APPOSITIONS: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture

VOLUME FOUR (2011): TEXTS & CONTEXTS

2011-05-31T17:04:00.001-07:00

APPOSITIONS:

Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature & Culture,

http://appositions.blogspot.com/,
ISSN: 1946-1992

VOLUME FOUR (2011):
TEXTS & CONTEXTS

ARTICLES:

James P. Ascher

University of Colorado at Boulder

The Wordes Moote be Cosyn to the Dede: Diplomatic Transcription and Shifting Senses of Exactness Toward the Ecosystem of Digital Reproduction

Sarah Barber

Lancaster University

Digitisation and the Survival of Documents: the records of seventeenth-century Barbados

Sheila T. Cavanagh

Emory University

How Does Your Archive Grow?: Academic Politics & Economics in the Digital Age

Shelly Jansen

SUNY Binghamton

Woman or Heroine: Explications of Kierkegaardian Heroism in Euripides’s Hippolytus and Racine’s Phèdre

W. Webster Newbold

Ball State University

Rhetoric, Fiction, and the Appetite for Model Letters in Renaissance England

David V. Urban

Calvin College

Confessions of a Milton Bibliographer: Reflections on the Past, Ruminations on the Present, and Hopes for the Future of Milton Bibliography

REVIEW:

Anne Greenfield

Valdosta State University

Review of: Randall Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England. Routledge (New York, 2008), 288 pp. + xii. ISBN (10): 0-415-96115-7. ISBN (13): 978-0-415-96115-8. $125.00 (USD).

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—The Editors

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APPOSITIONS:

Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern

Literature & Culture,

http://appositions.blogspot.com/,

ISSN: 1946-1992,

Volume Four (2011): Texts & Contexts

_____

* * * ARTICLES * * *

2011-05-31T17:01:00.001-07:00

James P. Ascher: “Diplomatic E-Transcriptions”

2011-05-31T16:59:00.001-07:00

James P. Ascher

University of Colorado at Boulder

The Wordes Moote be Cosyn to the Dede:

Diplomatic Transcription and Shifting Senses of Exactness Toward the Ecosystem of Digital Reproduction

AscherImage

Caption: The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.

Abstract:

Using a passage from Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale, this paper closely reads networks of readers and scholars through the lens of efforts toward exact transcriptions. It examines paratexts, apparatuses, methodologies, and labor as emblems of the underlying politics of literary reproduction and the difficulties of exactness. I argue that closely reading previous editor’s efforts toward exactness crucially informs digital reproduction. Thus, the historical materials examined are all editions of Chaucer where the author made some effort at exactness. The different approaches are unpacked into their functions of aesthetics, semiotics, and comparison. The paper concludes considering these functions as enabling a discussion of the possibility of best-practices for reading and creation in the Age of the Digital Reproduction.

Cousins of Deeds and Tricks of Documents:

Diplomatic Transcription and Shifting Senses of Exactness Toward the Ecosystem of Digital Reproduction

1> Edited editions were the sine quo non for literary studies of Chaucer when Atlantic steamer tickets were expensive, photocopies were a fantasy, and digital cameras were relegated to science fiction. To study such a canonical author, scholars would depend on transcriptions, and for deeper study of an author- diplomatic transcriptions that were accurate to the glyphic features of the text. Even if budgets allowed access to the over eighty original manuscripts of Chaucer, the author’s transcription still mediated between the reading room of a great library and their book-lined study where they wrote. This separation privileged the work of great scholars, who had the reputation to command budgets, teams, and infrastructure. Today, however, digital reproductive networks purport to offer an equalizing road to scholarship. The harried scholar, attempting to squeeze more from the fountainhead of English poetry, can outsource their labor to distributed networks of readers and familiar spirits, who by digitizing materials have begun the scholar’s work already. Yet, these readers bring their own biases, and the network topology privileges certain patterns. We will attempt to read the networks and methods in this paper as a way of demonstrating modern critical methods.

2> Bad editors of Chaucer are well known and plentiful. John Urry’s^{^[1]}example of altering words to maintain an imagined meter, which is discussed more below, is a particularly egregious case of changing the content to make it more exact, yet making it inaccurate. Of course, this is still an effort toward exactness using the technology of Urry’s time. Digital tools simply represent a new station on the way of precise reproduction and so to place them one must first consider earlier specialized efforts toward exactness. So, while it is tempting to begin by describing Unicode, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative, and how to use technologies with text encoding, beginning with digital technologies is a positivist totalizing gesture implying that the new digital systems supersede centuries of intelligent people aiming for exactness. This gesture may trap us in the same way that Urry was trapped by the thinking of his time. The digital is but a small and recent innovation in the long history of textual editing, which must be considered in full course. One of the oldest tools for efforts toward exactness is the diplomatic transcription.

3> A diplomatic transcription has always been considered somewhat an odd duck and has only become more so in the twenty-first century. The sense of ‘diplomatic’ as something related to an exact copying of documents, usually legal but occasionally literary, seems to originate from Gottfried Leibniz’s effort to write a history of the House of Brunswick that contributed to the volume Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus, of 1693. I suspect the word may have been in use prior to 1693, but the relation to the word “document” via way of “diploma” makes this derivation plausible.^{^[2]}The method of reproducing the content for a particular intention is what interests this paper, which Leibniz illustrates nicely.

4> Leibniz’s near-earliest instance of diplomatic transcription deals with accurately reporting the contents of legal documents. He was attempting to create an exact copy to capture the aura of the original copy, but of course an exact copy, especially in 1693, is something of an impossibility. Every purported instance of duplication is an act of reproduction with the idiosyncratic act of writing filtered through the equally idiosyncratic reading-act. What makes considering reproductive efforts aiming at exactness interesting are the paratextual apparatus that accompany them; some writers may think their copy is exact if they cannot read certain aspect of the original text, or they may simply be striving for exactness within the limitations of their technology. In Leibniz’s case, the technology was a new typeface cut specifically to make more accurate reproductions, but his techniques for diplomatic transcriptions were reused and developed into their own language of reproduction. The effort of exact copy morphs into its own discipline of diplomatic-type transcriptions and we have a new discipline of similar, exact, diplomatic, quasi-facsimile, and other transcriptions serving different purposes.

5> Not only is the truly exact impossible, but even efforts toward it may not reward the significant labor required. Scholar’s lack of time explains some of the rarity of diplomatic transcriptions, but begs a question in the twenty-first century where digital cameras are common, powerful, and inexpensive. Can we achieve something closer to exactness at less cost? What, if anything, is a diplomatic transcription--and similar efforts at exactness--good for when we can take a picture? How does the changing technological environment inform digitization best practices? When is similarity good enough?

6> This essay attempts to answer these questions by looking closely at a tiny piece of Chaucer’s work, the beginning of the Monk’s Tale within the larger Canterbury Tales and how its representations have changed over the long history of Chaucer scholarship and these representations participate in creating meaning. The particular tale was selected because it has been widely reproduced over its roughly six century history and so possesses a number of textual complications and has a variety of paratextual features in different editions. It thus provides something of a emblem for the general problem of the exact, similar, or diplomatic reproduction. We will explore efforts towards exactness pragmatically and historically by elucidating potential purposes and intentions. The historical-intention approach ultimately exposes certain common aspects of efforts to exact copy which can be applied in different situations. Ultimately, the historical reading will be applied to suggest new editorial approaches, leveraging current digital technology. While the end result looks like a list of best practices, the process of discovering practices is itself useful for understanding humanistic attitudes toward knowledge, reproduction, text, reading, and writing. This essay therefore codes an experiment in speculative computing, which emphasizes aesthesis and its non-totalized, subjective, knowledge, over mathesis’s effort to totalize knowledge into formalized logic.^{^[3]} Diplomatic transcriptions and digital facsimiles provide complicated sets of tools for editorial work that must be closely analyzed to be used well in producing efforts toward exact copy.

The Aims of the Exact Copy

7> Exact copy is something of a bugbear- we allude to it to indicate intention and mechanism, but ultimately the idea is unreachable. Examining attempts, however, will give us a better sense as to why someone might engage in diplomatic, or digital, reproduction. F.J. Furnivall’s Six Text^{^[4]}version of Chaucer neatly illustrates the three core purposes of attempting exact copy (see figure 1).

Fig. 1

Caption: Three columns of F.J. Furnivall’s Six Text edition of the Canterbury Tales.

8> Visually, the typographical color is varied and pleasingly patterned. The virgules form a pattern of lines, particularly in the Ellesmere facsimile,^[5]that recapitulates the weaving right edge of the poem, led by multi-line initial letters including a large ‘I’ that seems to anchor the identity of the speaker as the source. This visual aspect is what I deem the aesthetic/bibliophilic purpose of efforts at exactness. Looking more closely, we see variant glyphs such as the ‘h’ with an otiose slash, the ‘r’ with a hook, italic expansions of abbreviations, thorns, and yoghs. These signs are both symbols of particular editorial decisions and icons connecting to larger cultural works. They signify, when unexpanded or otiose--unexpandable--abbreviations, a cluster of possible readings each of which is a possible expansion. At the same time, they symbolize the cultural code of scribal practice. These symbolic aspects are what I call the semiotic/semantic purpose of efforts toward exactness. However, looking across the three columns reproduced in figure 1, we see similarities and differences that indicate something about both the artifact they refer to and the ideal copy,^[6]perhaps, lurking behind the physical artifacts. The effort to collate is what I call the comparison purpose of efforts toward exactness. We thus see three purposes represented here- the aesthetic/bibliophilic, the semiotic/semantic, and that of comparison.

Aesthetic/Bibliophilic Purposes

9> The aesthetic/bibliophilic analysis of texts has been introduced by various authors, so its inclusion as a way of understanding efforts toward exact copies should come as no surprise.^{^[7]}The reading experience is generally visual, so reproducing the appearance of a text carries through some of the paratextual apparatus.^{^[8]}Aesthetic considerations are not always attached to an effort toward exact copy, but in the case of Chaucer we have a tradition of particular typefaces. Consider the appearance of the Monk’s Tale from the Kelmscott Chaucer, (figure 2.)^{^[9]}

Fig. 2

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale from the Kelmscott Chaucer.

10> William Morris designed the Chaucer type seen in this image specifically for Chaucer’s works, continuing a tradition of using Blackletter typefaces for the Monk’s Tale. This Blackletter tradition alludes to the earliest printed versions by Caxton^{^[10]}(done in what looks very much like anglicana formata, Blackletter), Thynne’s edition^{^[11]}(in semiquadrata, Blackletter), and the manuscript tradition^{^[12]}(which was anglicana formata in certain notable cases).

11> The use of Blackletter, sometimes called Gothic, resonates with a long tradition of allusive typography, particularly associated with the distinctive Blackletter family.^{^[13]}The aesthetic tradition of Blackletter was noted by many readers. In 1781, Horace Walpole wrote to William Mason, "I am too, though a Goth, so modern a Goth that I hate the black letter, and I love Chaucer better in Dryden and Baskerville than in his own language and dress" continuing to suggest the use of the Blackletter carried some visual meaning. Yet, some who were aware of the tradition of Blackletter were not so effusive. As late as 1841 Isaac D'Israeli said that "Readers will be appalled by having to face a massive tome dark with the Gothic type, whose obsolete words and difficult phrases, and for us, uncadenced metre, arte to be conned by a glossary as obsolete as the text, to be perpetually referred to, to the interruption of all poetry and all patience.” Richard Hengist Horne in 1841, regarding his modernized Chaucer said "with the true but narrow devotion of the best men on the black-letter side, and their resistance to all attempts to melt the obsolete language and form it into modern moulds ... the Homer of English poetry continues unread except by very few," tying the idea of Blackletter to unreadability and loss of appreciation for English literature.^{^[14]}While differing on the effect of typeface on the reader’s experience, each of these readers demonstrates an awareness of the role of typeface as a paratextual apparatus.

12> The Kelmscott Chaucer depicts the fraught meaning of the Blackletter typeface. Aesthetically in the typeface, as well as through the layout, the Kelmscott Chaucer attempts to copy the feel of early reproductions. Morris was alternatively criticized and applauded for his neo-Medievalism; truly, while an aesthetic response exists, the value is fraught. This sort of aesthetic copying occurs in many of the reproductions reviewed in the usage of headings, large initials, and especially decorative images. (the Ellesmere, the 2nd edition of Caxton, the Speght,^{^[15]}and later versions of Thynne, all give similar images of the Monk astride a horse.) Yet, the repetition of typefaces and images suggests efforts toward aesthetic exactness which is the easiest purpose for the exact copy to apprehend.

13> Digital transcription systems, of course, have a wide range of typefaces to choose from. The image of the writer procrastinating by changing typefaces thus indicates her attempt at finding the right aesthetic resonances. A way to understand this is Tanselle’s “physical text,” which is the order of the letters and words, independent of layout and aesthetics.^{^[16]}The modern digital environment operates on the physical text level, as a string of characters, that can be reformatted with new typefaces, new margins, changing columns, etc. This allows digital transcriptions to be adaptable in the repetition of the graphic aesthetic forms.

14> The repetition of the graphic aesthetic forms extend from the manuscript tradition as well. The Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts bear a striking resemblance to each other, leading some to suggest that they might have been created by the same scribe. They are both in a steady anglicana formata, use similar scribal abbreviations, and have nearly the same catalog of glyphs. They both use a somewhat uncommon abbreviation consisting of a loop on the long anglicana ‘r’ of “hir aduersitee,” but their use of the sigma form of ‘s’ differs. (See figures 3 and 4.)

Fig. 3

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale from the “Ellesmere Chaucer.”

Fig. 4

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale from the “Hengwrt Chaucer.”

15> The phrase “blind prosperitee” is also expanded differently in the two versions, which supports the general assumption that either these two texts share a parent or are copied from one another. The transcription gives an example of an aesthetic effort at exact copy and, since the two versions are expanded differently, provides a case where exact copies of the two manuscripts would differ.

Semiotic/Semantic Purposes

16> Similarity in aesthetics in typefaces is also an icon that connects to similar usages through cultural codes and so affects the reading and reception of the work. For example, Blackletter is associated with the Bible and other sacred works as well as German language works.^{^[17]}We can read this association as aesthetic, but also semiotic by considering the signification first, although the two are closely related.

