Presents work-in-progress of Digital Mitford: The Mary Russell Mitford Archive to develop an XQuery-based tool for dynamic, corpus-based annotation in TEI-encoded archives.
General Principles of Intellectual Property: Concepts of Intellectual Proper...
Digital Mitford: Mitford Annotation Tool
1. --Mary Erica Zimmer, Boston University
--Molly O’Donnell, University of Nevada,
Las Vegas
--Elisa Beshero-Bondar (Project Director),
University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg
7. Mitfordian “Connections”?
--Mitford to Sir William Elford, 3 April 1815
(ed. L’Estrange, vol. 1 [1870]), p. 306
“…her family connections must render her disagreeable to Miss Austen, since
she is the sister-in-law of a gentleman who is at law with Miss A’s brother for
the greater part of his fortune.*”
“You must have remarked how much her stories hinge upon entailed estates;
doubtless she has learned to dislike entails.”
Editor’s Note:
“* Every other account of Jane Austen,
from whatever quarter, represents her
as handsome, graceful, amiable, and shy.”
8. Annotation: Creating Communities
• “The annotator, if [s]he's a good one, presents
a reading that will create the acceptable
range of conversation within the group
[s]he supposedly serves.”
• “This leads me to suggest that questions of
annotation always come back to issues of
communities and institutions . . .”
--Hanna, “Annotation as Social Practice,” 184
10. Digital Mitford
• “That no such edition yet exists almost
certainly reflects the challenging extent of a
task that could not be completed without the
assistance of a large and diversely specialized
team of scholars.”
--Digital Mitford,
“Methods and
Practice”
(mitford.pitt.edu)
15. Interpretive Grounds, via Granularity?
– Hanna notes “the fear that the annotator will
in fact become an interpreter, impose his being,
in a double attack, on the reader and on the text.”
• Hence, “twentieth-century annotators . . . are
required to fragment their activities into tasks
presented as rhetorically discrete, so they can
never appear whole consciousnesses in touch
with the text” (Hanna 180).
• Yet “this rhetorical prescription seems . . . a way
of allowing annotation to proceed as a form of benign
meditation, a service profession, which it is not” (181).
27. Are You Being Served?
• “The annotator, if [s]he's a good one, presents
a reading that will create the acceptable range
of conversation within the group [s]he
supposedly serves.”
• “This leads me to suggest that questions of
annotation always come back to issues of
communities and institutions, and consequently
questions of power.”
• “At least one question one should ponder at
length . . . is precisely that of power: who or
what is being served by this activity?”
--Hanna, “Annotation as Social Practice,” 184
35. Byronic Influences?
“Oh! renowned committeemen! From all the selected fruits of all the poetical costermongers
of Great Britain, Ireland, and Berwick-upon-Tweed, could ye choose nothing more promising
than this green sour apple? I am really astonished that Lord Byron could write anything so
stamped with the curse of mediocrity, that even the strong shadow of Dr. Busby fails to
throw it out with anything like effect.”
--MRM to Sir William Elford, 18 October 1812
39. Recalibration, Redux
• Re: “what an annotator is doing”:
– “My practice suggests to me that he is in fact
creating himself as reader—and thus creating
the reader of his work.”
– “When my reading runs into blocks, I have to
dissociate myself momentarily and become a
researcher.”
– “But eventually, this split within myself is healed,
since I return to write in the most helpful fashion
my reading as note or gloss . . .”
--Hanna, “Annotation as Social Practice,” 181
Notas do Editor
--Work to increase circulation and appreciation of Mitford’s writing is one reason bringing us here today.
--Yet this presentation also builds on a broader claim made by Ralph Hanna, who in 1991 took issue with those casting annotation as “mediation.”
--For him, this metaphor presupposes the editor him- or her-self as mediated, as an active member of the critical community who is “produced by the same readerly culture for which he [or she] speaks” yet presents a process that is “by no means benign” and can be “perceived socially as a form of aggression” towards both the readerly community and the text itself.
--Longer presentation would consider the models of action implied in the metaphors themselves.
--Key point for today: his counter-model one that helps to calibrate the annotator as reader—one recursively created by the work of annotation itself.
With reference to Hanna’s insights: what we see here is his qualitative description, one our tool’s more quantitative work will allow us to place in context.
--By Hanna’s own admission, this description has been developed through long experience (“Annotation as Social Practice,” p. 178).
--This very fact may make describing how to annotate difficult: of what does a scholar’s “attentive reading” consist? (Much drawn upon “goes without saying.”)
