The Exploration and Development of Tools for Active Reading and Electronic Texts

The Active Reading project, based at Sheffield Hallam University, is concerned primarily with creating an
electronic scholarly edition of a Renaissance work—namely Shakespeare’s King Lear, which makes available
the textual variants of published editions of that work. This serves to enhance scholarly activity by enabling
insight into the variety of editorial practices that have contributed to understanding of the work. It is important
that, within the study of literature and critical analysis, reading should not be viewed as a passive activity but
one in which a reader’s active interpretation is central and can be supported by access to textual variants.
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To examine several paper-based editions of a work for textual variants, is to undertake a
time-consuming and somewhat confusing task—faced with reams of paper, and having to “keep place” within
that material in order to make comparisons. A modern solution to this task would naturally be to gather the
various editions together and produce one electronic edition, where points of variation amalgamate the
individual paper editions and make them interactively and visually available to the reader. We refer to this as
a definitive edition; limiting the loss of structure (both textually and physically) that a conflated text/ edition
might produce.
A prototype system to support active reading has been developed, which consists of an edition of the
various available texts of a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt1. The combined edition is encoded in XML and
various methods for displaying the texts and their variants are implemented using a combination of XSL and
JavaScript. The prototype has served to illustrate the mechanisms by which the definitive edition could
function, and has demonstrated the feasibility of this approach.
The project focuses upon the reasoning for choices and selection in the encoding of the text—why
one method is chosen over another, how this affects the appearance of the edition, and the decisions open to
the end user. Hence a definitive edition determines the choices the user/ reader can make in the exploration of
what is in effect the readers own edition of the text. The overall objective is to enhance how users engage
with the text(s) through interactivity, in a manner that does not hamper their creativity and thus enables
scholarly development and understanding. Evaluation of the current prototype edition has been undertaken
and is ongoing amongst the target user group—undergraduate students of English Studies. Preliminary results
are providing valuable insights into understanding of the needs of the user/reader, and criteria by which
effective active reading can be judged.
This paper aims to illustrate the advantage of enabling understanding of the editing process, through
the use of interactive technologies and text encoding tools. The resulting edition and the research generated
will offer new ways of comparing textual variants, and of reading and understanding these texts —for use in
research, in teaching, as a learning tool, and as a template for the creation of future electronic editions. The
interdisciplinary nature of the project itself offers a challenge, attempting to merge the worlds of Renaissance
Literature, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Computing. Employing HCI methods in designing and
developing a new edition is a vital tool for understanding the active reading requirements, and for generating
an edition that is both simple and effective to use.
NOTES
1. http://homepages.shu.ac.uk/~sfthomas/activeR/theyflee.html [NB: can be viewed with Internet
Explorer only, page also uses frames.]