17> D.C. Greetham discusses the application of semiotic analysis to texts through the work of C.S. Peirce and Roland Barthes as it applies to critical editions.^{^[18]}Greetham essentially posits that second-order systems of editorial apparatuses can be identified as acting on the first-order system of signs that compose the language. That is, an edited edition is distinguished by the presence of two layers of signs- the first-order is normal language, tropes, symbols, codes, etc. while the second-order is the specialized choices of the editor, diplomatist, or other actor in the reproduction of a text. The second-order writes the ‘myth’ that Barthes speaks of, or the digital version of the cultural code of Lotman, which is equivalent to the semiosis (recovering signifying relationships of the text and its history) of the critical edition.^{^[19]}

18> The usage of particular types of symbols or culturally-weighted icons allows the diplomatist, or others making effort toward exact copies, to expound on the semiotic structure of the text, but in a partially interpretive way. Diplomatic efforts don’t typically include any strong misprision, let alone weaker forms, but it’s certainly not out of the question for interpretation to overrun the materials. This semiotic expounding is a key difference from the digital image, which slavishly copies the surface and is an act of mimesis (imitative representation of reality) rather than semiosis.^{^[20]}The choice of sigla and glyphs allows the diplomatists to communicate subtle information about the artifact that the image does not capture.

19> Note that the transcription of the “Hengwrt Chaucer” in figure 1 expresses the marginal insertion of Adam’s Tale (see figure 4) as a continuous text, but indicates the difference in the apparatus. The Hengwrt manuscript itself does not explain the nature or authority of the note and so the structure of Furnivall’s edition expresses a particular second-order relationship to the underlying text. The editor expresses a judgment about the physical text with the tools of semiotics, which is a technique afforded only in transcription, not in slavish copies. Thus the purpose of an exact copy can be to translate, or even modernize by changing from difficult-to-read handwriting to electronic typography that contains the same graphical elements, the semiotic structure of the original.

20> An example of slavish copy can be found in two editions of Chaucer examined for the current paper study. Skeat’s^{^[21]}edition and Ruggiers’s^{^[22]}edition capitalize on their respective contemporary technology to attempt an exact copy of the text. Skeat presents a collotype facsimile of the whole work as a mimetic index of the photographic trace, mediated through printing, of an actual writing event embodied in an artifact. While the edition is beautiful and fascinating, it provides nothing but a reflection of the original manuscript. Ruggiers’s edition provides a facsimile combined with a transcription and variorum. Unlike Skeat, Ruggier expands his interpretation with italic expansions and notes, but the semiotics of the exactness of Ruggier’s transcription are hidden in the italic expansions and notes. However, to the extent which he knew the icons, they have been retrieved and represented in the notes. Thus in Ruggiers’s edition we are faced with a plural marriage of two manuscripts, an apparatus, and a bibliography of scholarship. The exactness in Ruggier’s document is both in content and the description of the state of knowledge at the time of its creation.

21> The seeming originals of Chaucer are numerous, or few, depending on how you view the ontology of the text. Manly and Rickert^{^[23]}examined the eighty-three known manuscripts in their unparalleled, massive, study of the text of the Canterbury Tales, while F.J. Furnivall looked at six copies simultaneously. William Thynne bequeathed twenty-five Chaucer manuscripts in the late sixteenth century to his son Francis, who was frustrated in his attempt to create a new Chaucer edition by Speght who released his edition first. Francis simply used his collection to write a critical introduction to Speght’s volume.^{^[24]}The introduction implies a recognition that possessing a large number of manuscripts bestows apparent authority and interpretive power, even if someone else beat you to the chase in doing and publishing the actual work of interpretation; the ability to compare a large number of texts privileges an interpretation. The privilege of the true text can be found within another purpose of exact, or diplomatic, transcriptions, that of comparison, between near and far manuscripts as well as comparison between presently-known manuscripts and future discoveries.

The Purposes of Comparison

22> Comparison can be seen throughout much of the history of attempts to edit Chaucer. While Francis Thynne personally owned all twenty-five manuscripts he used for comparison, and so could presumably spread them out on a table, neither Caxton nor Tyrwhitt^{^[25]}had such a privilege. Caxton famously set his first edition of the Canterbury Tales from a manuscript in his possession, but soon afterwards a purchaser of the first edition paid him a visit and pointed out that Caxton’s printing had errors because his manuscript was bad. The visitor’s father possessed a superior manuscript which he begrudgingly lent Caxton. “He sayd he knew a book whyche hys fader had and moche louyd / that was very trewe / and accordying vnto hys owen first book by hym made / and sayd more yf I wold enprynte it agayn he wold gete me the same book for a copye.”^{^[26]}So, Caxton’s earlier printing serves as a comparison with the later manuscript. The comparison between transcriptions of manuscripts was undoubtedly repeated by Tyrwhitt who strove “to give the text of the Canterbury Tales as correct as the Mss. within the reach of the Editor would enable him to make it,”^{^[27]}but who had to rely on manuscript copies found in institutional collections and Caxton’s editions. Thus, in these editions, a diplomatic-type transcription enables the exploration of the ideal text or polytexts.^{^[28]}

23> Manly and Rickert approached the task of comparison on a massive scale, mediated by a new technology, the photostat. Their team collected eighty-three photostat, or photographic, copies of each of the known Canterbury Tales manuscripts. While Manly and Rickert left their original photostats on deposit at the British Library, their final product has the mass-produced technological feel of their process. The text is a photolithographic reproduction of carefully typed pages of text, with carefully typed pages of notes; these mass-produced products neither honor aesthetics nor the semiotics of the originals. Each character is moderated for maximal efficiency by a typewriter designer and appear as an icons for the normal office work of the day. The work of the semiotic structure is entirely hidden in the British Library archives and indicated in Manly and Rickert’s notes. Aesthetics are dismembered from the text and discussed in separate opening essays. The work of Manly and Rickert in a sense sanitizes the rich experience of manuscript sources by developing an ideal reading, based on scientific principles, and then separating the messiness in a series of notes. The form recapitulates the empirical sterilization of knowledge of the double blind experiment, which in a laboratory becomes something to code and classify. Manly and Rickert approach an exact copy, made through exact copies of distant manuscripts, but with the empirical approach of scientists. Aesthetics, essentially, are lost.

24> Each of these previous examples focus on comparison between presently-known, collocated manuscripts. Caxton and Thynne compared texts at hand; Tyrwhitt compared distant texts without reproductive technology; and Manly and Rickert compared distant texts using mechanical reproduction. Since each of these editors dealt with a finite collection of known texts, their apparatus was hidden or submerged. The raw materials for comparison were unexaminable since once the creators compared them, the exact copies were no longer needed. A contrasting purpose is to compare presently known manuscripts with future discoveries, in which the versions used for comparison must be preserved in some way. A good diplomatic transcription can serve in lieu of access to a manuscript or printed edition that has been lost or destroyed. This role of proxy is suggested by Tyrwhitt when he considers Caxton’s editions as manuscripts; since they represented versions now lost to time, he judged Caxton’s editorial process as sound.^{^[29]}The reuse of historical exact copies seems to be the tacit goal of Furnivall when he presented in great detail the diplomatic transcriptions of his six best versions of the Canterbury Tales.

25> Yet, thinking of future manuscript discoveries alone glosses over the connotation of “presently known,” which can also be referring to the limits of current knowledge. A hugely important work in Chaucer scholarship is F.J. Child’s “Observations on the Language of Chaucer and Gower.”^{^[30]}Child rediscovers the pronunciation and purpose of the terminal ‘e’ in Chaucer’s language, which had previously been assumed to be simple caprice or flawed transcription. This discovery signaled an end to a type of Chaucer scholarship where an editor would alter the text to make it fit with various poetic ideals. Prior to this discovery some editors would try to fix variants that they saw as errors. John Urry’s edition^{^[31]}was notoriously bad in false corrections. His editorial process is described:

His chief busines was to make the Text more correct and compleat than before. He found it was the opinion of some learned Men that Chaucer's Verses originally consisted of an equal number of Feet; and he himself was perswaded that Chaucer made them exact Metre, and therefore he proposed in this Edition to restore him (to use his own Expression) to his feet again, ... That whenever he could by no other way help a Verse to a Foot, which he was perswaded it had when it came from the Maker's hands, but lost by the Ignorance of Transcribers, or Negligence of Printers, he made no scruple to supply it with some Word or Syllable that Serv'd for an Expletive ... Besides all those Methods for lengthening out Verses, which was the thing generally wanted, he had occasion sometimes to shorten them; and for that purpose he frequently makes use of an Apostrophe where he would have a Syllable dropt in the pronouncing of a word, as Sov'rane prize, ...^{^[32]}

26> Thus, in Urry’s work we have a sort of anti-diplomatic transcription which attempts to repair errors that were simply a gap in the current understanding of Chaucer’s language. Urry’s edition is also the first to break the aesthetic copying by using a Roman typeface. (See figure 5.)

Fig. 5

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale from Urry’s edition.

27> His re-interpretive work changed the reading of the Monk’s Tale. Examining line three of Adam’s Tale, we can see that Urry uses the word “strene,” meaning gain or sexual intercourse, rather than the more common “sperme.” The line thus reads “And not begotin of mannes strene [cf. sperme] unclene,” which suggests that the sex act or man’s gain, which could be interpreted variously, is unclean, rather than suggesting that sperm is unclean. Manly and Rickert do not find this reading in any of the manuscripts they review, suggesting that it was one of Urry’s restorations. These restorations earned Urry the scorn of many editors and is succinctly summarized by Tyrwhitt:

The strange license, in which Mr. Urry appears to have indulged himself, of lengthening and shortening Chaucer's words according to his own fancy, and of even adding words of his own, without giving his readers the least notice, has made the text of Chaucer in his Edition by far the worst that was ever published.

He goes on:

I will just add, for the sake of those who may be disposed to make use of this Glossary in reading the works of Chaucer not contained in this edition, that it will be found to be almost equally well adapted to every edition of those works, except Mr. Urry's. Mr. Urry's edition should never be opened by anyone for the purpose of reading Chaucer.^{^[33]}

28> It is does not seem coincidental that Tyrwhitt’s criticism prefigured Child’s essay which gave part of the impetus for Furnivall’s diplomatic transcriptions; it seems that there was a growing awareness of the limitations of knowledge and the role that diplomatic transcription could play. We see that a diplomatic transcription, or other exact copy, can serve as a hedge against the current limitations of knowledge, and compared to interpretive reconstruction, diplomatics is more honest and conservative. Diplomatic efforts toward exact copies facilitate intertextual connections with near and distant texts, as well as across time.

29> Explicit intertextual connection are one of the strong suits of digital reproduction. Landow famously goes as far as to suggest that hypertext--by which he conflates most forms of digital reproduction--is the reification of critical theory.^{^[34]}The simple hyperlink makes intertextuality tangible for even the undergraduate and properly coded texts can be reused to represent all manner of connection. Had Urry had access to a digital system that could represent uncertainty then he could have indicated the nature of his modifications, and not falsified his own work with the discovery of new pronunciation methods. This, however, is something of a digital-philic positivist argument; Urry did have access to a system that could represent uncertainty in the form of footnotes and the traditional use of italics to represent expansions, he simply didn’t make use of them. So, while the digital offers us new tools for editing, these tools are simply digital versions of what were often more cumbersome tools.

Intertextuality as Key to Diplomatics

30> No matter what one thinks about the validity of the ideal copy as editorial model, or the polytext model, these machinations about exact copies are really about intertextuality: between some ideal and the residue, between residues, or between later reproductions that have no ideal. Aesthetics represent an intertextual relationship with other exemplars of form, while the semiotic are intertextual relationships through icons and symbols, and comparison is explicitly intertextual and can be used to contain the other two. Thus, the purpose of a diplomatic transcription, and by extension, new efforts toward exact copy--digital facsimiles among them--is a close reading of intertextual relationships. The intertextual purpose implies that mindless digitization is not a replacement for diplomatic transcription but a new tool to be used in the aid of superior editing. The key to forming an exact copy is that an editor untangles complicated relationships and reproduces those in the appropriate technological environment. So, our digital camera represents, not a replacement for diplomatics, but a new type of typewriter, that--like Manly and Rickert’s photostat machine--can be used in building the successor to diplomatic transcriptions. We can begin to explore new techniques using the promising digital tools available and therefore begin to approach an understanding of what new diplomatics might be.

Digital Tools

31> Work in new diplomatics, as a subset of digital humanities, can be understood as the building of tools, while the editorial impetus remains firmly grounded in traditional scholarship. From the preceding discussion of diplomatic transcription, we can identify concrete goals to 1) provide a surrogate that brings the original to mind across space (comparison across space and semiotics); 2) provide a structure that can be incorporated into future scholarship (comparison across time and semantics); and 3) create pedagogical ladders (aesthetic/bibliophilic). The first is crucial because the critical work must somehow prove that it encompasses the original. The critical work need not exceed the detail and connections of the original given the limits of current knowledge, however, it should at least “bring it to mind” for those who have viewed the work and not obscure the rich structures. The second goal, providing reusable components, is one which helps further scholarship. It recognizes that current scholarship is beholden to the past and that future scholarship must examine the present. Scholarship which does not generate a new, re-usable, narrative is decadent and degenerate because it would eventually consume all the old narratives and the field would die. The third goal is essentially the goal of all criticism. Were everyone a perfectly informed reader, there would be no need to criticize or to edit. One could be satisfied with the original item and high-quality, although slavish, facsimiles. Recognizing that literature is a discipline implies that there is something to learn, so textual works ought to assist. Possible tools for these techniques are discussed below.

Bring the Original to Mind

32> The quickest, and most widely understood twenty-first technology for surrogation is the digital facsimile. Through hypertextual communication networks (i.e. the internet), scholars can retrieve images, request copies, or make appointments to create their own photographic work. These facsimiles provide the immediately available surrogate that captures the layout. However, diplomatic transcription provides a slightly different surrogate.