--What our model helps us to do: trace the territory of scholarly annotation itself, focusing less upon particular points of knowledge (facts) as its its underlying structures of relation (less “what” than “how” the expert reader knows what he/she does).
--Specifically: if annotation does form readers and readerly communities, as Hanna argues, how does it do so? How do its mechanisms work? (Or, taken from another perspective, of what does a note’s “helpfulness” consist?)
--Important for the ongoing, recursive, and shared editorial actions of the Digital Mitford project.
--Project moves between “first comprehensive scholarly edition” and archive, as seen in key points of its own description, shown here.
--Seeks to increase scholarly access to, and appreciation of, Mitford’s substantial body of work. --Yet such work also involves engaging the history of how she has been edited previously: grappling with those challenges is its own story.
--Team of substantial size; members bring multiple, diverse skills to the project (cf. Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing, 112-116).
--Provides case study, as well as a means of tracing and reflecting upon, scholarly editorial praxis.
--Major edition is L’Estrange’s (1870): predates a “second series” published under Henry Chorley’s name.
--Other editions exist, some of which highlight her correspondence with well-known interlocutors (John Ruskin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, others).
--These editorial selections both echo judgments made by previous editors/executors and help to show previous criteria used to assess “significance.”
Within previous editions, massive amounts of material have been cut, however. (Red crayon: most likely marks the deletions of William Harness, Mitford’s literary executor; often conveys that which was considered of lesser interest.)
--Initial selection of letters, and selections from letters, brought together in the 1870 L’Estrange volumes, which were significantly influenced by Harness’ work.
--Looking at deletions provides a taste of what may have been left out: this further material is important not only for understanding her life and work, but also for bringing into view previous principles by which her work has been edited.
One way in which Mitford has been known: via her comments upon others. (Image shows L’Estrange’s 1870 edition.)
--What’s above is not her most famous comment on Jane Austen, though it follows that comment, in the same letter: 3 April 1815, to Sir William Elford.
--Using this comment to show one way MRM’s views have been placed in light of contemporary contexts, as well as how editorial judgment may “mediate” these.
--One form of “mediation”: interventionist; sometimes understood as an “aggressive” (in Hanna’s terms) stance towards the readerly community.
Would argue, however (and in agreement with Hanna) that annotation is less “mediation,” and more “formation”: --Hanna: “My practice suggests to me that [the editor] is in fact creating himself as reader--and thus creating the reader of his work.” --How we *do* such work is the major question: question of our relation to, and membership in, a reading audience underscores importance of community itself.
--In Hanna’s words, the scholarly community manifests and extends “the acceptable range of conversation” about a writer: reinforces scholarship as conversation fueled and supported by scholarly editing.
--Work of Digital Mitford makes both abstractions (that is, the “conversation” and the “community”) tangible.
--Mitford workshops convene a community that engage the conversation to which Hanna refers, even as they calibrate and support it for a broader group.
--Mitford team members hail from different contexts and bring multiple, varied skills to the project. (Data visualization my focus, for example.) --Such diversity reflects Elena Pierazzo’s account of emerging models for scholarly editorial teams (Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing, pp. 112-6).
--Great strength in this approach: would refer you to the project’s website (linked and shown here) to learn more about the team, its affiliations, and its interests.
To quote the project itself…
What this means: editors come to the project from multiple points of entry.
--Diverse skills and interests can lead to specialized areas of emphasis (drama, journals, data visualization…).
--Almost all editors work at some point upon the letters, however.
--There, we are faced with transforming *this* (the handwritten MRM manuscript)…
…into this (the encoded TEI transcription).
--What our editors are doing: in light of what editions have done, going first from handwritten MS to transcription and TEI encoding, with annotations.
--Letter of 1820, MRM to the actor Benjamin Haydon: this is a first-day transcription I’d done when joining the project in 2014. --This document does not show editorial notes or the decisions of our encoding scheme. (We’re coming to those momentarily!) --Those wider editorial choices, and their implications, are the heart of the project, as well as of the tool being presented to you today.
Re: annotation undertaken within the project, important to keep in mind:
--Interplay between encoding of individual letters and the “site index” (“-ography”) files: insights from the former help develop the latter.
--What our editors do: not only transcription and encoding, but also annotation (within the letters and as part of the overall site index).
--This screenshot shows an earlier (2014) version of our site index file (“site index” = all the “-ographies”: personography, placeography, orgography, etc.) (Compare “Encyclopedia” tab from the Map of Early Modern London.)
Developing these entries requires: 1) contextualizing in light of existing research, as you’ll see here, and 2) implicitly tracing the topography of Mitford’s world, as revealed by the letters, journals, and other documents of the archive. It’s the latter I want to talk about now.
