Category Archives: Using Juxta

Using Juxta in the Classroom: Scholar’s Lab Presentation

Posted on by
Reply

Director of NINES Andrew Stauffer and Project Manager Dana Wheeles will be joining the UVa Scholar’s Lab today to discuss Juxta Commons and possible uses for the software in the classroom.  Below are a list of sets included in the demo to illustrate the numerous ways Juxta could draw students’ attention to textual analysis and digital humanities.

Traditional Scholarly Sets for Analysis and Research

 

 

Scholarly Sets for Classroom Engagement

 

 

Beyond traditional scholarship: born-digital texts

 

 

Our favorites from the user community

 

 

Digital Thoreau and Parallel Segmentation

Posted on by
1

[Cross-posted at nines.org.]

Every now and then I like to browse the project list at DHCommons.org, just to get an idea of what kind of work is being done in digital scholarship around the world. This really paid off recently, when I stumbled upon Digital Thoreau, an engaging and well-structured site created by a group from SUNY-Geneseo. This project centers around a TEI-encoded edition of Walden, which will, to quote their mission statement, “be enriched by annotations links, images, and social tools that will enable users to create conversations around the text.” I highly recommend that anyone interested in text encoding take a look at their genetic text demo of “Solitude,” visualized using the Versioning Machine.

What really caught my attention, however, is that they freely offer a toolkit of materials from their project, including XML documents marked up in TEI. This allowed me to take a closer look at how they encoded the text featured in the demo, and try visualizing it, myself.

This embed shows the same text featured on the Digital Thoreau site, now visualized in Juxta Commons. It is possible to import a file encoded in TEI Parallel Segmentation directly into Juxta Commons, and the software will immediately break down the file into its constituent witnesses (see this example of their base witness from Princeton) and visualize them as a comparison set.

upload screen

Uploading Parallel Segmentation

 

par_seg.loaded

Parallel Segmentation file added and processed 

 

Once you’ve successfully added the file to your account, you have access to the heat map visualization (where changes are highlighted blue on the chosen base text), the side-by-side option, and a histogram to give you a global view if the differences between the texts in the set. In this way, the Juxta Commons R&D hope to enable the use of our software in concert with other open-source tools.

I should also note that Juxta Commons allows the user to export any other sets they have created as a parallel-segmented file. This is a great feature for starting an edition of your own, but it no way includes the complexity of markup one would see in files generated by a rigorous project like Digital Thoreau. We like to think of it the Parallel Segmentation and new experimental edition builder export as building blocks for future scholarly editions.

Many thanks to the team at Digital Thoreau for allowing us to make use of their scholarship!

Authenticating Google Books with Juxta Commons

Posted on by
Reply

What do you get when you collate as many free Google versions of the same text as you can find? Those familiar with Google Books may suggest that you’ll quickly discover rampant OCR errors, or perhaps some truly astounding misinformation in the metadata fields. In my experiment using Juxta Commons to explore the versions of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s long poem, The Princess, available online, I encountered my fill of both of these issues. But I also discovered a number of interesting textual variations – ones that led me to a deeper study of the poem’s publication history.

In the process of testing the efficacy of the software, I believe I stumbled upon a useful experiment that may prove helpful in the classroom: a new way to introduce students to textual scholarship, to the value of metadata, and to the modes of inquiry made possible by the digital humanities.

Many of the editions of Tennyson’s works offered in Google Books are modern, or modern reprints, and are thus available only in snippet view. Paging through the results, I chose six versions of the Princess that were available in e-book form, and I copied and pasted the text into the text editor in Juxta Commons*. Because the poem is relatively long, I chose to focus solely on its Prologue – not only to expedite the process of collation, but to see if one excerpt could give a more global view of changes to the poem across editions. Another important step was to click on the orange “i” button at the upper left of the screen to save original URLs and basic metadata about the object for future reference.

source info

This step turned out to be invaluable, once I realized that the publication information offered on the title pages of the scanned documents didn’t always agree with the metadata offered by Google (see this example).

Once the set was complete, and collated, I noticed right away that there were significant passages that were missing in the 1863 and 1900 editions of the poem.

insertions

Stepping chronologically through the set using the witness visibility feature (the eye icons on the left) showed no apparent timeline for this change (why would it be missing in 1863, present in 1866, 1872, 1875, and excised again in 1900?). The answer could only be found in a robust explanation of the revision and publication history of Tennyson’s work.

Without going too deeply into the reasons behind this set of differences (I’ll refer you to Christopher Ricks’ selected critical edition of Tennyson, if you’re interested), The Princess happens to be one of the most revised long poems of Tennyson’s career. The Prologue was expanded in the 5th edition (published in 1853) and it is that version that generally considered the standard reading text today. However, as we have seen from the Google Books on offer, even in 1900, editions were offered that were based on earlier versions of the poem. Could the fact that both versions missing the stanzas are American editions be important?

