9/15/2011. Summary of Discussion about Newberry, Du Chemin, and Literary Texts.
Freedman and Douglas Knox (Director of Publications and Digital Initiatives, Newberry Library).
Related items:
See Knox response in his email 9/15/2011: KnoxNewberry_TEI_notes.pdf [with links]
See also DuChemin_Literary_project_notes.pdf (9/4/2011) [with samples of TEI]
See also LiterarySourcesListNotes.docx [with list of anthologies and digital facsimiles]
During the previous week, RF sent along a provisional report of the questions, provisional methods, and
challenges of the TEI portion of the project. See DuChemin_literary_project_notes of 9/4/2011, which outlined
the following, based on earlier email from August 2011 between RF, Zecher, and Knox.
The Basic Questions:
 What scholarly observations do we want to be able to make about the texts of the Du Chemin
chansons? And what kinds of encodings would be required to yield the necessary answers?
 What work has been done to date on the texts, both for the engraved editions of the music, and for
associated tools supported by the CESR?
 What new tools or standards would be needed, and who would define them?
 How would the resulting work be integrated with the rest of the Du Chemin and Lost Voices project?
 Where are the sources? Libraries, microfilms?
 Where would the work take place? Who would supervise it? How much would it cost? Who pays?
Knox and Freedman thoughts from 9/15/2011 follow:
I. General Challenges and Themes
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Where does the technical meet the intellectual?
o How can we keep the appropriate balance between these that will attract the maximum
number of participating scholars and librarians?
IT Needs. Audiences.
o What, exactly, are the IT needs, and who will meet them? Scholars? Librarians? Outside
consultants? In brief:
 A clear set of technical specs, and a clear set of guidelines for how to get scholarship
(editions, commentaries, etc) in and out of these formats.
 Some manageable system for linking encodings with facsimiles, and both with
criticism.
 Some clear interface that will allow users to find what they need (facs, editions,
commentaires)
 Interface that will allow users to configure materials according to (different views),
perhaps gathering items in a book bag.
 And a system for 'comments and community' that will allow readers to post
comments in a controlled way, and to find each other.
Beyond "photoduplication"
o The term seems an outmoded model for the digital world. We want to do more than "present"
texts, or books. We want to interact with them, and reflect on them in a dynamic way.
Interoperation.
o Yes, we need systems and encodings to work with each other. But no less important: who
really uses these resources? This should determine how much energy is put into ensuring
compatibility.
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See work of Martin Mueller (NWU) with TEI. Mueller's August 2011 letter
to TEI community. Who will USE the encodings, and how?
Public Goods. Scholarly Standards.
o RF and DK: we want the 'public good' that comes from open texts, but the scholarly
community is conservative. Are we really headed towards 'crowd sourced transcriptions and
annotations' of the sort that Katherine Rowe proposes? We think not.
 See Transcribe Betham project at UC London: 'Contribute via crowd'.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/
File management is really a key challenge in all of this.
o How to keep the 'versions' of various things up to date, and how to keep them together.
o For instance: how to associate digital facsimile with its transcription. And also how to keep
the transcription associated with all of the metadata about editorial standards, ownership, etc.
 See Scholars Lab at UVA: http://nowviskie.org/2011/praxis-and-prism/
 See also notes on Nielsen and MerMeID system (and follow-up email from
Geertingen).
o Another problem for the world of anthologies: each BOOK in fact consists of many WORKS,
but many Authors. For vocal music, even more complex, since each WORK might have
different SOURCES, both musical and literary.
Referencing system:
o External: One big problem of digital resources: what is quotable text? And what constitutes
a citation of the text? Especially when each user might configure the results differently.
There is no 'page'.
o Internal: for the case of anthologies, we might have a 'corpus' of related items. That is: only
ONE bibliographical description of an anthology of poetry or music. But many poems or
compositions can point back to these. This might solve the problem of 'syncing'
bibliographical data.
o Passages vs Works. Is it possible to have XML:ID within an individual project (thus we can
cite a WORK in an ANTHOLOGY). But how to cite a PASSAGE in a WORK? But how is
this managed in cases where one wants to point beyond the project at hand, to a passage in
another resource?
o Durability. The system of referencing needs to be as durable as the files themselves!
 One example of this: TILE project created by MITH. Allows affiliation of
images (and regions of images) with text of various kinds (commentaries,
XML transcription, etc.). Works across projects.