--Our work picks up an issue raised by the Annotation I panel this morning (Wim Van Mierlo): how might we describe the structure of scholarly annotation itself?
--For the Mitford project, we’d understand that question in terms of how to write better site index entries: ones calibrated to the project and its particular archive. --Practical guidance (Greetham) often refers editors to the DNB and other established resources.
--Such an approach works in a way for well-documented entities, like Byron, yet far less so, for figures more particular to Mitford’s world. (Want to turn now to one such figure…) --Also doesn’t capture what about any particular person would be most significant for the edition itself.
--Returning to theory for a moment: our approach allows editors to confront what Hanna (180) speaks of as the “fear” that “the annotator will become an interpreter” by making explicit, as well as more immediately visible, key grounds and relationships from which scholarly notes develop. --Point echoes Michael Witmore (Folger Shakespeare Library), who has noted digital work’s allowing us to examine more precisely the object of our attention (2014 TEI Conference, plenary remarks).
--Here, that objects are the oft-unstated relationships informing scholarly annotation itself, mobilized to practical and ongoing ends.
--Important both for our understanding of how scholarly annotation works and for supporting the work of our editorial team.
Broadly: our tool assists annotation, via aggregation, which supports interpretation (by editors and, eventually, readers).
--Brings forward clusters of items in key categories, as indexed in relation to specific terms. (Such clusters foreground and help to reveal recurring relationships found among the documents of the encoded archive as a whole.)
--Does so by mobilizing the insights of our own markup, as we’ll explore.
--This slide shows a section of our Digital Mitford Coding Guidelines. (Slight revision: not currently tagging “quantities.”)
--Echoing discussion of heuristics: principles outlined in the codebook are our editorial principles; via markup, the edition’s values in annotation are made visible.
Why should we care? What might such a tool help us to do?
--One area in which this sort of work benefits us is the exploration of “known unknowns”: for instance, finding “Miss James.” --Speaking here from the insights of Molly O’Donnell, from recent discoveries made by Lisa Wilson and her students, and from the perspective and experience of the full Mitford editorial team. (Briefly, noted story of team’s excitement and work together on “Miss James” in Summer 2015.)
--Building from these examples paves the way to understanding how data visualization itself may serve as annotation, in ways responsive to the project and the world it renders (an ongoing, evolving exercise in mapping Mitford’s world).
So, what compelled the team’s interest so greatly? What sorts of details about “Miss James” began to emerge? --MRM begins by noting she has received “a charming letter from Miss James”: the first of many, though at present, we know only what MRM says about MJ.
--Sense of MJ as interpersonally intelligent (shows concern for whom MRM does/does not meet). --Can see here also the prevalence of <persName> tagging, as well as literary references in MJ’s vicinity (here, via <title>).
MJ’s sauciness and independence of mind also make her a generally appealing character:
--MRM lists “Miss James” as one of three people who respect her whose opinions she values above all others (she, like William Elford and Mrs. Dickinson, “does not “talk scandal” of her “poor dear Friend,” etc.).
--MJ is also “no respecter of beauties” (and humorously so…).
--Has many memorable lines and insights (here reported indirectly): in them, <persNames> are prevalent, along with references to her reading (here, via <bibl>).
--Uses vivid language/manner of speaking: effect of MRM’s dialogue has been to “put salt upon Mr. Macready’s tail”
--Here, we also see the <q> for quote coding: not being used at present within the tool, but would be a fascinating further development
--Also shows aspects of our current annotation system: the <note> tag, which corresponds roughly to the footnote in a scholarly edition (though not limited by placement, of course)
But why did the team *really* care? Why were so many of our group invested in this elusive figure?
--Impression grew, via cumulative evidence, of her as a significant presence in MRM’s life: several letters show MJ’s influence on MRM’s opinions, judgments, etc. (Pithy, trenchant observations: “His wife says it is excellent . . . Miss James says it is detestable.”)
--Recurrence underscores her as a person of substantial importance, interest, and influence in MRM’s world, as well as one fascinating in her own right.
Also, tantalizingly connected with other MRM friends and acquaintances about whom we know more:
--Here, “Haydon” (Benjamin) is referred to in connection with upcoming plans involving MJ.
--MRM states: ”above all, do not name him to Miss James”
--Nature of MJ/Benjamin Haydon relationship unclear: would MJ not attend, were he to be present? (Intriguing, to say the least!)
While MRM seems to admire MJ greatly, MRM maintains a sense of perspective about her, as well.