I invite Tennyson scholars to help me continue to piece together this puzzle. However, I believe that in this one example we have seen just how powerful Juxta Commons can be for delving into seemingly innocuous editions of one of Tennyson’s poem and exposing a myriad of possible topics of study. Next time you’re wondering just *which* version of a text you’re looking at on Google Books, I hope you’ll consider Juxta Commons a good place to start.

* Please note that Juxta Commons can accept some e-book formats, but those offered by Google Books have image information only, and the text cannot be extracted.

We have a winner!

Posted on by
Reply

Congratulations to Tonya Howe, the winner of our Juxta Commons sharing competition, leading up to the MLA Conference in Boston (#MLA13). Be sure to have a look at the side-by-side view of her comparison set, Legend of Good Women, Prologues A and B.

We’ll be featuring the set in the Juxta Commons gallery in the very near future, along with some of the other sets that received lots of interest in the last month.

A Preview of Juxta Commons

Posted on by
Reply

The NINES R&D team is happy to announce a new phase of testing for Juxta online: Juxta Commons. We’re entering our final phase of intensive testing on this new site for using Juxta on the web, which breaks down the processes of the desktop application so you always have access to your raw source files and your witnesses, in addition to your comparison sets. We’ve even added more ways to work with XML, as well as an option to import and export files encoded in TEI Parallel Segmentation.

We have invited a group of scholars and users to try out Juxta Commons for the next two months, and share their experiences online. They’ll be exploring new ways to add source files, filter XML content and browse our newly-updated visualizations, previewed in the gallery above.

If you would like to be a part of this group of testers, please leave a comment below, and we’ll get in touch with you.

Juxta and excess: The case of Aimé Césaire

Posted on by

(Guest post by Alex Gil – read full entry at NINES)

I’m a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Virginia currently working on a digital edition of Aimé Césaire’s early works under the sponsorship of  l’Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie and ITEM. Some of this work also moonlights as my rather schizoid dissertation (read French poet/English Department) and I consider it part of my long-term goal of generating and sustaining enthusiasm for reliable digital editions of neo-canonical Caribbean literary texts. I am rather new to this blog, but not to Juxta. I started working with Juxta around the time when I started working with Aimé Césaire’s signature poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, roughly 2 years ago. At the time, Juxta saved me enormous amounts of time proofreading my retooled OCRs and generating an apparatus. It was later, when I started working with Et les chiens se taisaient, a longer text with substantially more variants and transpositions, that Juxta revealed to me both its current shortcomings and its ultimate promise.

We could say that Aimé Césaire was a migratory poet in the fullest sense: He had perfect pitch for context and used it to quickly adapt his voice to new audiences as his work traveled around three continents. As a student of literature he was as much a product of his Paris education as he was of the journey that brought him there and back to his home base in Martinique. His major works, and the many revisions they were subjected to during his lifetime, provide the final testimony to his restless poetic trajectory.

To the textual critic who approaches this corpus for the first time, one feature stands out above all others: The sheer number of transpositions from one version to another. In past conversations, I have likened his stanzas and lines to Lego blocks in order to quickly explain how he seems to have an utter disregard (or is it exactly the opposite?) for sequence. In the case of Et les chiens se taisaient the text begins its life as a three-act play on the Haitian Revolution, has an adolescence as a poetic oratorio with heavy Christian overtones and grows up to be a heavily abstract play about the struggle between universal Slave and Master figures. Throughout this transformation, stanzas and lines are bandied about without care for consistency, sometimes going from one speaker to his or her antagonist in a later version.

When I began using Juxta for Et les chiens se taisaient, I only expected the same functionality that was perfect to the T for Cahier d’ un retour au pays natal, but as soon as I started working with the first two instantiations of the text, the manuscript and the oratorio, obstacles and yearnings started cropping up. In its current build (1.3.1), Juxta struggles with long texts with many transpositions. After several meetings with NINES and Nick Laiacona, it became clear that a memory issue combined with the graphic rendering of connectors was the culprit. Apparently, Juxta has a built-in limit to the amount of internal memory it uses from the machine, and rendering the graphic connectors puts substantial pressure on these resources.  To account for transpositions, Juxta allows you to mark “moves” manually from one text to the next, creating a list of these moves as you go along in one of the bottom panels. This system is intuitive and easy to use, and complements the automated functions nicely, but it becomes unwieldy in a collection with heavy traffic. While Cahier d’ un retour au pays natal had a total of four, albeit significant, moves in its four major versions, Et les chiens se taisaient has an overwhelming 64 moves just between the manuscript and the first published version!

Click here to read the full entry at NINES.

Using Juxta in the Digital Variorum Edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos

Posted on by

(Guest post by Mark Byron, University of Sydney, Australia)

I am currently assembling the digital variorum edition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos with Richard Taylor. This edition aims to collate all published versions of every canto, including page proofs and setting copy, where available, and to integrate digital reproductions of illustrated capitals in deluxe editions, audio and video recordings of Pound reading his poetry, and a very large cache of annals material pertaining to the production of his epic poem over the course of sixty years.