33> Handwriting is simultaneously unique and references a class of glyphs that represents some ideal form. The digital, or original, manuscript challenges the reader to learn the idiosyncrasies of the scribe who wrote it, but once the scribe’s hand is learned, it can be read easily. Given time away from the hand one may find it challenging again. The diplomatic transcription aims to alleviate the challenge of paleography and assist with comparisons. By faithfully duplicating all glyphic elements in a modern, readable font, users can compare shapes across hands and also have some assistance in learning how the handwriting of a particular scribe works. The choice of typeface, layout, and other aspects of representation must be informed by aesthetics. Crucially, aesthetics places something as simple as selecting a digital typeface in a historical continuum. Drucker identifies the aesthetic considerations of digital projects as the inversion of the power relationship between formal logic and humanistic aesthetics as a core component of speculative computing. Where old digital humanities projects privileged the role of systems of formal logic over appearance, flipping the roles provides a richer interpretive environment by demanding that formal logic support the needs of aesthetics.^{^[35]}

Reusable Components

34> For components to be reusable, they must be documented, accessible, and standard. The techniques of textual editing are fairly well documented but the addition of an apparatus in the form of notes makes sure that the reader understands the process the text went through. Text encoding is, however, only newly documented. Two major technologies are the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).^{^[36]}Digital tools are preferable within current technology since they are the most reusable, being adaptable to visual print, visual digital, tactile, auditory, and perhaps even gustatory mediums.

35> The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) is a non-profit group of scholars who are supplementing the work of the Unicode Consortium.^{^[37]}The Unicode Consortium works on “... developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards.”^{^[38]}(The emphasis is mine.) Unicode is used in almost every recent computer system and specifies a set of encodings with associated glyphs across numerous languages. However, within the conception of the modern lies a narrow definition of characters focusing on recent needs that obscures differences between glyphs and thus collapses anachronistic variant glyphs. For example, a properly encoded Unicode text does not distinguish the sigma form of ‘s,’ from long ‘s,’ from anglicana ‘s,’ or any other variants that do not signify a different underlying letter. These variant ‘s’s are seen by the Consortium as decorative in nature. Initially the Consortium did distinguish historical variants, but decided to stop. In particular, the long-s is a code point in the Unicode standard, but is considered inappropriate for English language long-s. It is present for languages in which the long-s glyph represents a different sort of letter. Therefore, Unicode is intentionally inappropriate for new diplomatic work because it ignores the glyphic components.

36> The MUFI aims to provide tools to distinguish these glyphs as scholars require. They extend the Unicode standard, and provide explication for various encodings, as to what sort of glyph to use for which mark as found in medieval literature. Additional encodings are, of course, essential for diplomatic transcription in which researchers distinguish variants which are only decorative in nature. The work of the MUFI, however, enables one to do distinguish variants in a way that is independent of font choice. Since the standard must specify abstract encodings of glyphs based on Unicode, several different fonts have been developed that support the MUFI standard. In particular, figure 6 uses Andron Scriptor Web which is a free MUFI v. 3.0 compatible set of glyphs to transcribe the beginning of the Monk’s Tale in the Ellesmere Chaucer. (See figure 6.)

Fig. 6, p. 1

Fig. 6, p. 2

Fig. 6, p. 3

Fig. 6, p. 4

Fig. 6, p. 5

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale diplomatically transcribed from the Ellesmere manuscript.

37> However, a scholar who wanted to reuse data could use another font or even map the font to standard Unicode.^{^[39]}The glyphic data is thus encoded, but reusable in a documented way.

38> The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI-C) develops a standard eXtensible Markup Language (XML) for encoding semantic, physical, and editorial information about all forms of texts. Their scope includes verbal as well as written statements, and supports efforts as diverse as transcription of early Greek papyrus to writing a term paper. The toolbox the consortium created is vast and complicated but extremely well documented which makes it highly reusable for various formats. The TEI-C already provides a set of standard automated stylesheets that can convert texts to HTML, xhtml, DocBook, PDF, RTF, Plain Text, and other formats. Their standard also includes substantial facilities for references and linkages. An image of a page can be linked to the transcribed text and vice versa. The style-sheet can then express the linkage in any way the designer wants: as a hyperlink, an arrow, a written line reference, a quote, embedding the whole text, etc. Thus, the TEI-C provides a abstracted model for encoding texts and critical objects so that the presentation can be adapted to different display systems, platforms, and altered to emphasize different aspects. A TEI-C encoding can be so thick as to be unreadable, while a particular display can show a few aspects that illustrate the argument being made.

39> TEI can also be used to encode the text diplomatically while simultaneously normalizing it and expanding abbreviations. The [g], [glyph], and [char] elements represent various glyphs that can be used when working with a MUFI-compatible font, but ignored for non-MUFI fonts. The [choice] element allows the editor to describe variants in the text as seen in the TEI underlying the transcription of the Monk’s Tale from the Ellesmere Chaucer. (See figure 7.)

Fig. 7, p. 1

Fig. 7, p. 2

Fig. 7, p. 3

Fig. 7, p. 4

Fig. 7, p. 5

Fig. 7, p. 6

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale diplomatically transcribed in TEI from the Ellesmere manuscript.

40> The encoded text can then be processed automatically to generate the normalized and diplomatic versions. Additions to the work could be to link the text to the digital facsimile and also to link the glossary to the text. Furthermore, the editorial glosses and linkages can be expressed through XML and presented through clever stylesheets. The standard structure of TEI also allows for distributed projects (such as the SDE version of the Hengwrt Chaucer). Each editor, subeditor, transcriber, etc. can be instructed with the same techniques and the final version can be merged automatically into a massive project.

Pedagogical Ladders

41> Providing a glossary and analysis allows the reader to begin to understand what might be going on in the analyzed passage analyzed and both could be linked to the TEI-C’s structure as well as to digital images. The normalized version of the text that can be automatically generated provides a similar facility. A reader who is uncomfortable with Middle English can begin with the Modern English version, read the analysis, and develop some understanding of the normalized version. After working with the normalized version the reader can explore the variant glyphs of the diplomatic version, which adds a new layer of challenge in the form of abbreviations and otiose decorations. Finally, once the reader is comfortable with the diplomatic transcription, she can return to a digital facsimile or the original. Thus, our current study provides a series of hyper- & hypotextually^{^[40]}connected steps that enable readers to understand the text better.

Example

42> How can we achieve an effort to exactness in practice using current tools? For the context of this paper, a small passage is marked-up and transformed using various digital tools. As we have been deeply concerned with new directions in diplomatic transcription that digital reproduction facilitate. The coding enabled two versions to be created automatically, the diplomatic transcription and the normalized transcription. These versions can be seen in figure 6 which has both the diplomatic and normalized transcription, while figure 7 has the raw XML describing the content. Both documents repay close reading, in particular the use of [charDecl] which emphasizes a particular effort at exactness in glyphs. The element is used to declare particular glyphs that are not represented in the underlying encoding. Yet, it also offers the opportunity to provide equivalents for display, simultaneously recognizing the impossibility of exact reproduction but the desirability of creating some displayed form. As compared to the digital facsimile, it allows the author to be self-aware about the ambiguities of interpretation, and demonstrates the nature of the choices made.

Conclusion

43> Diplomatic transcription and digital images as both efforts at exactness remain problematic. Their historical approaches and functional goals must remain in the foreground for particular projects as these efforts always result in a new reproduction. Intertextuality is the key to understanding the difference between mindless digital reproductions and the new diplomatic transcription. We have examined several historical attempts at exact copies and discussed some new technological tools for future diplomatic efforts based on how these historical attempts have succeeded and failed. The narrative paints a picture of striving for textual stability against editorial limitations, the limitations of technology, and the limitations of readers. While Chaucer seems to have a firm place in the history of English poetry, the stability of his text still seems questionable ever after hundreds of years of study. New technologies will undoubtedly add to the array of tools that we apply to the very old problem of explaining and establishing a text, and will also lead to new editorial work. To find the way forward we must look backward or otherwise face making the mistakes of our predecessors who attempted exact reproduction.

Notes:

[1] Geoffrey, Chaucer, The Works: Compared with the Former Editions, and Many Valuable Mss. ed. John Urry (London: B. Lintot, 1721).

[2] Gottfriend Wilhelm Leibnitz, Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus (Hanover: S. Ammonii, 1693) and also Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “diplomatic,” accessed February 16, 2011,
http://oed.com/view/Entry/53206

[3] The terms aethesis and mathesis, along with the technique are taken, in part, from the work of Johanna Drucker who used similar techniques in developing SpecLab. See: Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

[4] This and other primary source materials consulted are in the bibliography at the end; Chaucer, Geoffrey. A Six-Text Print of Chauncer's Canterbury Tales in Parallel Columns from the Following Mss: 1. The Ellesmere 2. The Herzgwrt 154 3. The Cambridge Univ. Libr. Eg. 4. 27. 4. The Corpus Christi Coll., Oxford 5. The Petworth 6. The Lansdowne 851. Edited by F.J. Furnivall. London: Chaucer Society, by N. Trübner, 1868.

[5] The Ellesmere is the well know manuscript, “Ellesmere Chaucer.” EL 26 C 9. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., f. 169.

[6] Ideal copy is a fraught term used in bibliography and editorial theory. John Carter provides a good summary of the resonances--both positive and negative--evoked here: “This term, once popular among textual bibliographers, arose from the fact that books printed in the hand-press period (more rarely after) might be corrected during the course of printing, thus creating a moving target, difficult to strike at the ideal moment. Although it is possible in theory for an individual example of the book in question to conform to it, exhibiting the final intention of the author, publisher and printer at the completion of printing, in so far as intention is capable of being established, the ‘ideal copy’ is a sort of Platonic archetype’ laid up where neither moth nor rust can corrupt it. In fact, there ill inevitably be several ‘ideal copies’, distinct in the circumstances of their issue ... But the term has now fallen out of fashion, those concerned preferring to chart the conventional signs of change than pursue a snark that may be a boojum.” John Carter and Nicolas Barker, ABCs for Book Collectors, 8th ed. (London: British Library, 2004): 126-7. Numerous bibliographers and editors have written about the usefulness of the concept of ideal copy and opinions vary wildly.

[7] An older tradition of book-sniffery (here alluded to as bibliophila) can be found in the work of Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Edward Newton, and even occasionally William Blades. A classic of the bibliophilic ilk is Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania, or, Book madness : a bibliographical romance, (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811) A more modern, measured, approach to the aesthetics in a disciplined way is discussed in G. Thomas Tanselle, Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 81-88, 158, provides a summary of the literature.

[8] This well-trod idea is traced ably in Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) although the particulars are something of a matter of debate.

[9] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Now Newly Imprinted, ed. by F.S. Ellis (Upper Mall, Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896).

[10] Typical of this work is Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. by William Caxton (Westminster: William Caxton, 1477) (ESTC S109814) and Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. William Caxton (Westminster: W. Caxton, 1483) (ESTC S108804).

[11] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer: Newly Printed, with Dyvers Workes Never in Print Before As in the Table More Playnly Dothe Appear, ed. by William Thynne (London: T. Godfray, 1532).

[12] A census of these manuscripts is provided by Geoffrey Chaucer, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, eds. John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert (Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press, 1940) but two typical and well know examples are “Ellesmere Chaucer.” EL 26 C 9. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., f. 169 and “Hengwrt Chaucer.” Peniarth MS 392 D. The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

[13] Blackletter is associated with particular genres, time periods, languages, etc. The most recent comprehensive study of the aesthetic resonances is Stanely Morison, Black Letter: Its History and Current Use (London: Monotype Corp, 1937) this substantial text is in some ways revisited by Blackletter: Type and National Identity, eds. Peter Bain and Paul Shaw (New York: Cooper Union, 1998). In particular, “Blackletter vs. Roman: Type as Ideological Surrogate” by the editors and “The German Language and the Two Faces of Its Script: A Genuine Expression of European Culture?” by Philipp Th. Bertheau use the same sort of aesthetic criticism employed in this paper to explore relationships with German culture and language.

[14] All qtd. in Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticsm and Allusion (1357-1900), “Introduction” (London: Chaucer Society, 1923) xliv - xx.

[15] Geoffrey Chaucer, The workes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas Speght (London: Printed by Adam Islip, 1602).

[16] G. Thomas Tanselle, A Rationale of Textual Criticsm (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

[17] A summary of uses can be found in Talbot Baines Reed, A History of the Old English Letter Foundries, new ed. rev. and enlg. by A.F. Johnson (Kent: Dawsons, 1974) 47-50.

[18] D.C. Greetham, Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 276-325 citing Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday, 1972); C.S. Peirce, “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’,” Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, ed. Robert E. Innis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985); and others.

[19] Jan Baetens, and Jan Van Looy, “Digitising Cultural Heritage: The Role of Interpretation in Cultural Preservation,” Image [&] Narrative, 17 The Digital Archive. (2007).

[20] Although, there is some element of interpretation in the choice of cropping, image quality, color reproduction, etc. These components are generally chosen on a systematic basis, rather than ad-hoc. The ad-hoc nature can be seen in numerous examples of digitization best-practices. See: Western States Digital Imaging Best Practices, ver. 1.0 (Western States Digital Standards Group, Digital Imaging Working Group, 2003),

http://www.mndigital.org/digitizing/standards/imaging.pdf

[21] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others; Being a Reproduction in Fasimile of the First Collected Edition 1532, from the Copy in the British Museum, ed. Walter W. Skeat (London: A. Moring, H. Frowde, 1905).

[22] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript, ed. Paul G. Ruggiers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979).

[23] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts, Edited by John Matthews Manly, Edith Rickert (Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press, 1940).

[24] Spurgeon, xxii.

[25] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer: To Which Are Added an Essay on His Language and Versification, and an Introductory Discourse, Together with Notes and a Glossary, ed. Thomas Tyrwhitt, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1798).

[26] Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Edited by William Caxton (Westminster: W. Caxton, 1483) (ESTC S108804) a2r - a2v.

[27] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer: To Which Are Added an Essay on His Language and Versification, and an Introductory Discourse, Together with Notes and a Glossary, Edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt (2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1798) i.

[28] The idea of a polytext is that some texts don’t resolve into a singular ideal copy, but a collection of texts--or polytext--between which the ideal copy might be found. See Joseph Grigely “The Textual Event” in Philip Cohen, Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991).

[29] Tyrwhitt, i.

