Callimachus: A Virtual Archivist for Electronic Markup Projects

The field of electronic text editing in the Humanities has
been somewhat polarized along boundaries of preferred
technology. Some feel that relational databases provide a more
robust and powerful representation scheme while others cleave
to the expressive power and transferability of XML.
The Callimachus project at the University of Saskatchewan
was conceived as a way to have our cake and eat it too -
merging the robust scalability of formal database technologies
with the expressive power and Humanist-friendly accessibility
of HTML and XML schema.
First applied to the hypertext edition of Faulkner's The Sound
and the Fury, Callimachus delivers an easy-to-use schema
development and implementation environment that eliminates
the need for client-side editing, document management and
revision control systems.
We propose to present our experiences with The Sound and the
Fury, sharing the lessons learned and some of the surprising
and unanticipated scholarly results that were achievable only
with a system that allowed us to change our minds repeatedly
and reconceive our schema as we moved along.
Callimachus was designed to allow the possibility of using a
true database application to markup Faulkner's 1929 novel on
a token (or word) level. Using free software tools such as
MySQL, we built a Web interface with the database, thereby
circumventing the need for client-side software, and enabling
more than one editor to alter the database simultaneously. By
storing each word of the novel in a separate record, we avoided
the problems caused by imposing a strict hierarchy (like TEI)
on a literary text. The new approach enables us to layer and
overlap tags without fear of corrupting a strictly structured
markup; we can also use conventional data-mining algorithms
to reveal unforeseen relationships between tagged elements in
the text.
These relationships are crucial in understanding any literary
text that builds meaning through association and structure.
Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is a prime example. With
this custom database and interface, we can discover when and
how a concept appears in the novel. We can discover which
characters dwell on what concepts and to what extent. We can
discover how many words (how much narrative space)
characters use when talking or thinking about specific topics.
We can display relationships with charts and graphs computed
with any combination of variables. And, to share our data, we
can easily script the software to transform our database in
conformance with the TEI or any other schema.
Before the invention of Callimachus, the first version of the
hypertext edition of Faulkner's novel used HTML and
JavaScript to visualize the complicated and apparently
disordered narrative in the book's first chapter. Faulkner, telling
this part of the story through the mind of an 'idiot', normally
provides only obscure clues to mark the mnemonic flashing
from one event to another. The narrative does not follow the
chronological sequence of events in the novel. However, using
HTML and JavaScript to tag each event, we built an interface
that links events in the narrative sequence with events in a
chronologically correct version of the text. For the first time,
readers could reorient themselves in the chronology by clicking
a button, leaving behind the much more confusing original
narrative.
The hypertext edition helped us clarify our understanding of
the novel and yielded some surprising results. We knew that
the 'idiot', narrator, named Benjy, would relive an event (such
as his grandmother's death), would trigger a sequence of
flashbacks, and would often repeatedly return to that initial
event. Benjy's memory of his grandmother's death is interrupted
17 times by other flashbacks. When we isolate this event from
the interruptions, we notice that it is transmitted chronologically.
Hidden in the chaos of so many relived events are small,
coherent, chronological narratives.
This archive ( <www.usask.ca/english/faulkner>
) was recently called "one of the best applications of the true
potential of hypertext to date" (Neyt 140) . However, there were
only a few surprises yielded through the approach of this early
edition. In general, we knew what to expect; the manual markup
in HTML and JavaScript made our innovative display possible,
but without search functions or sophisticated computing, we
had to draw graphs manually and show proportions based on
manual word counts. At the ACH / ALLC conference in 2001,
we saw the promise of the TEI and, very slowly, began
rethinking our approach. The Callimachus archive structure is
the result.
The point of Callimachus (named after the Greek poet and
grammarian who was the chief librarian at Alexandria) is to
free Humanities researchers from the burden of having to specify their destination before starting their journey. And we
do so in a way that allows each participating project to take
advantage of analysis tools that might have been originally
created for a different text.
In addition to providing a universally accessible web-based
editing infrastructure, Callimachus offers powerful analysis
tools: on-the-fly visualization to produce graphs of the
relationships inherent in the text; data mining to help identify
textual relationships that were not immediately apparent; and
translation to allow the user to transform the text into arbitrary
formats (such as HTML, TEI or other XML schema) for
exchange with other parties.
Callimachus is designed to grow and adapt with the user, but
without invalidating his or her previous work. The user does
not have to learn another markup language or data formalization
in order to begin exploring the text with state-of-the-art analysis
tools. We prefer to leave the construction of hierarchical
representations schemes until after we've learned what those
relationships are, rather than presupposing what we are going
to find in order to begin.
Bibliography
Neyt, Vincent. "Review of Stoicheff, Muri, Deshaye, et al.
(eds.): The Sound and the Fury: A Hypertext Edition." Literary
and Linguistic Computing 19.1 (2004): 137-143.