We have chosen to use Juxta to collate the very extensive set of variants for each canto – the total number of witness files runs into the thousands – because this application addresses a number of issues inherent in such a project.

The Juxta interface lists any chosen comparison set, which, for example, might be as small as ten witness files for Canto VI or as large as forty witness files for Canto IV. The degree of variation of each witness text from a chosen base text is visually represented next to each file in the comparison set list. This provides an efficient means to identify the more eccentric versions (bibliographically speaking) of a particular canto. A curious reader viewing the Edit Note in the figure below might choose to compare the 1922 version of Canto II published in The Dial with the so-called “Base text” – the 1975 New Directions edition of the Cantos that was adopted by Faber in place of its own edition, marking the end of the separate stemmatic lineage of the British edition of the text. (It should be noted that any witness file may be chosen as a base text for the purposes of a particular collation.)

Juxta’s elegant interface provides immediate visual information concerning the kind and degree of variation between the two witness files represented here: the reader is already aware of the canto’s changed status after 1922 from the “Eighth Canto” to Canto II, and can see – immediately – that the heaviest revision occurs in the opening lines, a revision that ushers in the now-iconic address to Robert Browning (the rhetorical and semantic implications of which can be processed by means of careful comparison of the two versions).

Variation is visualized in the integrated heat map, and is complemented by the Histogram function, allowing the reader to see exactly at which points the densest variation might occur in the canto. In this case, the beginning of the text bears the most acute variation, but other significant variations occur throughout the canto, including the final lines. To be able to see this at a glance is truly a powerful aid to scholars, even those intimately familiar with the textual state and history of this poem.

The complexity of Pound’s text is legendary, and not all bibliographic features can be captured in either codex or digital editions. Yet Juxta provides the means to collate Greek text, including diacritics (seen in the example above), and the increasingly substantial presence of Chinese in later instalments of the Cantos. Indeed, any element present in the Unicode palette can be deployed in a Juxta text file. While those ideograms drawn by hand (often incorrectly) and included in published editions of the Cantos are not represented in the text field, photographic reproductions of them can be added as Edit Notes at precisely where they occur in a particular canto.

These features provide excellent reasons for the digital variorum edition of Pound’s Cantos to employ Juxta. Potential development of an HTML applet – allowing for an integrated collation function within a web-based edition – is exciting news indeed.

Mark Byron
Department of English
University of Sydney, Australia

Working with non-Roman alphabets in Juxta

Posted on by

Now that Juxta 1.3 has been refined and released, the development team at NINES has been discussing new directions for the software. First and foremost is the adaptation of Juxta’s collating power for texts in languages other than English. Comparisons of texts in French and Italian work pretty well, but we’re still investigating the necessary diacritics to make such operations more exact. However, it seems that scholars working with non-Roman alphabets have been left out of the conversation.

Do any Juxta users out there have any experiences with foreign language collation to share with us?

Searching Tennyson

Posted on by

Below is a representative page from Christopher Ricks’s critical edition of the poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

This excerpt from “The Lady of Shalott” illustrates traditional methods of textual collation: the base text is prominently displayed, with variants and annotations included in notes at the foot of the page. It provides a useful comparison to this screenshot of the same poem, collated in Juxta.

Two versions of the poem can be displayed in Juxta side-by-side, with a heat map of the differences (highlighted in green) making variants instantly recognizable. But in addition to these basic visualizations, the new Juxta 1.3 adds another useful feature: search.

Continue reading →

for dummies?

Posted on by

Wesley Raabe, a former colleague at UVA (now CLIR Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities) has written a very nice blog post describing his experiences with Juxta. He subtitles it “textual collation for dummies,” which I take as a real compliment, because Juxta was designed to open up this esoteric practice and make it easier for literary scholars to see the utility of analyzing variant texts without having to hunker over a Lindstrand Comparator or dazzle at the flashing lights of an Hinman.

Wesley also points out that Juxta accepts unmarked, plain-text (.txt) documents as a baseline for comparison. But we want to make it clear that Juxta can work with more than plain text files — and for scholars who are interested in recording even very complex line or other numbering schemes, embedding bibliographic citation information and other notes in the files, Juxta’s particular flavor of XML can be useful. Juxta XML can be constructed by hand or generated via XSLT from other XML formatted files (such as TEI). Its simple format is described beginning on page 17 of our user manual.

Why bother? Juxta XML is a great choice if you’d like the printable apparatus to be generated complete with bibliographic information and your notes, keyed to line and page or scene or chapter or canto numbers that make sense to scholars studying your particular texts.

I haven’t seen anybody do this yet, but Juxta XML would also be a nice choice for the editor of an existing archive of well-proofed XML documents of various editions to provide to end users as a download option. In that case, Juxta — in its most sophisticated form — would be plug-and-play. Even for dummies.