[30] F.J. Child, “Observations on the Language of Chaucer and Gower,” Memoris of the American Academy, New Series, vol. viii (3 June 1862) 445-502; vol. ix, (9 January 1866) 256-314.

[31] Geoffrey, Chaucer, The Works: Compared with the Former Editions, and Many Valuable Mss. ed. John Urry (London: B. Lintot, 1721).

[32] Geoffrey Chaucer, The Works: Compared with the Former Editions, and Many Valuable Mss, Edited by John Urry (London: B. Lintot, 1721) i2v - k1.

[33] Tyrwhitt, xiii, 524.

[34] George P. Landow, Hypertext 3.0, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006) 53-68.

[35] Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) 3-18.

[36] MUFI http://www.mufi.info/; TEI http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml

[37] http://unicode.org/

[38] The Unicode Consortium, retrieved Oct. 6, 2009 from http://www.unicode.org/consortium/consort.html

[39] Andron Scriptor Web, retrieved Oct. 6, 2009,
http://www.mufi.info/fonts/#Andron

[40] This is something of a stretching of the usage employed in Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). In that work, he builds a structure of second-order literature comprised of re-writing texts in the form of satire, parody, burlesque, etc. This paper argues that diplomacy intends to achieve exactness, it is in several ways a rewriting in the same way. This sits most easily in Genette’s structure between a transformation (same style, new content) and forgery (new content, same style).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions of Chaucer Discussed in Roughly Chronological Order:

“Ellesmere Chaucer.” EL 26 C 9. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., f. 169.

“Hengwrt Chaucer.” Peniarth MS 392 D. The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales. Edited by William Caxton. Westminster: William Caxton, 1477. (ESTC S109814)

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Canterbury Tales. Edited by William Caxton. Westminster: W. Caxton, 1483. (ESTC S108804)

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Workes of Geffray Chaucer: Newly Printed, with Dyvers Workes Never in Print Before As in the Table More Playnly Dothe Appear. Edited by William Thynne. London: T. Godfray, 1532.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The workes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer. Edited by Thomas Speght. London: Printed by Adam Islip, 1602.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works: Compared with the Former Editions, and Many Valuable Mss. Edited by John Urry. London: B. Lintot, 1721.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer: To Which Are Added an Essay on His Language and Versification, and an Introductory Discourse, Together with Notes and a Glossary. Edited by Thomas Tyrwhitt. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1798.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. A Six-Text Print of Chauncer's Canterbury Tales in Parallel Columns from the Following Mss: 1. The Ellesmere 2. The Herzgwrt 154 3. The Cambridge Univ. Libr. Eg. 4. 27. 4. The Corpus Christi Coll., Oxford 5. The Petworth 6. The Lansdowne 851. Edited by F.J. Furnivall. London: Chaucer Society, by N. Trübner, 1868.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Now Newly Imprinted. Edited by F.S. Ellis. Upper Mall, Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others; Being a Reproduction in Fasimile of the First Collected Edition 1532, from the Copy in the British Museum. Edited by Walter W. Skeat. London: A. Moring, H. Frowde, 1905.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Text of the Canterbury Tales, Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts. Edited by John Matthews Manly, Edith Rickert. Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press, 1940.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works, 1532; With Supplementary Material from the Editions of 1542, 1561, 1598 and 1602. Menston: Scolar P., 1969.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales: A Facsimile and Transcription of the Hengwrt Manuscript with Variants from the Ellesmere Manuscript. Edited by Paul G. Ruggiers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. General editor Larry Dean Benson, edited by F.N. Robinson. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Caxton's Canterbury Tales: The British Library Copies. Edited by Barbara Bordalejo. Leicester, UK: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2003.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Hengwrt Chaucer: Standard Edition on CD-ROM Golygiad Safonol Chaucer Hengwrt ar CD. Edited by Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan. Leicester, UK: Scholarly Digital Editions, 2003.

Secondary Sources:

Baetens, Jan and Jan Van Looy. “Digitising Cultural Heritage: The Role of Interpretation in Cultural Preservation.” Image [&] Narrative, 17 The Digital Archive. (2007).

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday, 1972.

Child, F.J. “Observations on the Language of Chaucer and Gower.” Memoris of the American Academy, New Series, vol. viii (3 June 1862) 445-502; vol. ix, (9 January 1866) 256-314.

Greetham, D.C. Theories of the Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Huntington Library. “Digital Scriptorium,” http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/dsheh/heh_brf

Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticus. Hanover: S. Ammonii, 1693.

Peirce, C.S. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’,” Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology. Edited by Robert E. Innis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Spurgeon, Caroline F. E. Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticsm and Allusion (1357-1900), Introduction. London: Chaucer Society, 1923.

Petti, Anthony G. English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Tanselle, G. Thomas. Bibliographical Analysis: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Illustrations:

Filename: AscherImage.jpg

Caption: The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.

Legend: The image is a fanciful fugue on the topic and themes of this paper. It graphically represents four alternate readings of line 742 in the Riverside Chaucer “The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.” By way of Old French “cosyn” might be read “cosin” meaning trickery, and “dede” can mean both action and document. The image represents the hyper-position between meanings and the role of the physical text as represented by rewriting.

Filename: Figure1.JPG

Caption: Three columns of F.J. Furnivall’s Six Text edition of the Canterbury Tales.

Legend: From Chaucer, Geoffrey. A Six-Text Print of Chauncer's Canterbury Tales in Parallel Columns. Edited by F.J. Furnivall. London: Chaucer Society, by N. Trübner, 1868. 256

Filename: Figure2.JPG

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale from the Kelmscott Chaucer.

Legend: From Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Now Newly Imprinted. Edited by F.S. Ellis. Upper Mall, Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1896. 83

Filename: Figure3.JPG

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale from the “Ellesmere Chaucer.”

Legend: From “Ellesmere Chaucer.” EL 26 C 9. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., f. 169, retrieved via Huntington Library. “Digital Scriptorium,” http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/dsheh/heh_brf

Filename: Figure4.JPG

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale from the “Hengwrt Chaucer.”

Legend: From “Hengwrt Chaucer,” Peniarth MS 392 D, The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. f. 89v

Filename: Figure5.JPG

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale from Urry’s edition.

Legend: From Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Works: Compared with the Former Editions, and Many Valuable Mss. Edited by John Urry. London: B. Lintot, 1721. 161

Filename: Figure6.pdf

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale diplomatically transcribed from the Ellesmere manuscript.

Legend: The source text is from “Ellesmere Chaucer.” EL 26 C 9. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., f. 169, retrieved via Huntington Library. “Digital Scriptorium,” http://dpg.lib.berkeley.edu/webdb/dsheh/heh_brf . The transcription is by the author.

Filename: Figure7.pdf

Caption: The beginning of the Monk’s Tale diplomatically transcribed in TEI from the Ellesmere manuscript.

James P. Ascher is an Assistant Professor and Rare Book Cataloger at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Ascher teaches the history of writing, books, and media while maintaining bibliographical databases. He is also the motivating force behind ScriptaLab, an initiative to explore materiality and immateriality in media, text, and artifacts. His published research is on bibliography and the apprehension of meaning mediated through message passing.

_____

APPOSITIONS:

Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern

Literature & Culture,

http://appositions.blogspot.com/,

ISSN: 1946-1992,

Volume Four (2011): Texts & Contexts

_____

Sarah Barber: “Caribbean Heritage/Digital Access”

2011-05-31T16:54:00.001-07:00

Sarah Barber

Lancaster University

Digitisation and the Survival of Documents:
the records of seventeenth-century Barbados

1> This piece continues appositions’ recent contributions debating the value and pitfalls of digitisation, particularly with regard to material from the early-modern world.[1] Here is discussed the digitisation of manuscript primary sources relating to the Anglophone Caribbean in the seventeenth century. The diversity and diasporic nature of the Caribbean – here expressed as the Torrid Zone, covering the Carolinas in the north, Surinam(e) in the south and Bermuda in the east – means that surviving records are scattered around the world, making collection, access or synthesis very difficult. Digital catalogues, searchable by place, have helped locate documents, provided that they are held by official, participating repositories.[2] Whilst the picture within the Caribbean itself is very variable, generally speaking the region lacks the resources to participate in such large-scale digitisation programmes; heritage remains a political issue, and is not a priority in economically-developing regions.[3] We are here, therefore, debating an ethical dilemma, relating the complex relationship which we hold with our own histories, with added layers of complexity and confusion because the Caribbean is the scene of the contestation and acculturation of past and present, white and black, free and enslaved, rich and poor, developed and developing worlds.

2> Seventeenth-century studies of the Americas, particularly its Anglophone territories, have been shaped by two, towering strands of teleological historiography. From the Americas, the period between late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth century adventurism and late eighteenth-century independence, labelled ‘colonial’, has invariably sheltered the question ‘why 1776?’, or in other words, how America escaped its colonial status. This has a particular impact on a study of the region embraced by the Caribbean Sea, between 35 degrees north and the equator, since it has the effect of separating the Carolinas from a region which was regarded as integral in the seventeenth century, across, through and around which people of all ethnicities, both genders and any social status – governors, clergy, planters, slaves, servants – ideas, and goods, migrated. Barbados was particularly important in this respect, since it was a small island, and by the 1650s, overcrowded, such that new opportunities on the mainland in the Carolinas -- Charlestown, Goose Creek and Port Royal -- or Surinam, led many in Barbados to desert or diversify their holdings.[4]

3> Historiographies on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean tend towards the imperial because historians are defined both by sources and by access to them. The empire was administered from London, much of the trade was shipped through the metropole, and the apparatus of empire allowed the centralised collection and storage of the documents which charted its operations. These ‘State Papers’ are housed at The National Archives, Kew. ‘Colonial State Papers’ have been commercially digitised and made available to the ‘educational and library market and . . . priced accordingly’ and include Colonial Office (CO)/1, Privy Council papers, and those of the Board of Trade and Plantations, ‘informed principally by recommendations from scholars and librarians, among whom we consulted widely’.[5] The State Papers, calendared or newly available in part, in digital transcription, provide a ready-made skeleton for studies of the Torrid Zone. They are also copious (though less so for the period prior to the Restoration, when the regimes following 1660 attempted to codify and rationalise the upheavals of the revolutionary century).[6] When added to the huge corpus of pamphlets which survive (the vast majority of which were published in London) a very detailed history of the lives of British settlers and those they governed can already be told.[7]

4> Whilst the survival of colonial records of administration provides a coherent regional story of centralisation and imperial administration, the period of increased independence has fractured regional coherence and produced a vast number of diverse sovereign states, each with their own archives' policy. There are both historic and current differences between islands and between islands and mainland territories, and there is an understandable desire to concentrate studies on one part. In this respect, Barbados receives by far the heaviest coverage. It was amongst the earliest parts of the Caribbean settled; it was rapidly and effectively reduced to a (pseudo) form of English administration; and it was not captured by a rival European power. It was the only territory in the region that was not inhabited at the time the English landed, thereby fulfilling Sir Francis Bacon's strictures to plant in a 'pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted'.[8] From the 1640s onwards it developed such a successful sugar economy that London regarded it as the jewel of the empire, a profitable and stable colony and a model of Plantation Society, in which a monoculture cash crop is produced, using economies of scale in land and servile labour force. The success or failure of the other territories in the Torrid Zone is apt to be measured by or modelled on the Barbados experience.[9]

5> But it could equally be said that Barbados is atypical: one of the foremost reasons is the volume of material for the island's seventeenth-century history which is still available in situ. It is the responsibility of three separate organisations. The Barbados Department of Archives (bda) is the main repository of historical records relating to Barbados. It operates from the former leper hospital at Lazaretto, St Michael, to the north of Bridgetown, a building which dates from 1907, and has the advantage of being stone-built, such that the records can be stored in the cool and dark, and relatively close to the campus of the University of the West Indies. It was established as an archives' office by an Act of 1964, two years before the island obtained its independence from the UK. Those researching Barbados’s history often work through the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, formed in 1933 (the oldest such organisation within the Anglophone Caribbean), its Shilstone Memorial Library, and its journals, Caribbeana and Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.[10] The Society is based in the Museum building, the former military section of St Anne’s Garrison complex, to the south side of the city, around Carlisle Bay. The third institution is the University of the West Indies, at Cave Hill, which runs records’ management courses but confined to archives of its own history.[11] The West Indies Federal Archives Centre/Cave Hill Campus Archives was opened in 2004 with a mission to

select, acquire, maintain and make available, records of continuing administrative, cultural and historical value to the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. The Campus Archives will preserve the institutional memory of Cave Hill Campus as part of the total records management programme. The records of the Cave Hill Campus Archives will be stored, conserved and described in compliance with international archival standards. Provisions for the consultation of records will be made for those of the University of the West Indies and the Caribbean community that it serves. Access to the archives will be provided wherever possible and outreach programmes will be designed to meet the needs of users and potential users.[12]

6> The Barbados Department of Archives houses several corpora of documents which tell of the island’s seventeenth-century history. Only one of these is extant in secretary script: the levy book of the parish of St Michael.[13] Coinciding with the urban area of Bridgetown, this levy of the late-seventeenth/early-eighteenth century lists streets, house-owners along the streets, those living in the properties, and the quantity of sugar which was levied by the parish towards parochial works. Most often in the seventeenth century, this consisted of provision for the poor and the maintenance of highways. Plotting the data against an almost contemporaneous plan of the capital, such as that featured on Mayo’s map of Barbados of 1720, the historian is able to discern the relative affluence of streets and areas of Bridgetown.[14] It is also possible to demonstrate concentrations of populations, such as the Jews; individuals or companies of merchants operating both economic and social networks; and the cross-referencing of names against other evidence.

