Reflections and Looking Forward to Iteration 2.0

What I hadn’t realized when I began this project was that the edition and all of the work that went into it was never going to be finished. As I got further and further into designing the layout of the website and started making editorial decisions for the mechanics of the edition, I began to notice the limitations of the CMS I was using and the broken connection between the repository and the website. I started doing more and more of the editorial work in Wix instead of GitHub, usually going back after the fact to add things to the repository, and then only pulling the changes into my local branch when I remembered to. Due to laziness, undoubtedly, I found myself forgetting commands and stumbling through my terminal, scrambling to piece together the final parts of the edition in time to submit it for grading. Though I was proud of the edition I created, I was very aware of how much better it could be had I spent the time and energy in learning how to work with the technology at an even deeper level—in a habitual way. While I had been praising McGann for encouraging digital humanists to rise to the occasion of philology and high criticism, I had been ignoring the blaring fact that I had neglected to properly understand the true capabilities of the interface I was manipulating. I found myself bound by the limitations I imposed on my own edition because I was incapable of actualizing the hypertextual edition of my dreams—a common state for editors of print scholarly editions, but certainly not for those editing for digital mediums. Surely, however, the prospects for digital editions are greater than the pitfalls we’ve stumbled into.

Though I’ve acknowledged that there are unfillable gaps in my edition’s history, there is no reason why the work I do on it can’t, from this point on, return to the version controlled environment. There is no doubt that the next step is to begin developing the GitHub Pages version of the site—finally bridging the gap between the repository and the edition. Once that is done the workflow will be completely streamlined; every element of the site and all of the files will be version controlled to a degree of total manipulation at the command line. At that point, the edition can continue to evolve and shift as the networked world around it changes and users expect new innovations. Along these lines, my edition as it currently exists can not facilitate the type of interactions unique to the digital edition. I not only followed print edition conventions in my categorization, but most of my pages are completely static! I created a digital-manifestation of a print edition with only minimal hypertextual linking; however, all of this work was well worth doing. I plan to update the repository with the final transcriptions and my editorial notes as soon as possible and at that point the repository can become the master branch from which all changes emit and are monitored. The current website will exist as a relic but a worthy version nonetheless.

Now, it’s time to look forward to the soon to be realized potential of digital scholarly editions. There is so much more that can be done in a digital interface than what we’ve conceived of already. The constituent parts of an edition are more mutable than we realize, and the possibilities for presentation are endless. In his essay, “The Apparatus Criticus in the Digital Age,” Tom Keeline investigates the effectiveness of the critical apparatus in both the print and digital edition. He laments the common misconceptions readers hold that the apparatus and textual notes are secondary to the reading in the text and can be, therefore, ignored and taken for granted as the definitive interpretation of the text:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one except textual critics and pendants actually reads an apparatus criticus. Why should they? Consider how few ‘general readers’ read footnotes. Now picture those footnotes festooned with cryptic symbols, cloaked in the obscurity of a learned language, and provided without any superscript signaling in the main text that there might something relevant at the bottom of the page—then add in the pervasive notion that the apparatus is merely a repository for what the editor thinks does not belong in the text. This is unfortunate. (Keeline 342)

The structure of the apparatus interrupts itself, often containing too much information (or accidentals), drowning out more substantive and text altering variants causing the reader to glaze over and miss the more subtle implications raised by the variants. It is simply not reasonable to expect every reader of an edition to reconstruct the transmission, however, it is reasonable to intend for every bit of content you include in an edition to be used by the reader. We need to take advantage of the nesting and embedding capabilities of the digital medium: “the argument can be presented in such a way as to display in the first instance only the most essential information; the reader would then have the choice of continuing to peel back the layers of the onion to reach a fuller discussion” (Keeline 349). I attempted something similar to this when I laid out my edition, keeping more complex sections of the rationale further from the landing page; thus enabling the reader and user to make their way through the edition incrementally. That being said, I included an incredibly dense critical apparatus in my edition, knowing full well who my intended audience was for that particular tab in the site. It had not yet occurred to me how counterintuitive the traditional apparatus is to the hypertextual capacities of the network when, at the touch of a key, multiple threads and witnesses could be pulled together visually on the screen, essentially animating the transmission and augmenting the user’s mental model of the history. The apparatus, could exist quietly tucked away in a version controlled repository folder—publicly accessible though not publicized as the definitive representational view—while a dynamic hypertextual tree of interactions could be created to allow each individual user the opportunity to contribute an interpretation of the transmission history for a given work. The key in developing applications that can achieve this degree of interactivity is collaboration; not simply interdisciplinary collaboration, but micro and macro collaboration between all actors, their computing devices, and the greatest possible audience.

Current group work models for digital humanities projects typically employ a computational specialist or developer to oversee the technical aspects of the project while a professional or researcher in the applicable humanities field oversees the curation of content to be represented digitally—these teams can be comprised of as few or as many members as seems necessary to achieve the goals of the project. Joris van Zundert contests this model of collaboration in his chapter “Barely Beyond the Book?”: “Once the work is done, the client and developer can go their separate ways, without having essentially influenced the methodologies on either side” (92). He describes this phenomenon as a “paradigmatic regression” or, in simplified terms, our tendency to only superficially affect the methods of our collaborators because of our reluctance to abandon familiar and tested methodologies (Zundert 85). He goes on to show how collaboration between textual scholars and developers can extend so far as an exchange in terminology:

The developers began to refer to concepts such as ‘page’, ‘annotation’, ‘transcription’. The researchers grew accustomed to using words such as ‘user’, ‘interface’, ‘architecture’, as well as the vocabulary that is rather typical for the agile methodology used by developers…. (Zundert 91)

While this transference of terminology between actors may seem to affect their lasting methodologies, it can be assumed that once the necessity to use this modified vocabulary fades the average person will simply revert back to the method that they are most familiar with.

The issue with this model is that the actors cannot fully conceptualize the work of the other and thus their communication is disrupted and the work made more difficult. Collaboration among developers often takes a much different form, actualized in cloud applications such as GitHub making for seamless distribution and management of files and code. It should come as no surprise why developers have mastered collaboration; they developed the software that manages the software they develop, and therefore have an experiential understanding of the inner workings of the software. Just as a textual critic is fluent in reading the symbols that make up the apparatus, a developer is attuned to monitored collaboration in a version controlled environment. If concessions have to be made on one side or the other, I’ll be the first to say the humanists need to set aside their pride and figure out GitHub. There is no reason why work, contingent on maintaining accurate versions and records, should not aspire to total version control regardless of whether it’s computational, scientific, artistic, or humanities driven. All disciplines should have equal sway over the digital technologies that are soon going to be our primary mode of transmitting the human record.

I have a vision of version controlled digital editions and archives, made by teams of actors who are experts in their fields and who feel completely at home on the command line regardless of their training in software development—humanities scholars making commits and forking versions without hesitation. It’s an optimistic dream, but not entirely farfetched. GitHub is already equipped to manage non-computational content and lends itself particularly well to textual versioning as I’ve demonstrated in my “Nutting” edition. It’s going to take some courage on the part of the humanists to trust in their ability to understand the software but there is no difference in the acuity of a developer and a humanities researcher to memorize a list of commands. Once you are able to habitually communicate with your computer at an administrative level, your control over your files and your relationship to the cloud alters forever. Surely, this is the model from which digital editions will spring into being—from totally controlled, tracked, collaboratively assembled, designed, and actualized digital archives and repositories. Who knows! Perhaps Wordsworth’s “Nutting” is just the poem to get us there.