Traditional Scholarly Sets for Analysis and Research

• Alice in Wonderland
• D.G. Rossetti, The Stealthy School of Criticism
• Inflammatory Reactions, by Andrew Stauffer
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Scholarly Sets for Classroom Engagement

• Hamlet, Quarto 4 - Showing variants in spelling, and questioning “What is a work?”
• The Declaration of Independence – The evolution of a familiar document
• Tennyson’s The Princess – Authenticating texts on the web

Beyond traditional scholarship: born-digital texts

• Wikipedia: Climate Change - Seemingly stable documents mask constant debate between contributors and editors
• Current Events: New York Times on Health Care (via Newsdiffs.org)
• Instagram Terms of Service – How contracts evolve

Our favorites from the user community

• PC Fleming tracks the Daniel Day-Lewis wikipedia page during the Oscars
• George H. Williams compares two modern translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
• Tonya Howe compares two versions of a fourteenth-century poem, Legend of Good Women
• NINES Fellow Emma Schlosser examines the Wikipedia page on the Benghazi embassy attack in September
• Ryan Cordell tracks the publication history of Hawthorne’s Celestial Railroad
• Josh Honn’s collation of Lady Morgan’s novel, The Missionary

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.

Uploading Parallel Segmentation

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!

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.

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.

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.

Juxta Commons now offers a platform by which we can study the evolution of the most visited encyclopedia on the web—Wikipedia! The Wikipedia API feature allows users to easily collate variants that reveal changes made to articles, a useful tool when tracking the development of current events.   In light of President Obama’s recent nomination of Senator John Kerry to be Secretary of State following Susan Rice’s withdrawal of her bid for the position, I decided to trace Wikipedia’s article on the September 11th 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.  The attack resulted in the tragic deaths of four Americans including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

I prepared thirteen witnesses taken from the course of the article’s history on Wikipedia, stemming back to September 14th, 2012. In selecting the variants, I chose to focus on information most pertinent to the role of Rice, who is U.S. Ambassador to the UN.  These witnesses for the most part fall under the article’s “U.S. Government Response” section.  As various editors added more information regarding the attack and its aftereffects, I noted that on September 22nd a section had been added to the article entitled “Criticism of U.S. Government Response.”

In a September 16^th version of the article, an editor adds that the U.S. government has begun to doubt whether a low quality and poorly produced film circulated on YouTube entitled Innocence of Muslims was in fact behind the attack.

By September 22^nd, an entire paragraph had been added to the “U.S. Government Response” section, including quotations from Senator John McCain (R, Arizona) who decried any claim that the attack was spontaneous: “Most people don’t bring rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons to demonstrations.  That was an act of terror.”  A September 27^th version reports that Susan Rice appeared on five separate news shows on the 16^th, asserting that the attacks were a “spontaneous reaction to a hateful and offensive video widely disseminated throughout the Arab and Muslim world.”  The 27^th variant also affirms that the Benghazi attack had become a politically fueled issue during the heated presidential race.

The October 28^th variant cites under the “Criticism of U.S. Government Response” section that Senator McCain specifically accused the administration of using Susan Rice to cover the true motives of the attack.

As the progression of this Wikipedia article shows, the U.S. government response to the Benghazi attack overshadowed, to some degree, the causes and nature of the attack itself.  This, of course, had much to do with the then raging U.S. presidential campaign.  Rice’s tangential role in the response to the Benghazi attack, as evidenced by the paucity of references to her within the article, implicitly reveals the nature of political scapegoating.  Thanks to Juxta’s Wikipedia API feature it was easy for me to trace the evolution of an article on a contemporary controversy, revealing the methods by which we continually modify and interpret our understanding of current events.

For all those attending the Modern Languages Association Conference in Boston this year, please join NINES Directory Andrew Stauffer and Performant Software for a reception in the exhibit hall (Booth 717) on Saturday, January 5. We’ll be running demos of Juxta Commons and answering your questions about NINES, Juxta and digital humanities software in general.

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.

]]> http://www.juxtasoftware.org/we-have-a-winner/feed/ 0 http://www.juxtasoftware.org/juxta-commons-sharing-competition/ http://www.juxtasoftware.org/juxta-commons-sharing-competition/#comments Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:48:36 +0000 Dana http://www.juxtasoftware.org/?p=297 Continue reading →]]> **Updated with more details about the competition**

Juxta Commons users – share your favorite comparison set today, and the set with the most views in the next month wins the user free swag!

Create and share a collation set and get the MOST UNIQUE VIEWS in one month.  You’ll win a lovely Juxta Commons commuter coffee mug, plus fame and glory.  We will be keeping track via analytics, and we will announce the winner in early January.

You can share your visualizations by Twitter, Facebook, Google +, link, email and embed, so there are lots of ways to get the word out.

Remember that we are still in beta and are particularly interested in load-testing the site, so bear with us if you experience slow-downs.  You can send us feedback and bug reports via our Google Group and you can find information about using the site on our User Guide.

The winner will be announced at our presentation at MLA. Happy collating!

As an experiment, I took several versions from this example and plugged them into Juxta Commons. When combined in the heat map, the results were truly surprising.