7> The bda also houses a transcription of the St John vestry minutes, between 1649 to 1683, although the manuscript transcription is from the nineteenth or twentieth century.[15] These again are concerned with provision for the poor and maintaining the highways, albeit in the case of this sugar-producing area of the island, among vestrymen and churchwardens who were planters of considerable wealth and social standing. However, there is also evidence of the operations of the local clergymen, particularly William Leslie (Lesly) and his replacement, Benjamin Cryer, who was the so-called Commissary for Barbados.[16] More importantly, for the process of the digitisation of these records, are details of the construction of the church and a house for Rev. Cryer. The former were in train around 1661, overseen by Samuel Major, for which two pounds of sugar per acre was to be levied towards its completion, rising to three, because the smaller sum was thought insufficient: in 1676 it was ordered that the church and porch be pulled down and rebuilt.[17] At its meeting at the start of 1679, weighing ‘the Inconvenience the Minister of the parish lyes under by reasone of the greete [sic] distance he lives from the parish Church and also ye Inconvenience to the parishioners thereby’, plans were made to build a house for the minister near to St John’s church.[18] Two pages detailed the building materials, process and dimensions – 40 x 21 feet – of a three storey, stone building with wooden porch, shades and staircase, which if fed into architectural software could reproduce a plan and sketch of one of the few descriptions of domestic-scale buildings from the seventeenth-century Caribbean.[19] The first edition of the Journal was keen to list and report on all extant heritage sites on the island, but despite the statement by Sir Richard Dutton, that buildings of ‘stone, or brick and covered with tiles, slate, or shingles, and built after the English fashion for commodiousness and decency, as well as strength’ were, by 1681, ‘general all over the Island’ only churches and plantation houses remained standing.[20]

8> There are voluminous parochial records which come under the heading of parish records, wills, and deeds.[21] None of the seventeenth century originals survive and historians are reliant on the transcriptions which were made in the late nineteenth century by a small army of civil servants, overseen by a senior official who checked and added his name in the margins at regular intervals. If these transcriptions had not been made, then likely any evidence of these records would have been lost altogether, but they nevertheless set up a number of questions for the historian (and the archivist) regarding the status of transcription and copy and who owns the intellectual property of each possible version. The civil servants who transcribed the documents were not skilled as historians, and whilst they may have had knowledge of Barbados, they lacked any of the seventeenth century, and its idiom and of the European elements of the documents. Thus, documents are not always transcribed in full. Deeds and inventories followed a regular legal formula, and publishers began to raise income by producing books of indenture, will, or deed pro-formas, onto which parties could write in details particular to their transaction.[22] An historian would very much like to know the progress that printing such pro-formas followed, places in which parties deviated from the formulaic legalese and why. Similarly, it is possible to glean some evidence of the levels of literacy in Barbados from the number of people who signed and those who made a mark, but the transcribers were far from consistent in noting such details or in detailing the nature and look of a mark. Names, particularly personal names, were spelled differently between and within documents but may not have been accurately read or transcribed by the civil servants, so often a degree of surmise is necessary in deciding whether two individuals are the same, or part of the same kinship network. There are areas in which the transcribers have not been able to read the original and have guessed at its contents, other places in which there is a wavy line, sometimes a gap, and sometimes the illegible material is just omitted and the ‘sentence’ carries straight on.

9> There are two types of parish document bound in a series of huge leather volumes and kept in repository at the Barbados Department of Archives. The first of these is known as ‘Deeds’, bound in volumes of nearly a thousand pages each (see fig.1), and collectively catalogued at ‘RB’.[23] They are indexed alphabetically, include deeds and counterparts, and

Fig.1

Photograph Sarah Barber, 2007:

BDA, RB3/1.

begin in earnest in 1640.[24] Before editorial correction, the index can be used to map the level of activity in the land market against prevailing conditions on both sides of the Atlantic, and make estimates, for example, of the relative volume of migration in response to the civil wars. With names edited, analysis within the index can reveal the relative affluence or otherwise of settlers, merchants and employees, the growth of companies and economic networks (which can be cross-referenced with other documents for both confirmation and expansion of the links), and secondary migration around the region. The list was originally taken, for example, to track the numbers of those present in Barbados between 1640 and 1660 who subsequently appeared to be planting in Surinam, representing diversifying of successful interests, re-starting of unsuccessful ventures, and political control and resistance.[25]

10> The author has, to date, collected a ‘copy’ of a portion of RB3/1, which covers the majority of the years 1640 to 1643, but the material is not arranged chronologically, either year on year, or within each year, so one of the editing tasks if a complete transcript should become available is to place the indentures in the linear order that they were issued. Whilst they are ostensibly a rather sterile list of legal documents, and are still consulted by lawyers seeking to establish claims to land and property in Barbados,[26] they are a huge and invaluable resource for the historian. They detail the individual wealth and status of planters, merchants and others who made a will on the island, or transferred property and had it described and inventoried; their labour force, and the respective proportions of servants to slaves; the location of land and/or property, and the origin and status of grantees. To offer one example, the deeds record two men, Thomas Brough, described as 'of Barbados'[27] and Jacob the White, a merchant, possibly Jewish, of Amsterdam, who were sharing accommodation in Brough’s thatched storehouse, subdivided into rooms. In the summer of August 1643 Brough sold a part share in his storehouse to White – for 3,000 lbs. of tobacco – to facilitate White's erection of an eight-foot extension in which to live, whilst the two men would continue to receive 'country' goods brought to them from the island, and should White be able to secure another worker, they would together grow, dig and dress potatoes.[28] Such humble origins of the merchant, settler and commodity markets of the West Indies signal a valuable corrective to the later image of sugar monoculture which generated Barbados's model plantation society. Even the idea of degree of dependence on and independence from the mother country are challenged by the early use of 'the country' to describe Barbados's hinterland. Similar in usage to the English conflation of 'county' and 'country', the description of 'the country' in the West Indies is an indication of customary practice developing, peculiar to individual settlements.

11> The second set of documents are catalogued at RL, and are predominantly transcriptions of parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials. Survivals begin from varying dates, which differ between sacraments. There are unexpected pitfalls for the historian of such material, since practice was not necessarily the same as that within the Anglican Church in the mother country. For example, often families did not have sufficient money to pay for the feast which constituted the minister’s ‘payment’ for performing a baptism – a disappointment for him, under-paid for his time in the tropics and reliant on such meals to supplement a meagre income[29] – and these were postponed until several children could be christened together, or waited until the individual was an adult. Such prosaic, practical considerations should neither be interpreted as a commentary by liberated (and not necessarily Anglican) parishioners on the contemporaneous debate about paedo-baptism nor optimism about the life expectancy of new-borns in the Caribbean. A cursory glance at the registers, let us take that of St Michael as an example, shows the value of both individual pages and overall trends. Our first example is a double page of the transcript of the St Michael parish registers, showing the period from 18 July to 2 September 1681.[30] Madam Thornburgh was of sufficient status to be buried in the church, whilst John Murphy and Isaac Hobbs were buried in the churchyard, despite being Roman Catholics.[31] On the 30 September, the birth that same day of John, a son for Captain William Marshall, provided the opportunity to christen both John and Samuel who was already nearly two years old.[32] On 1 September ‘7 men executed’ were buried: these were presumably seven of the eight sentenced to death – four for murder and four for burglary – by Sir Richard Dutton at the Sessions held between 16 and 27 August, but much to everybody's frustration, the transcriber had added the word ‘namely’ and then scored it out again.[33] Another individual sample page from the same register, in 1670, shows a hugely disproportionate number of burials in comparison with baptisms and marriages. This information, more systematically examined would reveal a great deal about historical demographics, but even this one page reminds us that one of the most dangerous aspects of Barbados was the ocean passage, and that a large number of burials, in a parish which included Bridgetown port, would be of people who had died at sea.[34]

12> Genealogists have been the predominant users of the voluminous corpora of Barbados material: and the main reason that use has not extended wider is the absence of systematic copying for analysis.[35] The records' offices of the Caribbean do not have the equipment or funding to engage in large-scale copying, particularly digitisation, and the Barbados Department of Archives stipulates that it will not allow the copying of manuscripts that have already been copied by another party. Individual users of the records’ offices on a short term basis provide a small but regular income for cash-strapped institutions, the usual user being a holiday-maker searching for ancestors, or a solicitor conducting searches for historical title. This kind of enquiry provides a controllable situation for the staff – readers are asked which name they are searching and can be directed to the precise volume and page through the index lists – which minimises handling. Thus, it is resident scholars who have had past, regular access to the archives, who have been able to make more systematic use of the manuscripts. The cost to scholars who have to come from further afield and remain for long periods is prohibitive.[36] In the case of Barbados, a number of private scholars – such as Ronald Taylor, son of the proprietor of Hothesal’s, St John, and Director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, 1973-1980; and Jill Sheppard, for eleven years the Executive Director of the Caribbean Conservation Association and resident in the ‘Engineers' House’, Garrison – were able to spend extended time with the surviving evidence and produced valuable histories.[37]

13> Those who have made more systematic copies of large bodies of material are also connected to genealogy, wishing to facilitate the tracking of individual names. Collection of material has been dominated by two US-bodies: the Genealogical Company, based in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.[38] Both have engaged in large-scale ‘copying’ of records kept in Caribbean repositories, which enables records' offices to re-direct enquiries which depend on more systematic use of material. The parish registers have been microfilmed by the Church of Latter Day Saints and are available to consult through the Family History Library: the resources, both of storage and technology possessed by the Family History Library enables huge quantities of material, the copying of which would not be allowed in the original repositories, to be transferred from microfilm, via scanner to digital files (jpgs).[39] Even in terms of individual searches, the digitisation of the images which can be read as jpg files is a boon to the historian, as many which were previously unreadable can be made legible with selected areas of a page adjusted in tone, contrast, brightness and high-resolution zoom.[40] They remain limited, however, to individual searches by name, and are thus of huge value to genealogists, and to historians who wish to trace a humble individual (whose name they know), or those who wish to trace elite, political figures. They do not offer a window onto the existence of Africans in the Caribbean – not listed by name other than by familiar, given names – the social histories of the vast majority of white Bajans, or the survival of the indigenous Americans who came with the first English settlers.[41] The anecdotal evidence provided by the copies I have so far gathered provides tantalising additions to debates which have been conducted over many years, but for which statistics and comprehensive analysis are not yet available. Hilary Beckles instigated a debate over whether African enslavement in Barbados was prefigured by planters’ treatment of indentured labourers, particularly from Ireland.[42] One of the key differences between indentured labour and African labour was the loss of identity – specifically name[43] – suffered by the latter in the passage across the Atlantic, and whilst not seeking to deny the disproportionality represented by the numbers of unnamed and untraceable slaves shipped to the Americas, when set against single anecdotal examples, the appearance within the deeds of ‘Daniel the Irishman’ seems to connote that even this difference may not have been universal.[44]

14> If historians’ use of documents such as the parish registers, wills and deeds, however, is dependent on their being copied to the point at which systematic and large-scale analysis can be conducted, what represents ‘copying’ is a moot point, as is the point at which knowledge of the contents of documents becomes intellectual capital. The ‘ownership of knowledge’ is not considered greater than that implied by ownership or custody of the physical document. I have considerable knowledge about Barbados, and specific documents, but cannot share it whilst it falls within a format which might be considered copying - hence I cannot give image examples of the pages of registers discussed here. There are myriad problems, none of which have yet been resolved. The first concerns from whom to seek permission to copy. In the case of the Barbados parish registers (RL), does the fact that the physical documents have been copied onto microfilm open up copying rights, and is there a difference in both quality and extent between making public a single frame of these documents and making available large-scale copies? It could be argued that the fact that the physical documents are already 19^th-century copies frees the historian to make large scale systematic analysis (and tools for analysis) of the seventeenth-century content available to others.

15> The author was given permission to make digital photograph copies of the St Michael levy book and the St John vestry minutes – the first seventeenth century originals, the latter 19^th or possibly 20^th century copies – in 2004. Permissions to copy these records digitally do not extend to making available copies of the photographs, or distributing extensive sections of transcriptions. Permission to copy did not apply to the Deeds (RB) however, possibly, although this was not explicitly stated, because of their extent. Readers are increasingly being denied access to these as the manuscripts are degrading, which further begs the question whether physical ownership may have to be relinquished (albeit temporarily) to send them to a repository in which they can be preserved; whether the bda will have to accept outside interference and resources to enable the manuscripts to be stabilised; and whether the need to capture the contents digitally becomes even more acute. It would have taken eight volumes of nearly 1000 pages each, with pages themselves which would take three or four photographs to capture in their entirety, to copy the deeds between 1637 and around 1720. More explicitly, it was not clear, given the subject of the deeds – the historical fixing of claims to property in real estate – and their continued use in contemporary legal searches, whether permission to copy lay with the Department of Archives in so far as they were historical records, or with the Land Registry because they related to real estate. Application to copy using digital photography was made to the Land Registry and there was later a hugely frustrating encounter in which having been passed around various offices of the Registry, the Registrar maintained in interview that the decision lay with the Archives, whilst the Senior Archivist maintained the decision had to come from the Registry, but neither would commit that decision to paper.[45]

16> Assuming that application for permission to photograph the deeds may have been granted, a further visit to Barbados was arranged in 2007. An advance courtesy call just before the flight, however, revealed that it would not be possible to use digital photography, and having recently purchased recording equipment for oral history interviews, I speculatively requested whether I could speak the contents of a volume into a tape recorder, for which permission was granted. I thus had a total of nine working days, in which to sit in the bda and speak the contents (in a low whisper, so as not to disturb other readers) into a tape recorder. Thirteen tapes thus captured about two-thirds of the first volume of deeds. It had been thought that this would at least enable a pilot study to be constructed using the full records surviving for the year 1643; a case study which would demonstrate to the archives' office and the registry the value of being able to copy, edit, save and analyse on a systematic basis, the records of the deeds, display the findings using, for example, Historical GIS, and by demonstrating the sorts of knowledge and its range which could thus be generated to add hugely to our knowledge of Barbados both past and present. Unfortunately, it transpired that not all of the records for 1637 to 1643 were within RB3/1, but some were scattered in other volumes.

17> This means of capture necessitated parallel notes to be taken, as speaking the deeds could not capture the manner in which the nineteenth-century transcribers had rendered sections in Latin, the signs made as marks or their position,[46] or elements of additional information and marginalia which I felt it was important to record (fig.2). This process began the first ‘volume’ of a series of A4 spiral-bound notebooks (now a manuscript primary source in themselves) in which the manuscripts which cannot be digitally copied have been hand-transcribed,

Fig.2

SEB transcriptions, vol.1, p.8.

but the requirement to use pencil means these are liable to fading, smudging and indistinct scan imagery.[47] The taped sound was fed through voice-recognition software (in itself a problem since the tape recorder being used was not in itself digital, the words were spoken quietly, and so much of the language was alien, archaic or the result of original phonetic transliteration (particularly Irish names).

