This course explores the forms texts take, as the printed or digital products (eg. books, websites) of editorial and publication processes. We’ll explore historical perspectives on editing and consider factors that have shaped access to and circulation of texts: the role of political, religious and educational institutions; censorship; copyright; the rise and fall of writing and reading technologies; and the economics of print and digital publishing. Our scope is broad, extending from the scrolls of antiquity to medieval manuscripts, handprinted and machine-printed books, to our current age of digital platforms.
We'll be especially interested in the massive remediation currently underway of textual archives – archives of historical printed texts held largely in libraries, as well as medieval manuscripts, papyrus fragments, etc. – into digital formats, which allows these texts to be accessed in online repositories and databases. This digitization has transformed the way we read, write, study, learn about the past, and conduct research. But we must acknowledge and address new challenges: what gets included and what is left out? how are specific items to be found in the extraordinary mass of online content? what new interfaces are needed for accessing content created for a very different set of reading technologies (not to mention reading publics)? in what ways are the sources transformed through digitization? And what new protocols must we learn in order to work with these sources, to study and cite them?
The rise to dominance of digital texts in our reading and scholarship has revalorized editorial work as a scholarly project. It has required renewed reflection on what a text is, how it’s shaped by its publication processes, how it preserves or hides its history, and how the text is shaped over time by its reception; not to mention, what counts as scholarship and what public(s) we seek to engage. The digital shift has also entailed that we learn new techniques and new skills for working with texts in digital form. These issues will be foregrounded in the course.
In the process, we’ll learn how to work with historical texts and primary materials, including early printed books held in UW Special Collections. We’ll also learn to work with tools for transforming those materials into digital editions and databases. We’ll study the history and theory of editing and textual scholarship, where questions about what a text is and what determines its forms are addressed.
And we’ll learn some of the fundamentals of digital text editing and encoding, by creating our own small editions of a historical source, potentially one held in the UW Special Collections. We’ll learn manual and automated methods for transcribing a text; we’ll discuss how copyright shapes our choices; and we’ll learn to encode the text for digital processing using the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative – a set of widely-adopted XML standards for the digital editing of literary, cultural and historical documents – and explore techniques and platforms for publishing those materials on the web.
No prior experience with any of this is required or expected (if you have any questions or concerns about this, please contact me at gt2@uw.edu).
See below for upcoming courses… |
Course goals include:
-- introduction to histories and theories of literary editing and textual scholarship from the Renaissance to today; working with early editions, primary sources and historical documents (including in UW Special Collections); how to define the text of a literary work in light of the history of its editions, variations, and reception; how to develop an editorial apparatus, situating a work in context.
-- better understanding of early printed books and the history of print: how printed books were produced, circulated and read; how to study them today, as historical artefacts.
-- introduction to techniques for digitization and digital editing: including transcription (manual and using OCR tools), text encoding using TEI (an XML vocabulary for the digital encoding of literary, historical and cultural texts) and related XML-based technologies; other encoding/digitization options.
-- philosophical and critical reflection on the digitization of literary works and historical materials, including original editions: the benefits and pitfalls of digitization. Questions of access, openness, what does and doesn't get digitally preserved; metadata and cataloguing; the role of search engines and indexing. The role of copyright: remediation and text reuse. The challenges of time: maintaining books, websites.
-- introduction to the history, present and future of the public sphere, shaped by print and now the internet; the role of “publication” in the formation of the public sphere; its role mediating between individuals and communities, from groups with like-minded interests to professional networks to national communities and beyond.
-- project-management; collaboration within a small team: working with collaboration tools like Github and Google tools.
-- basic introduction to aspects of digital text processing and publication: platforms for publishing TEI-encoded documents; basics of web-publishing: HTML and CSS, and to how the web works: web-servers, HTTP, etc. Reflection on interface and “reading” in a digital vs. non-digital environment.
For graduate students in FREN 551:
-- practice and training teaching complex materials to undergraduates and experience working with undergraduates as mentors
-- a project that will enrich the graduate student's work towards their home degree; this might be a digital complement to a research paper; an edition of a work that student is working on in a dissertation; or simply a new methodological dimension to their work.
-- the ability to present and articulate a project and original argument in a scholarly professional context
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NEW: Proposed Minor in Textual Studies and Digital Humanities 25 credits, including 2 core courses; 2 electives (which may include additional courses from the core category); plus 5-credit capstone. Planned for Winter 2022. Core Courses Autumn 2021 “Archives, Data and Databases: Cultural Analytics” – TXTDS 403/INFO 498 Winter 2022 “Texts, Publics, and Publication: Digitization, Digital Editing and Publishing” – TXTDS 404/FREN 551 Spring 2022 “Book Arts” – TXTDS 402/ART H 422/ART H 525 “Archives, Data and Databases: Thinking With Archives” – TXTDS 403
Electives Autumn 2021 “World Wars I and II. Digital Histories” – HSTCMP 202 “21st Century Latin American Literature and Digital Storytelling” – SPAN 478 Winter 2022 “Human and Machine Translation” – FREN 222 “Dante’s Divine Comedy. The Manuscript, Textual and Digital Traditions” – ITAL 262 Spring 2022 “Black Digital Studies” – AFRAM 360 “History and Future of Texts, Books and Reading” – FREN 224/JSIS 224/TXTDS 224 “Introduction to Data Science in the Humanities” – ENG 267/TXTDS 267 “Travels, Migrations, and Exile. Encounters with the Other in Textual and Digital Archives” – ITAL 354
Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies 16 credits, including 2 core electives, an open elective, plus a 1-credit capstone. Open to any student enrolled in a Graduate Program at the UW. More information at https://bit.ly/3qGUBQB. Core Electives “Texts, Publics, and Publication: Digitization, Digital Editing and Publishing” (FREN 551/TXTDS 404 – WI 2022) “Premodern Textualities” (ENG 599 – WI 2022) “Book Arts” (ART H 525/TXTDS 402 -- SP 2022) “Manuscript Studies: Late Medieval Romance and its Manuscripts” (ENG 502 – SP 2022) |