, some of
the volumes in such magisterial series as the Jefferson Davis Papers and the
Madison Papers were criticised for the “plague” of overannotation. Any General
Editor must quickly learn stealthy strategies for restraining the annotative
enthusiasms of contributors.
The process of footnoting or annotating in the presentation of an edited text has
a different role from the one it does in works of literary critical commentary.
On a critic’s page the primary end of the annotation is to provide the
evidentiary basis for the commentator’s assertions and argument, or, in one
lurid account, to fight turf wars about academic status with other scholars
(McFarland 1991). We concentrate here, however, on the principles and practice
of annotating the primary text in a scholarly edition.
The purpose of annotation is usually framed with the reader in mind. It may be
based idealistically on “render[ing] the author’s meaning wholly intelligible”
(Battestin 1981), or it may be based on the attempt to provide the modern reader
with the information that would have been possessed by a reader on first
publication. In the case of unpublished works, it may translate a general reader
into an essentially private world. There is often a strong injunction that
annotation should not be subjective or judgmental (CEAA, Hewett 1996). In
practice, a further aim may be to present the accretion of scholarly knowledge
and interpretation of the text up to the present (Ricks 1989)
Annotation in the print mode is arranged in a number of different ways: textual
or explanatory notes at the foot of the page, notes at the end of the chapter or
book, collations, glossaries, appendices, and “excursus notes” (McFarland
1991).
For reasons of cost, electronic editions can offer much richer annotation than
print editions, and targeted parts of this extra material can be made accessible
from precise points in the text. Two important questions arise, though: how
should this ancillary material be arranged, and how should it be linked, or
rather, how should its availability be signaled from within the text?
One system, used especially by publications like journals that have both a print
and a web publication, is to follow closely the endnotes practice used in print
publications by offering the notes in a single file and signaling them by a
numerical footnote indice. Other editions indicate the presence of the
annotative note by a marginal indice (e.g. Thomas Gray Archive), by highlighting
the span of text to which the note refers, or by enabling the highlighting of
the text span through a mouseover to reveal the presence of the link.
Some of the most spectacular scholarly editing projects of the last decade such
as the Rossetti Archive and the Blake Archive situate their texts in such a
complex environment that the annotative strategy of immediate explication of
individual terms in texts is abandoned in favor of more serious immersion in the
contexts of the poems. Paradoxically, though, under this system precise
assistance is not always available to the reader.
In the electronic edition of His Natural Life developed by the Authenticated
Editions Project at its JITM website, we commenced with the list of annotations
in a flat file transferred as legacy data from the printed Academy Edition of
this text, and highlighted the text spans which were indicated in the lead-ins
to the print edition’s endnotes. But this seemed to make poor use of the
amplitude and precision offered by the markup scheme of the electronic edition.
Accordingly, we have analysed the content of the notes and reformatted them
according to type into sub-glossaries. The result constitutes in itself a
critical approach to the text.
Signaling the presence of annotations has been rethought in the light of the
expected readership of the electronic version, and this has led to the provision
of greater density of annotation links. However, providing for multitudinous
non-sequential reading patterns can easily produce an absurdly over-linked text
when the names of recurrent characters, places or motifs are annotated. This
latter problem can be alleviated if users have a mechanism for enabling or
suppressing the link indicators themselves.
We conclude that different strategies are required for the arrangement and
announcement of annotative material in the electronic environment from the print
one, but the major determinant of how annotations are to be arranged and offered
(and perhaps still the most difficult thing to judge) is how readers will
approach the edition.

REFERENCES

Authenticated Editions Project

Martin
C.
Battestin

A Rationale of Literary Annotation

Studies in Bibliography

34

1-22
1981

Marcus
Clarke

His Natural Life
The Academy Editions of Australian Literature

Lurline
Stuart

(St Lucia, Qld
University of Queensland Press
2001

Richard
Furuta

Eduardo
Urbina

“On the Characteristics of Scholarly
Annotations

HT02, June 11-15

2002

Ralph
HannaIII

Annotation as Social Practice

Stephen
A.
Barney

Annotation and Its Texts

New York
Oxford University Press
1991
178-84

David
Hewitt
et al
The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels: A Guide
for Editors

Edinburgh

1996

Mary-Jo
Kline

A Guide to Documentary Editing

Baltimore
Johns Hopkins University Press
1987

Thomas
McFarland

Who Was Benjamin Whichcote? Or The Myth of
Annotation

Stephen
A.
Barney

Annotation and Its Texts

New York
Oxford University Press
1991
152-77

Jerome
McGann

Textual Scholarship, Textual Theory, and the Uses of
Electronic Tools: A Brief Report on Current Undertakings

Victorian Studies

41

609-19
1998

Modern Language Association of America. Committee
on Scholarly Editions

MLA Guidelines for Electronic Scholarly
Editions

Modern Language Association of America. Committee
on Scholarly Editions

Draft Revised MLA Guidelines for Electronic Scholarly
Editions

Christopher
Ricks

The Poems of Tennyson

3 vols.
Harlow, Essex
Longman
1987

Rossetti Archive

Michael
Suarez
S.J.
In Dreams Begins Responsibility: Novels, Promises and
the Electronic Editor

Alexander
Pettit

Textual Studies and the Common Reader

Athens, Georgia
University of Georgia Press
2000

Thomas Gray Archive

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture

Website.

William Blake Archive