18> The original physical document, therefore, is an incomplete and inaccurate nineteenth-century transcription of the originals. These contents have then been rendered as voice, captured onto tape, fed through voice-recognition software, digitised as a largely gibberish trans-scripted version, edited to make the digital transcription sensible when set against the recorded voice, rendered into modern spellings,[48] edited to insert words and passages which can be interpreted from a knowledge of original form, names rendered in several possible spellings to allow for cross referencing, and other editorial and marginal information added, and these presented as a series of word-processor and jpg files. It is hard for the historian to accept that this newly-created version remains a copy of the original towards the facsimile end of the copying spectrum. Nevertheless, progress with this process has stalled. A research student went to Barbados in the year following the capture of the deeds on tape, to continue to copy at least 1643, from which he could produce a dissertation in which their usefulness could be demonstrated through a one-year case study. He was denied permission to continue recording the deeds vocally. The Archives and Land Registry announced talks to decide on appropriate legal permissions required to copy the deeds, fees that might be charged for doing so, and so on, but without a constant presence in Barbados to keep such decisions high on the agenda, no advance has been made.

19> Nor does prior copying open up future copying or transcription rights. Permission to copy remains with the custodians of the original documents (that is, the 19^th century transcriptions). The contract between the Genealogical Society of Utah and the Barbados Department of Archives to copy the parochial registers resulted in microfilms being available in 1978.[49] The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints are themselves possessed of very clear and defined parameters on the rationale for copying, bounded by the faith requirements of individual, familial searchers.[50] Although there are Family Search Centres around the world, and the FamilySearch.org web-search facility, the hub of their collection is in Salt Lake City at the Family History Library. Originally opened in 1894 to assist Church members in their own genealogical research, it is now open to wider public genealogical searches, and contains records of over two-billion deceased people.[51] The search engine provides an opportunity for individuals to add to the digitised records which can be searched online: there being ‘many opportunities for you to contribute to family history work and make more resources available to people around the world who are seeking after their ancestral roots’.[52] This is a valuable resource but is dependent on the accuracy of the record keepers, the families engaged in this work, and is hugely dependent on being able to trace particular individuals, by a name (and first name) already known, further delimited by date and place categories. One cannot search for 'Daniel the Irishman' in FamilySearch.org or in the Genealogical Company's databases of indentured labourers shipped to the Caribbean. A search for Thomas Brough, receiving any of the sacraments, between the dates 1590 and 1670, results in a list of 51 people, with Thomas Broughs from Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Kent, Somerset, Durham, Cheshire, and elsewhere, and no means of telling which of these, if any, travelled to Barbados, or what happened to him whilst he was there. The addition of ‘Barbados’ to the ‘place’ category yields no results. Jacob ‘White’, should he be a Dutch Jewish merchant, would not be listed in these Christian genealogies at all. Thus histories are determined by specific family trees, perpetuating the historical dialogues between genealogists and political historians, but excluding any study which requires statistical overviews of categories of people. ‘[P]ublication or distribution of the actual record images or documents (including via print or the Web) and wholesale indexing, transcribing, or translating of the records (even when these activities are for non-profit purposes) are prohibited by the contracts’, and thus the ability to analyse vast corpora of records, in a way which would be facilitated by digitisation, transcription, entry onto database and so on, is stymied.[53]

20> The records are too vast for one person to transcribe and enter for their own research purposes, and if the process of copying the records in the first instance is blocked (or prohibitively expensive), then later analytical processes will not follow. In the case of this piece, therefore, I cannot share images of the single pages of parish records copied in the Family History Library, nor photographs of individual pages of transcribed deeds. I can describe the content of individual deeds, such as the relationship between Thomas Brough and Jacob White, but you have to trust my relation of it and the form in which it is contextualised. Presumably, should a reader wish to check or follow up any reference, they would travel to Barbados to view the original deed (assuming that it remains sufficiently robust and stable to be produced). Whilst the large-scale transcription of the deeds is close enough in content to the original for it to constitute a copy in the eyes of the archives (and presumably land registry), the historian is frustrated that their knowledge, expertise and labour in rendering the documents usable (and some distance from their original form) is unable to be made available in a form which will advance wider knowledge. Despite having passed through a number of processes, I cannot publish a sample of the transcription process to show other historians or to illustrate the value and importance of the work, both in terms of preserving the content and generating the tools of historical analysis, because it is considered either too close or too extensive a copy (or both). Thus the work of the historian is devalued: in its own terms; in terms of contextualising the knowledge of other disciplines (including genealogists and archival scientists); in contributing to heritage, its preservation and its value in defining identity; and in terms of the dialogue between past and present.

21> The Torrid Zone which possessed such coherence, criss-crossed by networks, has become atomised in the modern world. Attempts have been made to make connections across the region – the Caribbean Community, ‘caricom’, and there is a network of regional archives, carbica -- but each location has a sovereign, post-Independence history, and carefully guards its difference, necessitating that not only do negotiations with each repository proceed with painful delay, but a parallel series of such negotiations is required for all the repositories under their different jurisdictions and employers.[54] In terms of funding opportunities, and the requirements of funding councils in the UK to record the contemporary impact of any research, the gathering and digitising of Caribbean records contains a strong thread emphasising the long-term ecological benefits generated by one person travelling the region and potentially digitising the records for on-line access, thus saving such extensive and repeated travel by others. The Caribbean, particularly the territories of the UK Commonwealth[55], maintain a delicate dependency with the former ‘mother country’, wishing to forge regional independence and self-reliance, distance itself from the past of slavery and possession, and distinguish between commemoration and celebration of parts of its heritage, whilst remaining reliant on the United Kingdom for tourist income and Commonwealth links to global resources. Outsiders and occasional visitors continue to associate the Caribbean with luxury and leisure – and scholars and their funders are prone to the same assumptions – and the presence of comparatively well paid and resourced academics, could be characterised as depriving a country of its intellectual ownership of heritage, to the additional detriment of the continued income which individual, non-academic visitors provide and which keeps an archive open and its staff in employment. What is required is a major international collaborative project, but first some progress has to be made in highlighting its importance, and scholars need to be able to publish seed-corn case studies to demonstrate the value of the whole.

Notes:

[1] appositions: Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture, vol.3 ‘Digital Archives’ (May 2010); Sarah Barber, ‘Re-writing the British Caribbean’, appositions e-conference (2010), http://appositions.blogspot.com/2010/02/sarah-barber-rewriting-british.html (recovered 22.02.11).

[2] The most important for the purposes of collecting the records of the seventeenth century Caribbean is Access to Archives, operated by The National Archives, Kew:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/
(recovered 22.02.11), which is hugely important in locating records in repositories in England and Wales, whilst many corpora of records go unremarked in Scottish repositories. When funding streams dry up, there are not the resources to keep up these databases, add to them or correct mistakes.

[3] D. Akmon , ‘Only with your permission: how rights holders respond (or don’t respond) to requests to display archival materials online,’ Archival Science vol.10.1, (2010): pp.45-64; the debate about heritage and archives in the Virgin Islands is well advanced: J.A. Bastian, (2001) ‘A question of custody: the colonial archives of the United States Virgin Islands’, American Archivist vol.64.1: pp.96-114; Idem., Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found its History, (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003); Idem., ‘Reading colonial records through an archival lens: the provenance of place, space and creation’, Archival Science vol.6.3-4, (2006): pp.267-284.

[4] Louis H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters and Plots, 1662-1729 (Macmillan, 2004); Sarah Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000); Idem., 'Power in the English Caribbean: the proprietorship of Lord Willoughby of Parham', in L.H. Roper and B. van Ruymbeke (eds.), Constructing early modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp.189-212.

[5] Email correspondence, Chris Cotton (Product Specialist, ProQuest) to Sarah Barber, 8 Feb., 2010 (recovered 09.02.10); Colonial State Papers digitised by ProQuest and marketed by Chadwyck Healey - http://colonial.chadwyck.com/ (recovered 04.02.10): TNA CO/1, Privy Council and Board of Trade and Plantations papers, for the Americas, 1574-1739, Calendar of State papers Colonial, America and West Indies.

[6] Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History (4 vols.), (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934-1938); K.G. Davies, The Royal African Company (New York: Longmans, Green, 1957).

[7] Early English Books Online (EEBO), Chadwyck-Healey; Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), Gale cengage Learning; 17th-18th century Burney Collection Newspapers, Gale cengage Learning; Natalie A. Zacek, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776 (Cambridge: CUP, 2010).

[8] Sir Francis Bacon, 'On Plantations', The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (London: Printed by Iohn Haviland for Hanna Barret, 1625), p.198.

[9] Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625-1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926); Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713, (University of North Carolina Press, 1972); Gary Puckrein, Little England: Plantation Society and Anglo-Barbadian Politics, 1627-1700 (NY: New York University Press, 1984); Carl Bridenbaugh, Vexed and Troubled Englishmen, 1590-1642 (New York: OUP, 1972); Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados: from Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State Cambridge: CUP, 2003); Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660 (Oxford: OUP, 2003).

[10] ‘In Barbados we have waited over 300 years to found a historical society, but once this was founded there has been no delay in issuing a Journal’: ‘Editorial Notes’, The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (JBMHS), vol.1, number 1, (Nov., 1933), p.1.

[11] Archives Records Management Programme (ARMP), University of West Indies, Cave Hill Campus,
http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/armp/ (retrieved 14.02.11).

[12] http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/armp/campus_archives.asp
(retrieved 14.02.11).

[13] BDA, Parish levy of St Michael, 1682-1712, pp.53-190.

[14] Martyn Bowden, ‘Three centuries of Bridgetown: an historical geography’, JBMHS vol. xlix (2003): pp.1-138. This is work which has been done by undergraduate students on the Lancaster University level 3 course 'Society and Anarchy in the English Caribbean, 1600-1720'. It is planned to make some of this work more widely available through the research website, 'Disputatious Societies':

www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/caribbean/index.htm.

[15] BDA, St John vestry minutes, 1649-1683, 68pp: the original manuscript in 19/20-th c.(?) transcription, and transcribed into a MSWord document by the author in 2009. It was also used as a teaching tool with classes of third-year undergraduate history students, who, spared the difficulties of seventeenth-century palaeography were nevertheless given rigorous instruction in the value of accuracy, precision and completeness, and the mutability of names and other spellings, as well as the sorts of work undertaken by a seventeenth^-century vestry.

[16] Commissaries were first appointed, by Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, across the foreign outposts of the Anglican Church, to act as overseers of the clergy within that region, and spokespeople for the clergy to the Bishop and vice versa: William Wilson Manross, The Fulham Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library: American Colonial Section (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965); Sarah Barber, ‘“Let it be an Englishman”. Scots and Irish in the Anglican clergy of the Caribbean, 1610-1740’, in Douglas Hamilton and Allan I. Macinnes (eds.), Mobility and Identity from Jacobitism to Empire, 1680-1820 (forthcoming 2012); P.F. Campbell, ‘The Barbados vestries, 1627-1700’, part I JBMHS vol.xxxvii.1 (1983): pp.35-56: part II JBMHS vol.xxxvii.2 (1984): pp.174-96.

[17] BDA, St John’s vestry minutes, p.15: meeting of the vestry, minister and churchwardens, 9 Sep., 1661; p.37, 5 Feb., 1676(7).

[18] BDA, St John’s vestry minutes, p.47: 17 March 1678(9).

[19] BDA St John’s vestry minutes, pp.51-52: 24 Nov., 1679. It appears from a reference to 1681, in which Benjamin Cryer was to be paid an extra £20 sterling as he was to move into ‘a new house’ that the building took around two years to completion; Roger H. Leech, ‘Impermanent architecture in the English colonies of the eastern Caribbean: new contexts for innovation in the early modern Atlantic world’, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture vol.10, (2005): pp.153-67; J. S. Handler and S. Bergman, ‘Vernacular Houses and Domestic Material Culture on Barbados Sugar Plantations, 1650-1838’, Journal of Caribbean History, vol. 43: pp.1-36.

[20] Sir Richard Dutton’s responses to the heads of enquiry about Barbados, 11 June 1681, The National Archives (TNA), Colonial Papers, vol. xlvii, No. 7, and Col. Entry Bk., vol. vii., pp. 76–84; Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, vol.11: 1681-1685 (1898), pp. 65-80; ‘The historic sites and buildings of Barbados’, The Report of the Committee to enquire into the present condition of historic sites etc.’, JBMHS vol.1.1 (1933): pp.16-32.

[21] P.F. Campbell, ‘Aspects of Barbados land tenure, 1627-1663’, JBHMS vol.xxxvii.2 (1984): pp.112-58.

[22] For an example of a surviving printed indenture from seventeenth-century Barbados see that between William Powrey (an alias for Hay) on the one hand and Anthony Turnell of Berkshire, dated 2 Dec., 1648, ‘Printed for Nicholas Bourn, at the South-entrance of the Royall-Exchange’: National Archives of Scotland (NAS), GD504/2/72/5/1.

[23] The first is RB3/1, and begins with a series of more political documents in which attempts were made to secure propriety following the dispute over agency between Henry Hawley and Henry Huncks (figure 1 shows RB3/1), and the index volume, valuable as an historical tool of analysis in its own right, is RB3/48.

[24] The author has a hand transcribed the index of names and volume references from RB3/48 – ‘Index to Recopied Deeds’ – between 1640 and 1660, and is in the process of typing up the list to allow it to be edited and analysed. This hand-written list comes to 171 A4 pages.

[25] Sarah Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), pp.124-40; Idem, ‘Power in the English Caribbean: the Proprietorship of Lord Willoughby of Parham’, in L.H. Roper and B. Van Ruymbeke (eds.), Constructing early-modern Empires: Proprietary Ventures in the Atlantic World, 1500-1750 (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2007), pp.189-212; John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI., Cabinet Gm667 Di Ms.: ‘A Discription of the Coleny of Surranam in Guiana Drawne in the Yeare 1667’.