 See Shakespeare Quarto, which uses this. http://www.quartos.org/
 Also link via Doug Knox note: http://mith.umd.edu/tile/
Coordinator: Doug Reside (Maryland Institute for Technology in
the Humanities). But he might now be at Columbia Univ.
Forums. What models exist for connecting different users around a text?
o UVA Scholar's Lab. (Joe Gilbert, one of our Du Chemin consultants, is a designer for this
project at UVA. He will be able to help us with a suitable set of 'comment' tools for a blog or
other resource.
o UVA Praxis Program. Graduate fellows learn skills. Bethany Nowviskie.
o UVA SpecLab (Johanna Drucker) (This initiative is a bit older)
o GeorgeMasonUniv: Mark Sample: see his Blog, especially on 'Reading Aloud' as a model
for the discussion of common texts. Slows down the reading process, and invites
participation by many voices. He describes this in a classroom context. Not sure it really
translates to the digital environment. http://www.samplereality.com/2011/09/14/on-readingaloud-in-the-classroom
o MITH, as noted above. (RF will contact Neil Fraistat; who has been involved with the
Shakespeare Quarto Project)
o Whitman Project. (RF will contact Ken Price, director)
II. What and how to edit? How might Newberry take part?
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A. Background: Fiala Project:
o Note that the David Fiala project started in 2009-2010 has already managed to make basic
editions of just about all of the poems in the Chansons nouvelles series. They are in a
Filemaker Pro database, and were done by students. There are notes on versification for each
poem.
o The Fiala editions do not, however, report differences among the partbooks, nor do they offer
readings/additional stanzas from literary sources (where appropriate). Thus: not source
critical.
o The Fiala editions also as a general policy resolve all orthographical ambiguities, and adds
accent to clarify meaning.
o For samples, see screen shots in Freedman memo from September 2011.
o No facility for searching and connecting related phrases and themes.
B. Editions of individual poems set to music in Du Chemin.
o That is: like the Fiala project, except now linked to the encodings for music, and open to
further inquiry via XML tags. In this case we're just editing the texts of the Du Chemin
chansonniers.
o These could offer both original and modern orthography, and also could show variants among
the partbooks. User could configure these.
o They could also be _critical_ editions, since we could give readings of the poems, extra verses,
etc, as they appear in other chansonniers, in other settings of the same texts, and in literary
sources. Note: only a minority of the texts also appear in other literary sources of the 16th
century.
o Text edition available as html from within the Du Chemin site, but the encoded text could be
available to other kinds of inquiry as a corpus. For instance: search for key words, or for
related chansons.
o We could consider having the TEI "in" an MEI encoding of each piece (thus: possible to
render text alongside music, and mark them up accordingly, like the TILE project shows.)
o But how would this be useful as we look across the entire series? Wouldn't it be better in this
case to have a single TEI file for all of the poems, then an XML:ID for each, to which the
MEI encoding could point?
C. Editions of Literary Chansonniers.
o That is: we edit selected collections of poems as TEI. Only a small portion of the poems
from any given collection would be set to music in Du Chemin books, but we could begin a
dialogue between the literary and musical presentations of the texts.
o TEI encoding could thus include "extra" stanzas.
o TEI encodings could include XML:ID, and thus be a 'target' for MEI encodings.
o It could also explore chanson-response pairs (maybe even find some others!)
D. Where are the Literary Sources? Newberry does not own many of them. However:
o Some are to be found in the Howard Brown microfilm nachlass.
o Others are _already_ available as digital facsimiles via Gallica and Munich. See separate list
compiled by RF.
o Still others are in research collections, esp Bibliothèque de l'arsenal. See finding aids, and
Dobbins article.
E. Where would work take place, and who would do it? Who would supervise it?
o Fiala Filemaker project has already done basic transcription and some analysis of poetic
meters and forms. These could be exported and used as basis of XML markup by graduate
student, supervised by Zecher or Knox.
o Could be done at the Newberry, using films and digital facsimiles, according to markup
standards and workflows defined by the CESR.
o Financial arrangements are flexible: we could pay Newberry for delivery of encoded texts
(and Newberry in turn could offer stipend to a student). We could also pay the student
directly for deliverables, and pay Newberry separately for correction, etc.