Manuscript Annotations in Space and Time

Reading a book or manuscript involves four dimensions:
width, length, depth and time, since flipping
the page is a temporal act, with a before and an after. As
scholars and publishers increasingly move towards digital
remediation of literary archives, how do we digitally
render 4D objects in a medium that is missing at least the
third one, and text encoding standards that deprecate the
role of the page in shaping meaning? Walt Whitman’s
annotations written on nineteenth-century books, magazines
and newspapers, provide a special opportunity to
begin to explore this question. A particularly unusual
class of documents that Whitman created has posed difficulties
for electronic rendering. At The Walt Whitman
Archive, where I am a project manager, we call them
“flipbooks,” to denote a text that, while supported on
a single sheet is, in essence, a scrapbook with multiple
leaves glued on top of each other. That is, “flipbooks”
are documents that are annotated and then layered on top
of each other so that one can flip each clipping or page
over. In this presentation I will discuss how the questions of
the third and fourth dimensions of these documents informed
our design of interfaces for encoding, searching,
and browsing digital surrogates of them.
With the help of an NEH grant in the Digital Humanities,
the Whitman Archive created an interface that attempts
to maximize audience and utility while addressing theoretical
issues in the representation of layered documents. We have created a set of software technologies and encoding
practices that allow for the tagging, displaying,
and searching of static documents that mix print, manuscript,
and visual images—documents such as printed
texts or images bearing handwritten annotations. These
technologies include a suggested approach for encoding
coordinates in XML transcriptions so that search
engines can visually display results of user searches for
manuscript words and phrases; web-based software for
linking XML editing programs to an image display to
allow encoders to relate bitmap images to XML text; and
model stylesheets capable of displaying transcriptions
of annotated documents together with digital images of
those documents. We have kept Peter Robinson’s warnings
about the tendency of previous markup interfaces
to be difficult to use—based on his experiences with
his own software, Collate—in mind. For example, the
ARCHway Project features a suite of powerful tools for
relating texts to images and for capturing multiple hierarchies.
Our software suite, following on the example
of the ARCHway Project, is designed to be simple
enough to be used by transcribers with little familiarity
with information encoding and portable enough to work
in multiple computing environments for widely different
kinds of archival projects. Unlike ARCHway, however,
it is web-based, and allows encoders to mark space as a
structural entity.
Creating these interfaces has raised important questions.
What exactly constitutes marginalia, and how
would one render it digitally? To what extent are writing
and reading, both in digital and non-digital media,
spatial acts? Whitman’s marginalia reveals his literary
influences, how he is bound in time to writers that precede
him; but the spatial element is significant as well,
since his texts take root in the fertile marginal medium of
theirs. His practice of pasting such documents together
into unforeseen and reconfigurable combinations, with
deliberately motile hierarchies, brings to mind Hayden
White’s argument that form not only reveals content, but
can be content itself. It also reconfigures, as the work of
Marta Werner on the “radical scatter[er]” Emily Dickinson
suggests, what it means for scholars today to theorize
peripheries. Hence, the theoretical orientations and
practical implications of the archive’s interface are not
bound specifically to Whitman, but apply across literary
studies and digital humanities. In creating a relationship
between encoding practices and interactive design for
search and browsing, we have followed a path suggested
by, among others, Johanna Drucker, who asks if, “rather
than think[ing] about simulating the way a book looks,
we might consider extending the ways a book works as
we shift into digital instruments.”
Building an interface to allow for visualized search returns
of manuscript words in images meant creating a
coordinate system for manuscript tagging that allows
for searches or deformations based on the location of a
word in relative space, not just for specific terms or entities.
But building one that makes possible an approach
to how Whitman’s flipbooks work, in Drucker’s terms,
also meant making alterations to the TEI P5 approach
to XML-based markup, and in particular, to TEI’s insistence
that pages do not constitute intellectual structures.
This presentation will briefly demonstrate our interface
and discuss the logic of its design, focusing on the theoretical
implications and practical potential of an approach
that emphasizes layered spatial relations of text and images.
I will discuss the logic of the “surface and zone”
markup recommended for indicating such relations, and
discuss why we found it unsuited to handling Whitman’s
annotated flipbooks. Briefly, I will outline our practical
response, using a coordinate-tagging system, to such
markup, which allows page space to function as an intellectual
structure. To experiment with recreating the
way temporal flexibility affects intellectual hierarchies
in these documents, I will argue, not only introduces a
new kind of activity, a new domain of interpretation, into
editorial work, but also posits this kind of work as fundamentally
multidimensional.
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