[26] One of the main reasons that the deeds are currently consulted, but in consequence, a source of contested authority between the BDA’s responsibility to keep the island’s past, and the Land Registry’s role in ensuring just and fair rights to land in the present: see below.

[27] Even this seemingly small detail is important, signifying as it does, a degree of settlement and permanence on the part of this man operating as a merchant, although it makes it more difficult to trace his genealogy in Britain and Ireland.

[28] BDA, RB3/1 p.106, listed 9 Jan., 1643(4); given the construction of his name, Jacob may have been one of the so-called White Jews of the Portuguese East Indies, which fell under Dutch control: Pius Malekandathil, ‘Winds of change and links of continuity: a study of the merchant groups of Kerala and the channels of their trade, 100-1800’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol.50.2 (2007): pp.259-86.

[29] The ministers were often without glebe, we have seen that they did not have a stipulated house, and regular payments of levy, in kind, were not made by parishioners and were of no immediate use to the minister if paid, for example, in cotton wool: Barber, ‘Let him be an Englishman’, op. cit..

[30] BDA, St Michael, Barbados parish register, photograph by Sarah Barber, ‘St Mich 261.jpg’, created 27.09.09.

[31] This may have been Helen Rich, née Thornborough, grand-daughter of the Bishop of Worcester, and married to Robert Rich Jnr: Vere Langford Oliver, Monumental Inscriptions: Tombstones of the Island of Barbados (n.p.: Borgo Press, 1989), p.6 (Oliver originally collected his grave memorials in 1913-14).

[32] Samuel was born on 2 Nov., 1679.

[33] Col. Papers, Vol. xlvii., No. 49; CSPC vol.11, 1681-1685 (1898), pp. 98-105.

[34] Figure 3: BDA St Michael parish register, photograph by Sarah Barber, ‘St Mich 163.jpg’, taken 27 Sep., 2009, showing entries from 22 Jan.- 27 Feb., 1670(1).

[35] Geraldine Lane, Tracing ancestors in Barbados: a practical Guide (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company Inc., 2006).

[36] Records offices and registries often charge a daily rate to readers, the Registry on the outskirts of Spanish Town, Jamaica, is one example, and whilst their records (in this case, wills) are on microfilm, they do not possess the equipment to copy the reels, or to make print-outs from them in situ, so the only option is to hand copy what amounts to 500 pages of un-catalogued material, out of chronological or page order.

[37] Henry S. Fraser, ‘A tribute: Ronald Vernon Taylor’, JBMHS vol.xlv pp.36-39; Jill Sheppard, The 'Redlegs' of Barbados: Their Origins and History (New York: Millwood, 1977); Warren Alleyn and Jill Sheppard, The Barbados Garrison and Its Buildings (Macmillan Caribbean, 1990); Michael I. King, ‘Address to the AGM, Caribbean Conservation Association, 3 Feb., 2006, http://www.oas.org/dsd/Events/english/Documents/AddresstoAGMCCA-Barbados.pdf (recovered 02.02.10). Henry S. Fraser is another person resident in Barbados, as a medical doctor, whose interest in the island has manifested itself through historical studies, particularly on the island’s architecture, and Ronnie Hughes is generous in his help of scholars and others. Hughes collaborated to create a pamphlet exploring the connection between Barbados and Carolina, and this was punned in a BBC programme by Belinda Artingstoll, ‘The Barbados – Cumbria connection’ (BBC, 2007)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cumbria/content/articles/2007/02/23/slavery_cumbria_barbados_2007_feature.shtml
(recovered 20.02.11); Warren Alleyne and Henry S. Fraser, The Barbados-Carolina Connection (Macmillan Caribbean, 1989). The former, about the Lowther family, would have benefitted from knowing about a Cumbrian connection with Barbados that pre-dated Robert Lowther’s term as governor: the Barbados Deeds reveal a company of Lowther and Stobart operating in the 1640s.

[38] http://www.genealogical.com/
(recovered 11.02.10);
http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Library/FHL/frameset_Library.asp (recovered 11.02.10).

[39] Barbados Parochial registers, Series A, 1637-1850 (Anglican), Salt Lake City, Utah, filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah, 1978: a total of 38 reels of 35mm film. The Index to the parochial records is catalogued as BDA numbers RL1/57, 65, 68, 69. There are also St Michael baptism, marriage and burials from 1648; Christ Church baptisms from 1637 and marriages and burials from 1643; St Philip baptisms from 1648, marriages and burials from 1672; St John marriages and burials from 1657; and St James baptisms, marriages and burials from 1693.

[40] This is most striking with the court records known as Record of Enrolment books: Court of Common Pleas, Antigua, 1676-1907, Salt Lake City, Utah : Filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah, 1993, 10 reels, 16mm. Those collected are ROE Book, Box 187, 1676-1739, a total of 69 document images. The originals are so fragile they are unable to be produced and the microfilms, left unedited, are illegible.

[41] Jerome S. Handler and JoAnn Jacoby, ‘Slave Names and Naming in Barbados, 1650-1830’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd.ser. vol. 53.4 (1996): pp.685-728.

[42] Hilary McD Beckles, White servitude and Black slavery in Barbados, 1627-1715, (Knoxville, TN.: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Idem., ‘A “riotous and unruly lot”: Irish indentured servants and freemen in the English West Indies, 1644-1713’, William and Mary Quarterly 3^rd.ser., vol. 47.4 (1990): pp.503-522.

[43] Other forms of identity loss, because of the enormity of the breach with Africa which the slave trade engendered, have been partially addressed by technological advances such as genetic testing.

[44] In June 1640 appraisers listed the property (chattels) on the estate recently purchased by Ensign George Buckley, which included the labour of eleven indentured male servants, one of whom was listed solely as 'Daniel the Irishman', whose labour was worth 100lbs cotton wool per year, in comparison to others, whose labour could be worth over seven times as much: BDA, RB3/1, p.14.

[45] Letter, Sarah Barber to Mr Timothy Maynard, Barbados Land Registry Department, 02.04.04: permission at this stage was sought to copy up to the year 1700, and thus for volumes RB3/1-7. Subsequent experience shows that extending the seventeenth-century search to c.1720 is prudent and would involve including vol.RB3/8; Timothy Maynard, ‘Country experience in land issues – Barbados’, (Land Tenure Center, 2003).

[46] Most marks are recorded as a simple x-cross. For the deed of Adrian Turke, however, the transcriber has drawn an escutcheon featuring three curved lines which are probably either scimitars or crescent moons: BDA, RB3/1 p.98; Sarah Barber transcriptions, vol. i, p.11.

[47] There are currently ten volumes of these notebooks, amounting to approximately 1000 pages of transcript. Figure 2 is scanned here at a resolution of 600dpi, and it is still not possible to read those sections in which the pencil marks have not been subsequently overwritten in black pen (which makes the process even longer and more cumbersome).

[48] It is possible to spell out words in the voice-recognition software, but imagine how much time is added to this process when virtually every word is not spelled consistently, and one has no means of knowing how accurate was the nineteenth-century transcribers' versions in any case: thus, ironically, the decision to modernise the spelling renders the 21st-century version closer to the 17th-century originals.

[49] Barbados parochial registers, Series A, 1637-1850 (Anglican), SLC, Utah, Genealogical Society of Utah, 1978 (38 reels, 35mm). There is also a burials’ register for ‘other denominations’ which dates back to the seventeenth century, in this case the prominent Jewish community in Barbados: BDA, RL1/86 (hand transcribed, SEB A4 notebooks, vol.5, pp.6-10); E.M. Shilstone, Monumental Inscriptions in the Jewish Synagogue at Bridgetown Barbados with Historical Notes from 1630 (Barbados: Macmillan, 1988).

[50] The First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ‘The Family’, http://lds.org/family/proclamation?lang=eng (recovered 22.02.11): ‘The divine plan of happiness enables family relationships to be perpetuated beyond the grave. Sacred ordinances and covenants available in holy temples make it possible for individuals to return to the presence of God and for families to be united eternally’.

[51] https://www.familysearch.org/

(recovered 22.02.11).

[52] https://giveback.familysearch.org/: ‘Giving back: together we can make a difference’, (recovered 22.02.11). Amongst current projects is listed the baptism records of Jamaica from 1664, but this is the only Anglophone listing from amongst very few that cover the Caribbean region and seems less concerned with earlier time periods than the 19^th century onwards. My thanks go to the National Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica for providing a full set of microfilm copies of the extant parish registers of Jamaica to c.1720.

[53] Email: Anonymous respondent from Family Research Support [Support@FamilySearch.org] to Sarah Barber, 21.02.11 (recovered 22.02.11).

[54] http://www.caricom.org/ (recovered 22.02.11); carbica (2011) Caribbean Regional Branch of the International Council of Archives,
http://www.carbica.org/index_eng.htm

(recovered 15 February 2011).

[55] And regional islands which are British Overseas’ Territories.

_____

Dr Sarah Barber is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University (UK), specialising in the seventeenth century. Her recent work has been dedicated to identifying, collecting and disseminating the extant history of the Anglophone Caribbean. This has widened the debate about intellectual property, copying and public access, explored here.

_____

APPOSITIONS:

Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern
Literature & Culture,

http://appositions.blogspot.com/,

ISSN: 1946-1992,

Volume Four (2011): Texts & Contexts

_____

Sheila Cavanagh: “Digital Archive Economics”

2011-05-31T16:48:00.001-07:00

Sheila T. Cavanagh

Emory University

How Does Your Archive Grow?:

Academic Politics & Economics in the Digital Age

1> “Access” is a familiar word in the electronic age. As blogs, YouTube, and other self-publishing venues proliferate, the supposed democracy of the digital era becomes more entrenched in popular imagination. While the ranks of the electronically published grow daily, common perceptions about this trend do not accurately reflect important constraints upon the creation and maintenance of digital scholarly archives. Even though digital humanities is becoming more accepted as a field and is gaining exposure in the academic press, the economic and political obstacles facing this realm have not been addressed sufficiently. Those directly involved with digital archives contend with numerous issues that the general academic community often fails to understand or address, even though they bear significant implications for the future of scholarship. While discussions on relevant topics occur at germane conferences, such as the annual Digital Humanities conference (at Stanford in 2011; in London during 2010; http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/home.html), are beginning to be aired more frequently in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education, and are being tackled by the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTC), the digital world is evolving far more rapidly than most academic communities can adapt. As the 2010 Berkeley study on “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication” indicates, “Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems” (Executive Summary, v). As a partial consequence, while “access” may be a popular buzzword in the early twenty-first century, electronic scholarship is often far less “open” than many of us would wish.

2> In this essay, I will discuss some of these vexing concerns from my perspective as Director of the Emory Women Writers Resource Project (EWWRP) since 1995. A digital collection of over three-hundred female-authored and female-centered texts, the EWWRP includes genres such as travelogues, novels, romances, broadsides, plays, and pamphlets, extending from the 16th to the early 20th centuries, and ranging in subject matter from Native American Writers, to World War I poets, to Suffragists, Abolitionists, and to Early Modern Women Writers. This evolving archive is available without charge at
http://womenwriters.library.emory.edu/. The EWWRP began as a solo project fairly early in the era of electronic archive formation and it has encountered many of the challenges, as well as some of the successes, that shape such ventures. For example, the EWWRP became a collaborative effort almost immediately, due to limitations of funding and technical expertise. While collaborative undertakings still face opposition in the humanities during promotion and tenure decisions, they are essential in most digital endeavors. As the Berkeley report indicates, “Balancing the institutional need to evaluate an individual’s body of scholarship with the collaborative demands of grand challenge questions will only increase” (17). Particularly in the humanities, where collaborative scholarly endeavors tend to be viewed with suspicion, innovative scholarship is being hampered by evaluative mechanisms that have not kept pace with nontraditional models. This mistrust is unfortunate. As Christine L. Borgman notes, it is often true that “Collaborative projects attract more resources and more attention. If properly designed, they may also be more sustainable, creating platforms on which new projects can be constructed” (48).

3> Recognizing the institutional roadblocks that can thwart such endeavors, the 2006 MLA task force report on promotion and tenure suggests that “Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship” (11). The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) also acknowledge these issues. Accordingly, they are co-sponsoring an institute designed to produce “collaborative working papers that might influence the larger cultures of peer-review and promotion/tenure”
(http://www.nines.org/). There is little indication, however, that typical departments and institutions of higher learning are responding adequately to this charge, despite the widespread recognition that traditional publishing venues can no longer support the ongoing needs of many scholarly communities. In my case, I never intended for the EWWRP to replace the second monograph commonly needed for promotion to full professor. This is fortunate, since I have never received any indication that this database or its large NEH grant played any role in the decision-making process when I was promoted. Many reports on current faculty assessment practices suggest that this response to digital scholarship is common and that scholars seeking tenure and/or promotion generally avoid such risky projects. For example, although the Berkeley study indicates that some (unnamed) humanities programs are beginning to welcome nontraditional scholarship, it also emphasizes the professional dangers still associated with such work:

We found no evidence to suggest that “tech-savvy” young graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, or assistant professors are bypassing traditional publishing practices. In fact, as arguably the most vulnerable populations in the scholarly community, one would expect them to hew to the norms of their chosen discipline, and they do. Established scholars seem to exercise significantly more freedom in the choice of publication outlet than their untenured colleagues. (1)

4> Despite the academy’s constant appetite for new ideas and approaches, this report indicates insufficient recognition of the need for new paradigms to be accommodated more expeditiously in promotion and tenure procedures, if modern scholarship is going to take advantage of twenty-first century possibilities. MLA and HASTAC are producing guides to the evaluation of digital scholarship (“Tenure in a Digital Era” 1), but few colleges and universities have existing models for them to draw from. While such endeavors are gaining institutional support, the information presented at the 2008 and 2009 MLA convention workshops on evaluating digital scholarship (the first such “official” MLA gatherings) suggests that efforts to formulate appropriate evaluative criteria for these projects have not progressed substantially. In addition, as Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the MLA, indicates, current tenure guidelines fail to acknowledge that digital work can simultaneously fit into teaching and research categories. Furthermore, many institutions count all digital scholarship as service, “a solution seen as unsatisfactory because many of these project (sic) are in fact focused on scholarship and teaching, and because service typically doesn’t count for much in tenure reviews” (“Tenure” 2).