-- In “…the only silly letter…[MJ] ever wrote in her life,” MRM notes that in ”meaning to tell things delicately,” MJ “avoid[s] all…mention” of “vulgar things” --And, says MRM, in doing so MJ “is as obscene as on[e] of Lord Castlereagh’s exploitations”
Her (MJ’s) responsibility/devotion to others apparent: one particularly rich letter reveals her as potentially a teacher, along with her sister (Emily?).
--having had ”a letter from Miss James,” MRM notes MJ as ”hurried from Birmingham by the illness of her sister”
--not dangerous, yet MJ ”thought it” best “to hurry home to take care of their four pupils to relieve Emily’s mind from such a charge”
Further letters deepened the team’s sense of this strong and complex character, while also helping to show “what’s not in a name”:
--In Fall 2015, the students of Lisa Wilson discovered a first name—”Miss Susan James”—associated either with the said “Miss James” or her sister.
--Discovering this name was extraordinarily exciting for all! Yet this biographical detail itself did, and does, not itself solve the mystery of her identity.
--Also interesting that this letter also contained reference to MJ’s “school,” along with commendation of the institution’s quality.
--Suggests others’ connections to MJ as made and developed by MRM: as of yet, however, this further tale remains unearthed…
This is where the Mitford project, and its Annotation Tool, comes in. We want to do justice to this fascinating figure in our personography (site index). --How might we find more readily what we do want to know?
--Where might we find this richer material? Answer: through the archive itself, via the encoding just discussed.
Returning to Hanna briefly:
--Recall that his practical experience had “suggest[ed]” editorial work as “creating” oneself “as reader--and thus creating the reader of [the] work.”
--Here, we seek to turns Hanna’s question of “power” into one of empowering—specifically, via insights supported by the Annotation Tool, further empowering our editorial team by bringing forward aggregate archival insights from the project’s own encoded texts.
Such work involves returning, with renewed perspective, to the transcription and encoding of manuscripts at the project’s heart.
Returning to our discussion of the Digital Mitford Coding Guidelines as articulating editorial principles and specifying valued entities:
--Approach taken is one of drawing upon contextual markup: items discretely tagged in each of the major categories noted above.
--Involves focusing on significant clusters by category co-occurring with a named entity: what are the top three people, places, etc. that co-occur with a particular entity, like “Miss James”? (These are the key questions through which Elisa Beshero-Bondar has developed the XQuery code…)
Work with this tool has potential to support principles while influencing practices: we see here the site index template for “historical people.”
--”Historical person”: one actually existing in Mitford’s world: these are figures for whom archival evidence may prove most important, yet many of whom, like “Miss James,” tend to prove elusive when pursued through canonical/established sources (DNB, etc.).
--Can see also here the role of team decision-making in forming these editorial categories: “we’ve decided that named animals count as people…”
--Focus on brevity and pithiness echoes point made elsewhere by Anne Middleton re: annotations’ “phrasal” grammar (how to achieve pithiness is part of what the tool supports). (See Middleton, Anne. “Life in the Margins: or, What’s an Annotator to Do?” New Directions in Textual Studies, ed. D. Oliphant and R. Bradford, eds. (Austin, TX, 1990), pp. 166-183. 169.
How does the tool work? Here you see the XQuery:
--Keeping the “top three” principle in mind, Elisa Beshero-Bondar developed XQuery code to use on the team’s eXist database of encoded letters: this programming language native to XML allows us to “mobilize markup,” revealing the tagged topography of the letters as corpus.
--The XQuery looks for the “top three” items in each relational category that co-occur most frequently with the named entity: so, for example, the top 3 people, organizations, and places. (Team is also refining code to select the “top three” categories co-occurring, for a yet more precise perspective…)
--Queries of this kind, focused on specific, named entities (like “historical people”) can bring forward aggregate insights—in other words, clusters of potentially relevant information recursively supporting the team’s annotative work.
Example 1: Editing “Miss James”—here, in the current site index entry, one sees the “phrasal grammar” Middleton mentions.
--Current MJ note highlights relation to MRM and MJ’s potential profession; also includes explicit reference to MJ’s address/location.
--What else might the tool help us to see, however? How might it help us trace further MJ’s potential significance in Mitford’s world?
--Here, MJ’s co-occurrence with MRM’s father is interesting: MRM does frequently speak of her father, however. (Reading letters themselves is then necessary, as would always be the case when pursuing a potential aggregate insight.)
--MJ’s co-occurrence with Barbara Hofland and Benjamin Haydon even more fascinating: Haydon’s presence among MJ’s “top three” co-occurring people suggests contexts (that is, letters within which) editors might explore the intriguing MJ/BH connection spoken of earlier.
