The Electronic Lyrical Ballads: A Progress Report

The Electronic Lyrical
Ballads: A Progress Report

Bruce
Graver
Department of English Providence
College
beg@providence.edu

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

At the 1995 ACH/ALLC conference in Santa Barbara, I announced a new
electronic editing project: an electronic Wordsworth edition, co-edited by
Ronald Tetreault and myself. Within a month of the announcement, we were
contacted by Cambridge University Press; within another year, we had
contracted with them to produce an electronic edition of Lyrical Ballads, which we then saw as a pilot project for a
full edition of Wordsworth's poetical works. In this paper I will discuss
the ways in which we have redefined our project; I will then describe some
of the problems we have had in assembling it, focusing especially on the
difficulties we have had encoding authorial manuscripts in such a way that
they can be conveniently and accurately represented in existing
software.

I. From Hypertext to Archive
We originally conceived of our edition as a kind of hypertext, modeled after
descriptions of similar projects undertaken by Jerome McGann, Stuart Curran,
and others. Our aim was to bring together in electronic form not only the
texts of the Lyrical Ballads themselves, but all of
the relevant manuscripts, much of the source material, all of the
contemporary reviews, all authorial comments, and whatever else seemed
pertinent to this collection of poems. These materials would be organized
with a variety of hypertext links which would, we thought, easily enable the
reader to switch from one version of the poem to another, from poem to
source, from poem to review, and so forth. But it quickly became evident
that such an edition would not be feasible. There were the usual problems
with permissions, of course, but the main problem was one of audience and
design. Would it make sense, in the early days of the electronic edition, to
try to assemble such a massive amount of materials? Would scholars, many of
whom are unfamiliar with the electronic environment, be able to negotiate an
edition so complex? And, finally, would we ever finish such an edition, so
that Cambridge could establish a market for electronic products and continue
to support other endeavors like ours? As we worked, our skepticism grew.
As it happened, the bibliographical complexity of the Lyrical Ballads came to our rescue. Several different versions
of the collection survive. It went through four editions in seven years,
each of which is substantially different from the others; there were two
distinct printings of the first edition, and first printing of the first
edition survives in three distinct versions; the second edition also
contains significant printed variants from one copy to the next, in part
because of printer's errors and in part because the authors revised their
poems while the volumes were in press. And there are also unauthorized
printings of the collection, including an American edition and an odd set of
London editions made from the discarded sheets of the original printings.
Scholars, of course, have known about these differences for some time, but
few have ever seen the wide variety of printed variants because the volumes
which contain them are very rare and are scattered in libraries and private
collections from New Zealand to Grasmere to Colorado. So we decided to
attempt to bring together in one place all of these variant printings,
supplying full texts of specific copies of Lyrical
Ballads, supplemented by photographs of the printed pages in all
of their various states. At the same time, we decided to eliminate many of
the supporting documents that we had originally intended to include,
believing that they would distract and perhaps even confuse readers. In
short, we stopped thinking of our work as a hypertext, and began thinking of
it as an archive, a virtual library containing digital representations of
printed volumes that few had ever seen. This project seemed doable and
useful, and would have the added benefit of not burying the Lyrical Ballads under the sheer weight of its associated
texts.

II. Representing Revision
Because we decided to focus our edition on the printed versions of Lyrical Ballads, we minimized the need for reproducing
poetical manuscripts. We thereby avoided the need to get permissions to
reproduce copyrighted material, and we also avoided the difficulties
inherent in encoding and representing in software extremely messy draft
work. But we could not avoid manuscripts altogether. Our edition seeks to
preserve the history of the printed artifact, Lyrical
Ballads. Part of that history is contained in the printer's
manuscripts, the most substantial of which survive in the Beinecke Library
at Yale. These printer's manuscripts have been given added importance by the
most recent editors of the collection, James Butler and Karen Green, whose
edition appeared in 1992 in the Cornell Wordsworth series. Butler and Green
chose the printer's manuscripts of Lyrical Ballads
(1800) as their copy text; for us to ignore the printer's manuscripts would
be to ignore the texts of the poems that most scholars are now reading. So I
set to work transcribing and encoding both of the Yale sets of printer's
manuscripts: those for 1800 and 1802. The main problem I had to confront was
how to encode the manuscripts in such a way that their subtleties could be
represented adequately on a computer screen. There was only one model: Peter
Robinson's Wife of Bath's Prologue, which I studied
very closely. But the differences between a 15th century manuscript, drawn
up by a professional scribe long after the author's death, and a printer's
manuscript, drawn up by the authors themselves, are enormous, and it soon
became clear that Robinson's model would be of little use. Where Robinson
had just a handful of revisions to deal with (few of them with any
authority), I had thousands, all in the autograph of either the author or
his copyist, and I had to find a variety of ways to encode these revisions,
in order to distinguish them from each other. For example, Wordsworth's 1802
printer's manuscripts were prepared from proof sheets of the 1800 edition,
and thus the "manuscript" looks more or less like a printed book which has
been marked up by its owner. But there is little consistency in the ways
revisions were entered (the sort of consistency that computers, which depend
on global commands, clearly understand). Sometimes revisions were written in
the margins, sometimes at the foot of the page, sometimes in between lines,
and sometimes as overwrites; where the revisions became too extensive to fit
on the page, Wordsworth inserted loose sheets of writing paper and entered
them there. For the 1800 printer's manuscripts, the complexities are even
greater. These manuscripts are a series of letters, prepared in the Lake
District by Wordsworth and Coleridge and sent to their printer in Bristol,
hundreds of miles away. The letters were sent over a period of several
months; the first ones were sent before the authors had determined the final
order of the poems, and before several of the poems were even written. The
manuscripts were revised as they were prepared, and later letters often
include revisions to poems sent weeks earlier. There are also several
different autographs in the manuscripts: the base text was prepared by
Coleridge or Dorothy Wordsworth, usually, and then revised either by William
Wordsworth or Coleridge. Definitive punctuation was added in Bristol by the
brilliant young chemist, Humphry Davy, and there are also marginal notations
made at the printers, including one that caused the omission of 15 lines of
one of the poems. Now all of this is clearly part of the publication
process, and it helps to explain the state of the published volumes. And it
can be encoded, fairly accurately although not without great pains, with the
TEI DTD. But can it be represented clearly in a browser? Can textual
scholars, used to the way manuscripts are transcribed in printed volumes,
see something vaguely like what they are used to seeing? This is a problem
that we yet to solve, and I would like to describe some of the difficulties
at the conference, in hopes that someone there will be able to offer
suggestions.