Last Friday ATNU was present at the second What is a Text in the Digital Age symposium, co-organised by ATNU members Jennifer Richards and Michael Rossington, and Rick Rylance from the Institute of English Studies. The invite-only symposium brought together a mixture of established and early career researchers in order to reflect on how the digital age has transformed our notion of what a text is.
As usual in Newcastle, the day was bright but cold when the participants arrived at the Core. Jennifer Richards, Michael Rossington and Rick Rylance welcomed everyone and asked Kelvin Everest (Liverpool) to recap the discussion of the first symposium in London. The day’s programme began with ‘The User’s Perspective’, with contributions from Clare Hutton (Loughborough) and Nicolas Bell (Trinity College Library, Cambridge).
Clare Hutton began by confronting digital and print editions of Ulysses from a user’s perspective. With a particularly polemic critical edition of Ulysses in mind, Clare put forward the argument for ‘unediting’, which would allow the reader to approach a readable text. Clare’s provocation did not go unnoticed: much of the discussion that followed focused on this critical junction. Some argued that rather than ‘unediting’, one should think of user-centred editions that would allow readers to choose the type of text that they want to read. This possibility is one of the advantages offered by a scholarly digital edition over a traditional print edition.
Nicolas Bell focused on digitization projects within libraries. Commercially backed projects, such as the one sponsored by Google Books, tend to be extremely risk averse when it comes to questions of copyright. Nicolas then made the case that libraries need not be constrained by the same degree of caution, and that many copyright issues can be solved at no extra cost by engaging in a conversation with the copyright owning estate. The discussion that followed addressed issues such as funding and the ‘digital penumbra’ — the unwanted effect that non-digitized might be less visible for readers than texts which are available online.
The second session of the day changed gears into approaches to collaborative work. Paul Watson and Nick Holliman (Digital Institute, NU) and Michael Rossington (SELLL, NU) offered different perspectives on interdisciplinary work. Paul opened the session by stressing the importance of abstraction when working collaboratively with computer science. Abstraction, Paul argued, allows not only for a better approach to the problem, but significantly allows for the reuse and re-purpose of methodologies to other data sets. Work on phylogenetics, for example, can be useful for a genetic literary analysis. Nick focused on some of the challenges he identified in working across disciplines. Questions of language are at the forefront of most problems, and although the vision should be shared between all parties, outcomes are not necessarily common. Rather than thinking in multi-disciplinary terms, a more fruitful approach would be to think of the collaboration as multi-perspectival. Finally, Michael presented a case-study of a typical humanities problem that could be solved in collaboration with computer science: how to represent the stages of composition of a palimpsest-heavy manuscript. The productive discussion that followed the short presentations focused on the challenges of working collaboratively, particularly between the Humanities and Computer Science. Data analysis in the Humanities is a particularly germane problem: how to analyse data that is by definition ambiguous?
After lunch, Jacquline Norton and Rupert Maan, from Oxford University Press, shared with the group some of the difficulties publishers face in the digital age. They focused specifically on the Oxford Scholarly Editions Online project, and the challenges of digitizing and encoding scholarly editions from the 15th to the end of the 19th century. Despite the challenges, Rupert and Jacqueline also highlighted the innovations that are made possible by the process, such as the multi-pane simultaneous view of table of contents, text and notes.
The last session of the day was entirely dedicated to one innovative research project currently in development, The Reading Sensorium. Jennifer Richards (SELLL, NU) and Jane Winters (SAS), lead investigators on the project, discussed the origins of the idea, its development, and its current state. The symposium finished with a recap of the day’s discussion and a brief survey of where to go next. Although this edition of the symposium was the last in its current state, everyone expressed a wish to continue the discussion in one way or another. Here at ATNU, we are very keen to keep meeting and discussing these issues — so watch this space for more.