-------Questions one might seek to answer: how did “Miss James” know Benjamin Haydon, what was the nature of that relationship, and why does he co-occur so frequently with her? 16 co-occurrences: not nothing.)
--Also fascinating here are top results within organizations: “the Scotch,” “Court of Chancery,” and “Twickenham Coach” (latter may link to postal markings?).
--Overall, the tool provides a guide as to where one might look for significant relationships, as well as a sense of what might be useful to attend to therein.
--Austen note: initially, oddly unsatisfying, but underscores MRM’s comments on Austen as likely not telling the full story of her significance in MRM’s world.
--Frequent co-occurrence with “Aubrey” curious (John Aubrey, seventeenth-century painter and “antiquariat”: "http://viaf.org/viaf/71386625”).
-------Might his Brief Lives have been a significant work for MRM’s understanding of Austen? Or might MRM have often discussed Austen’s work in light of other reading? (If the latter is so, this prevalence could lead us to reassess the perspective MRM is understood to have borne towards Austen and her work.)
Relationships significant to her engagement with Byron fascinating:
--Well known to members of the editorial team (particularly, the group working on drama) that Mitford’s
--Here, 2nd entry of the “person” group is intriguing: given MRM’s composition of drama, one wonders if this prevalence may be due to Macready’s acting in Byron’s Sardanapalus? (Would need to consult letters to find out more…he’s also a fascinating figure in his own right.) --Certainly more to say here: overall, the clusters provide nuanced paths of entry to trace her engagement with his work.
------Seen qualitatively in distinct, poignant quotes like the one above, in which she comments upon Byron’s Prize Address on the opening of Drury Lane Theater (a competition she had also entered, herself [ed. L’Estrange, v. 1, pp. 209-10]). ------Yet the recurring concern also suggests points of more extended engagement: for site index entries, these recurring aspects may prove useful to include. Such points direct attention to areas well known, yet still highlighted by the tool as notable in an SI entry. (Tool supports both exploration and speculation…)
“Shakespeare” results fascinating to me, particularly within the “organization” category:
--Within “People”: father, author, and historical figure (intriguing mix of types).
--Within “Organizations,” however: reaffirms MRM’s distinctive engagement with politics, as well as (potentially) a tendency to discuss Shakespearean plots in terms of their modern political analogies. Such an emphasis in her recorded conversation might prove relevant within a site index entry. --Could this result suggest the kinds of discussions in which she is engaged, when references to Shakespeare arise? --Again, would now look qualitatively at the letters themselves to find out more.
Further benefits: aggregations presented through the Annotation Tool might suggest editorial lines along which to attend, when information/context seems too vast. (One example: here, we see the “site index” entry for MRM herself.)
-----This is MRM’s earlier entry: work has been done since this time.
-----Yet implications of this phrasing remain relevant: another potential benefit of the tool will be suggestions it makes re: how best to “expand” a bio note, while maintaining the editorial principles articulated (brevity, pithiness, etc.).
Here are the current Annotation Tool results for MRM herself:
--Here, the most frequently co-occurring people may be less surprising than the organizations and places. --Fascinating to consider how one might phrase site index sentences taking results from either of these categories into account.
--In some cases, may be worth considering “least frequent” co-occurrences, as well. (Parallels methods from corpus linguistics...) --Would require tweaking the code, but potentially useful.
To conclude, let us return briefly to Hanna’s central insight re: annotation as creating readers while convening communities thereof.
--As we have seen, the tool’s quantitative approach makes explicit the clusters of recurring relation helping to shape the topography of readerly expertise within the world of Mitford’s archive.
--What we’ve seen: the tool we’re developing is concerned to model structures of knowledge emerging from ongoing, recursive reading (that is, the unstated, yet vital, relationships among entities that scholarly readers implicitly develop).
--The results it yields make more explicit, and visible, the grounds from which scholarly interpretations develop.
--Such a tool both sheds light on the logic of scholarly annotation and supports the ongoing work of our incredible editorial team.
Further possible questions:
--Re: “Miss James”: where, if at all, might her own name occur as a “top three” collocate for others? (In other words, might she be usefully included in others’ site index entries, such as Benjamin Haydon’s?)
--In what further ways might such a tool prove useful/what other types of projects might it support, or challenges might it address?
--Fundamentally, we believe, such a tool supports learning to navigate, in order to better annotate: navigating, that is, more precisely within our encoded archive, in ways helping to map progressively, and recursively, the very contours of Mitford’s world. (Thank you.)
