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March 7th, 2008

Notes: Electronic Piers Plowman: Implementing an Edition of a Six-Hundred-Year-Old-Poem for Twenty-First Century Students

These are my own notes from the Research Conversation about representing Piers Plowman today, March 7. Presented by Terry Brooks and Miceal Vaughan. (Note (3/11/2008): I went back in and cleaned some of the formatting up on this, since apparently Windows Live Writer is not quite as consistent as I’d like.)

Miceal:
- Work is an electronic edition of the poem aimed towards beginning students
- 14th century poem in 3 distinct versions - 50+ manuscripts!
- First version ~1360s - author is uncertain, could be multiple issues
- Trying to build an archive of all surviving manuscripts of the poem
- Want to produce the poem so that it’s accessible in different formats (wording/spelling formats)
- Review of different versions of first four lines - spelling differing from Middle English to modern with different representations of letters: þ (equivalent to “th”), for instance
- Miceal has been working on this for roughly 15 years.
- Wants to present clean, uncluttered version so that it can be worked with directly
- Had HTML version created for students to work with created by people knowledgeable in HTML
Terry:
- Problem: Content of the poem is being held hostage by a fixed presentation format. Wants to divorce the format from the content.
- Given the original HTML version; first had to go into the source and create a parser that parses out content. Has to also deal with inline commenting. Wants to “unfreeze” the content and put it into a general format.
- XML structure: Section (prologue, passage) made up of many lines. Break the poem down to a word-by-word unit level, which could have separate spellings and spacing requirements and (of course) the value of the word itself. Also has word-by-word footnotes, which have author and line information.
- Problem with representation in XML: HTML escape characters can’t cooperate well with XML parsers. Solved by HTML post-processing that replaces placeholders with the proper characters.
- This was initially done so that it would be fixed, but editing was a need - created an XML editor to allow for these attributes to be changed without knowing the XML itself.
Current XML version focuses on the Knott-Fowler and Vaughan versions of the poem, and encodes line-by-line metadata on each version.
How does one flag the reader that there’s content hidden behind a particular word? Their tactic: change the icon.
How does an expert in Middle English want to read more than one text? Side by side, one above and one below? Actually, it turns out that they want two versions of each line presented together rather than side by side.
Question to audience: How would you build an application so that you can compare two versions (from an information architecture standpoint)?
Question from audience: How do you make this project expandable beyond Piers Plowman?
- Some of these strategies may be reusable.
- Micael: Trying to give access to a variety of versions.
- Terry: Yes, aiming at a generalized information architecture
Question from audience: Why not database-driven instead of XML?
- Terry: Portability.
Question from audience: How do scholars process and comment upon these works? Does literature exist that researches how this is done?
- Micael: No - everyone comments on these works differently.
- Terry: The XML editor spurred the same question - how do people edit these things? Feedback regarding how Micael edits led to editor program changes.
- Micael: There may be a possibility of redefining how commenting is done via the editor.
Question: Pedagogically, is this the same as you would have had students do by looking at two versions side by side?
- Micael: They would have gotten one version. Wants this to be something usable by anyone interested, but also for people to be able to understand the significance of different versions of the same work.
- Terry: I would ask the same question, different angle: How do people read these poems?
- UI design: Micael doesn’t want underlining or coloring of words - wants the data behind the document to be transparent
Micael envisions this project as an archive.
Audience: Interesting part of this is learning from the juxtaposition of different texts. But you’ve got a grid of future/current technologies and activities to consider.
Micael: Johns Hopkins not interested in keeping the electronic version of this information, but others might be interested in coordinating this.
Audience: This would embrace different learning styles that look at the same work from different angles. Example: Translating works, you might work an existing translation to help your translation efforts to make sure you’re being accurate and to help you understand it. Someone else might benefit more from struggling through the translation process without any checks against existing translation work.
Audience: This XML structure really doesn’t seem that portable, since it’s dependent on whether other documents use the same attributes.
Terry: Correct - not sure how generalizable the schema is.
Audience: This would have huge problems going across languages (French, Spanish, etc.)
Micael: This representation scheme would work for words, but not for prose.

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Notes: Electronic Piers Plowman: Implementing an Edition of a Six-Hundred-Year-Old-Poem for Twenty-First Century Students

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