In this example, the newest version (captured on November 6, 2012) is the base witness, with the previous revisions made on the day of the articles release included in the set. Just imagine: readers visiting the New York Times article at 11:15am would have read a very different set of opening paragraphs than those checking in at 11:45am.

As the Juxta R&D team has worked to take the desktop version of our collation software to the web, I’ve found myself thinking a great deal about the critical apparatus and its role when working with digital (digitized?) texts.

In the thumbnails above, you can see a page image from a traditional print edition (in this case, of Tennyson’s poetry) on the left, and a screenshot of the old Juxta critical apparatus output on the right. In the original, downloadable, version of Juxta, we allowed users to browse several visualizations of the collation in order to target areas of interest, but we also offered them the ability to export their results in an HTML-encoded apparatus. This was an effort to connect digital scholarship to traditional methods of textual analysis, as well as a way to allow scholars to share their findings with others in a familiar medium.

It has become clear to me, based on the feedback from our users, that this HTML critical apparatus has been quite useful for a number of scholars. Even though our output could seem cryptic without being paired with the text of the base witness (as it is in the Tennyson edition), it was apparent that scholars still needed to translate their work in Juxta into the traditional format.

 In the meantime, scholars working with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) developed Parallel Segmentation, a method of encoding the critical apparatus in XML. In her article,  ”Knowledge Representation and Digital Scholarly Editions in Theory and Practice,” Tanya Clement describes the effectiveness of using parallel segmentation to encode her digital edition of the work of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.  Using a TEI apparatus along with a visualization tool called the Versioning Machine, Clement argued that her project “encourage[d] critical inquiry concerning how a digital scholarly edition represents knowledge differently than a print edition,” and illustrated the flexibility of working with full texts in tandem. Witnesses, or alternate readings, were not subsumed under a (supposedly static) base text, but living, dynamic representations of the social and cultural networks within which the Baroness lived and wrote.

Working with digital texts can make generating a critical apparatus difficult. One could encode your apparatus manually, as Clement did, but most users of Juxta wanted us to take their plain text or XML-encoded files and transform them automatically. The traditional apparatus requires exact notations of line numbers and details about the printed page. How does one do that effectively when working with plain text files that bear no pagination and few (if any) hard returns, denoting line breaks? Instead of hurriedly replicating the desktop apparatus online –knowing it would posses these weaknesses and more — the R&D team chose to offer TEI Parallel Segmentation output for Juxta Commons.

Any user of Juxta Commons can upload a file encoded in TEI Parallel Segmentation, and see their documents represented in Juxta’s heat map, side-by-side, and histogram views. Those working with plain text of XML files can also export the results of their collations as a downloadable TEI Parallel Segmentation file. In short, Juxta Commons and can both read and write TEI Parallel Segmentation.

However, we’re not convinced that the traditional apparatus has lost its functionality. We’d like to ask you, our users, to tell us more about your needs. How do you use the critical apparatus in your studies? What other kind of apparatus could we offer to streamline and enhance your work in Juxta Commons?

Ted Erho, in consultation with the Primary Investigator (PI) assigned to a particular biblical work, selects the manuscripts based on age and significance. All manuscripts predating the 16^th century are included by default. A representative sampling of later manuscripts and textual families (when known) populate the remaining number.

I also work with each PI to determine which passages to collate. We look for places where there is clear and significant variation in the Ethiopian tradition as well as in the sources that may have impacted the development of the text such as the Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic versions. Collations of the Ethiopic texts will provide data for mapping out internal developments. Alignment of the subsequently isolated traditions with external versional evidence will establish the source of the original translation and perhaps what foreign influences subsequently affected Ethiopia’s transmission of sacred texts.

Once these elements are set, every selected passage in each manuscript is collated separately by a minimum of two scholars. We then use Juxta to compare the transcriptions. Juxta highlights in blue the areas where the collations disagree, which expedites comparison and final editing. The investigators work through the differences aiming for a consensus on every reading. The end result is a transcription 99.9% pure.

Second, we then collate these “pure” transcriptions of the thirty manuscripts to identify unique readings and family groupings. What once required a tremendous amount of effort is accomplished in mere seconds with Juxta. Relationships between groups of manuscripts are much easier to identify with the graded highlighting scheme employed in Juxta’s “Comparison Set” window. Plus the words and phrases highlighted in the collation window facilitate the isolation of distinct variation units of value for mapping out Ethiopia’s textual history.

(On the off chance that someone will read this who knows Ethiopic, I should note that we create two copies of the final “pure” transcriptions. One version is retained in its original form preserving all of the orthographical variants and scribal idiosyncrasies. These will be used later for publications and further research. The other version is “standardized” through a process that removes a large amount of the numerous orthographic variations, such as the frequent interchange of gutturals, that occur in Ethiopic manuscripts.)

In addition to providing the data we need for our immediate goals, these units will be compiled into a list that will allow scholars in the future to classify quickly the textual affinity of other manuscripts.

We are very grateful to the Juxta team for providing the software and quickly responding to the particular needs of the THEOT Project. We eagerly anticipate using this new web version and the further refinements and development sure to come.

The Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament Project

Co-Directors: Steve Delamarter and Curt Niccum

Steering Committee: Jeremy Brown, Aaron Butts, Ted Erho, Martin Heide, Ralph Lee