5> Luckily for my project, when I started the EWWRP, I had just achieved tenure and was largely undistracted by future evaluative considerations. In addition, Emory’s Woodruff Library had recently received foundation support in order to establish the Lewis H. Beck Center for Electronic Collections and Services; without the Beck Center, it is unlikely that the EWWRP would have survived or flourished. In the early days of the collaboration, Beck Center Director Chuck Spornick and I gradually built the EWWRP with the financial backing of a couple of internal grants, which we used to hire graduate and undergraduate student assistants. The Beck grant provided hardware, so the EWWRP was predominantly in need of intellectual and physical labor. Dr. Spornick and I had relatively free rein to work as we saw fit. Since part of the Beck Center’s charge was to cooperate with faculty on such projects, establishing and maintaining the partnership was fairly straightforward. Applying for our successful NEH grant, which allowed us to add over two hundred texts to the site, was more complicated and demanded significant institutional support, but we didn’t need anyone’s approval to start the search for external financing. We discovered a relevant funding opportunity and pursued it. The application process itself was arduous, but Vice Provost Dr. Joan Gotwals, then Director of the Library, supported our endeavor at every step.

6> Now, however, grant applications do not coalesce with such relative ease. Before we can start any fundraising venture, Emory’s library and university development offices must agree that our project and its needs rank with sufficient prominence on various institutional priority lists. Other divisions of the library or university may also be eyeing grants from the NEH, the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), or other potential funding agencies, and there are now institutional review boards that need to grant approval before an application can be undertaken. In any given year, it is by no means guaranteed that innovations we envision for our database of early women writers will coincide with institutional desires. Similarly, funding entities change their granting criteria regularly. Digitizing, for instance, is now far less a priority than institutional collaborations, technological trendsetting, or developing innovative support for scholarship; such changes to funding criteria are continual. A further complication arises, as Matthew G. Kirschenbaum observes, because “we now have the great benefit of digital start-up grants, but not dedicated awards for finishing or closing projects” (3). Most individual faculty members are hard-pressed, moreover, to keep abreast of relevant funding opportunities and obstacles germane to both internal and external financial sources. Furthermore, as Julia Flanders, a pioneer in digital humanities, notes, those who do both electronic and textual scholarship continue to confound current categories of academic work:

In this context, my own detour from graduate study into the academic workplace has raised a number of pressing questions about the nature of academic work, and specifically about the distinction between the more "applied" or "low" forms of academic activity (textual editing, running journals, compiling reference works, organizing conferences, directing research centers, serving on committees, and the like) to the more "pure" or "high" forms involving textual interpretation and the writing of books. Even the institutional location of the job I have held—within the division of the university responsible for technology support—is significant here, making my hybrid role as a researcher and an administrator/consultant all the more anomalous to both my scholarly and my technical colleagues. The fact that in any given week I might design a database, write an academic article on textual editing or on text markup, write a grant proposal, fill out payroll forms, or serve on an MLA committee, suggests a chaotic professional space and identity in which some essential boundaries have eroded.
(http://www.diegesis.net/julia/thesis/flanders_dissertation.html)

7> Flanders interrupted her traditional graduate career in the English Department at Brown in order to work with the Brown Women Writers (BWW) database, then wrote her dissertation on related issues. Currently, such hybrid positions as she describes are appearing in some conventional departments, but the job descriptions of most faculty members do not yet accommodate the possibility of electronic scholarship, including archive building.

8> While Emory Library has created a number of relevant positions with titles such as “digital strategist,” and some international electronic archives, such as the path-breaking BWW, boast full-time academic and digital staff, the processes by which an individual professor can establish and maintain a digital project remain relatively undefined at Emory and elsewhere. Since the EWWRP was created before the current economic downturn, it has been the grateful recipient of several internal awards, including funding for a series of graduate fellows who served as project managers. Many of these talented students have parlayed this experience into dissertation chapters, publications, and subsequent employment opportunities. My former graduate student, Dr. Erika Farr, for instance, has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Guardian for her cutting-edge work with Salman Rushdie’s digital archive. Director of born-digital initiatives at Emory’s Woodruff Library, Dr. Farr notes, “those computers [in the Rushdie archive] coming through the doors of Woodruff Library have redirected my career. This is not a one-off. This is a transformative change” (Loftus, 3). Dr. Farr’s lengthy experience with the EWWRP helped prepare her for the work she now undertakes to great acclaim. It remains unclear, however, how long this legacy of training new graduate students through the EWWRP can continue in our constricted financial climate. The prospects for new projects are even less certain, as universities seek to reduce expenditures. While interest in digital undertakings is growing, financial resources are diminishing, at least for the immediate future.

9> At the same time, since digital work still prompts evaluative hesitation, other kinds of professional support can also not be taken for granted. Consequently, the production of digital archives remain challenging undertakings for junior faculty and may also be foolhardy choices for more senior academics. Successful archives need to keep adapting to what is considered germane and important to a wide array of institutional interests, many of which bear no relationship to the organizing principle of the archive or to the scholarly interests of involved faculty members. Nevertheless, most archives are neither formed nor expanded as self-published projects. As the Berkeley report indicates, for instance, “The preservation and storage of a researcher’s own data are thorny issues. . . Scholars are tremendously dependent on third parties, such as curators, librarians, publishers, and even political authorities (in the case of archeology) for the conservation of primary materials” (18). As this observation suggests, “access” to texts, funds, and other modes of support remains daunting. Projects like the EWWRP, therefore, can only grow if those involved stay alert to innumerable technical and institutional issues. Women writers, like other archival voices, need advocates with a wider set of skills and knowledge than traditional subject expertise in order to establish and maintain broad access and sustainability.

10> Another kind of digital archive developed at Emory concurrently with the EWWRP, through a process that illustrates some of the challenges facing digital scholars who pursue other routes toward building archives. Harry Rusche has been teaching at Emory since 1962, so he no longer faces tenure or promotion concerns. About a decade ago, he established the Shakespeare in the World archives at Emory, which are openly accessible at http://shakespeare.emory.edu/. At that time, he was able to enlist staff from the library to help design his website. If he were initiating the project today, he would be less likely to find such assistance, because there are more scholars seeking to take advantage of electronic resources and more official barriers impeding informal arrangements between faculty and staff. Apart from this initial computer assistance, Rusche has built his archive largely independently of institutional support. Today, the Shakespeare and the Players section of the site contains approximately nine hundred images and about eight hundred pages of accompanying text. The Shakespeare in the World site is billed as remaining continually “in progress,” since it is not an endeavor that can ever be deemed “complete.” As Kirschenbaum and the other authors of a 2009 cluster of articles in Digital Humanities Quarterly suggest, however, the contradictions inherent in declaring a digital project either “done” or “in progress” can create significant problems in current institutional structures. This indeterminacy works for Rusche only because he does not face internal pressures to proceed at any artificially-induced pace or to “finish” his digital collection. At the same time, he does not receive university financial support, outside of his salary and the standard computer equipment all faculty receive; neither has he sought external funding. The archive, which includes original postcards depicting historic Shakespearean actors, has grown through his private acquisition of materials and diligent commitment of time.

11> His project, which consistently receives substantial internet traffic and scholarly accolades, suggests that some archives can be built with modest institutional financial support; it also demonstrates one way that digital innovation can be influenced-- positively or otherwise-- by individual career needs. If the state of technology had enabled Rusche to begin such a digital resource as a younger scholar, he would have risked tenure by devoting his time and expertise here rather than to traditional publishing. Even by the time he came up for full professor, there were few early modern scholars working on digital projects who could be asked to evaluate his electronic archives. As mentioned, groups such as the MLA have only recently begun to discuss the evolving role of digital scholarship in conventional promotion and tenure models and few universities have established criteria for evaluating such projects (http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital). The Berkeley findings suggest that it would still be unwise for a junior scholar to devote significant time to the creation of digital archives. Accordingly, the fact that both Rusche and I had tenure before we embarked on our individual digital adventures over a decade ago made this work possible. In her Presidential letter 2010 MLA President, Sidonie Smith, acknowledges that “Doctoral students in the modern languages will increasingly create and use digital archives and invent multimodal forms of scholarly presentation and communication in the next decade (2).” She further predicts, “Future faculty members in the modern languages and literatures will require flexible and improvisational habits and collaborative skills to bring their scholarship to fruition” (2). While Smith’s statements seem irrefutable, the academy has a long way to go before it adequately addresses the implications of such scholarly changes. Degree programs and promotion and tenure guidelines need to make far more rapid advances in adjusting to the electronic age than the typical glacial pace of academic reform generally accommodates.

12> Although some of us who are developing digital archives can ignore the substantial challenges of conforming to doctoral and promotion requirements, the timing of Rusche’s project signals other important concerns about this field that have barely begun to be widely addressed. Having taught at Emory for forty-nine years, Rusche is unlikely to remain on the faculty indefinitely. Along with other first-wave digital innovators, he will undoubtedly move on to other interests in the foreseeable future. Those who build archives are neither immortal nor static. Some retire, lose interest, change institutions, or otherwise become unable or unwilling to continue their digital scholarship. In a conversation last year, Dr. Naomi Nelson, then Acting Director of Emory’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library (MARBL), noted that such individual professional realities are beginning to prompt discussion at Emory and she used Rusche’s site as an apt local example, since it is one whose value is widely acknowledged. Although institutions have long histories of dealing with ageing print scholarship, digital work raises a host of new questions. How, for example, can sites be preserved and/or disseminated when the original creator(s) exit the scene for whatever reason? Who decides which faculty projects should be absorbed into other institutional units? When and how should this happen? Who “owns” the content of such sites? How can the expanding range of technological, intellectual property, and other relevant issues be adjudicated? What happens to faculty projects not deemed “worthy” of retention? Since faculty members who build archives in isolation typically choose their own software and procedures, how complex will ongoing preservation and dissemination become? Whose financial and intellectual responsibilities come into play? Emory, like most institutions, faces these and other unpredictable and vexing questions regarding the long-term prospects of digital projects. The EWWRP is fortunate that the current director of the Beck Center (Dr. Alice Hickcox) and her predecessor (Dr. Chuck Spornick) have been involved in its development since its inception. Such participatory stability cannot be assumed, however, so the vagaries of institutional memory and commitment also come into play as long-term projects are managed. As Smith remarks, “Experimenting with new media stimulates new habits of mind and enhanced cultures of collegiality” (2). Currently, at least in the humanities, such models of collegiality and collaboration, as well as the assessment of projects involving these new media venues, remain largely unexplored in traditional frameworks for awarding merit. The issues raised by Smith and others, therefore, need urgent consideration, given the unstoppable rate of electronic innovation and the already harsh environment facing graduate students and junior faculty.

13> At the moment, a number of Emory librarians, faculty members, and others share interests and responsibilities in the digital domain; this year, the Digital Scholarly Commons (DiSC) and the graduate Digital Certificate Program are being launched, thereby ensuring continued institutional attention to related issues. These initiatives, currently distinct from each other, are designed to carry Emory forward into the next phase of digital development. DiSC, to be housed in the Woodruff Library under the direction of Dr. Miriam Posner and Dr Stewart Varner, will coordinate and support faculty engagement with digital projects. Its specific charge has not yet been made public, but it has been developed in response to the long-term desire of faculty members and librarians to have a central resource for information and assistance in digital projects--such as archive-building--that demand expertise in germane technological, copyright, and ownership issues, as well as providing leadership through the inevitable, unpredictable developments in this field. The Digital Certificate Program, on the other hand, co-directed by Dr. Spornick and Dr. Allen Tullos, editor of the digital journal Southern Spaces, will offer Emory graduate students the opportunity to earn certification in digital scholarship and media through the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts. The certificate will require a series of relevant courses, as well as an internship with an appropriate electronic Emory venture. Comparable to Emory graduate certificates in Women’s Studies and Psychoanalytic Studies, the new credential will prepare students to teach and do research in these areas. While archive building is only one facet of current and forthcoming digital scholarship, one can assume that at least some of the students who graduate with this expertise will participate in future archival projects. Moreover, we can hope that the introduction of official certification within a long-standing division of a prominent research university will help further the progress and acceptance of digital scholarship in our evolving academic world.

14> While the concept of “open access” will probably remain fairly restricted for the near future in academic domains, professional acceptance and recognition for such work seems more imminent. Economic pressures appear likely to force universities to treat digital scholarship as legitimate successors to traditional scholarly production. As this essay suggests, however, professors, librarians, and other members of the academic community have considerable work to do before digital work, including the creation of archives, reaches professional equilibrium. Although I remain sadly skeptical that “open access” in the academic world will ever resemble the “open access” found in the electronic domain more broadly, I believe that the power and longevity of this digital age is irrefutable and that domestic and international universities can no longer postpone more adequate recognition of the ways that the internet is altering our scholarly world.

WORKS CITED:

Borgman, Christine L. “The Digital Future is Now: A Call to Action for the Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 3.4: Fall 2009. Web.

Center for Studies in Higher Education: University of California, Berkeley. Final Report: Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines. Diane Harley, Ph.D., Senior Researcher and Principal Investigator; Sophia Krzys Acord, Ph.D.; Sarah Earl-Novell, Ph.D.; Shannon Lawrence, M.A.; C. Judson King, Professor, Provost Emeritus, and Principal Investigator. CSHE 1.10 (January 2010). Web.

Cohen, Patricia. “Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit.” New York Times, March 26, 2010.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/books/16archive.html. Web.

Emory Women Writers Project. Sheila T. Cavanagh,

Director.womenwriters.library.emory.edu/ Web.

Flanders, Julia. Digital Humanities and the Politics of Scholarly Work. 2005.

http://www.diegesis.net/julia/thesis/flanders_dissertation.html. Web.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Done: Finishing Projects in the Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. Volume 3.2: Spring 2009. Web.

Loftus, Mary J. “The Author’s Desktop.” Emory Magazine. Winter 2010.

http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/2010/winter/authors Web.

Madrigal, Alexis. “The Best Parts of Rushdie’s ‘Papers’ are His Old Computers.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2001/01/the-best-parts-or-rushdies-papers-are-his-old-computers/69211/. Web.

Modern Language Association. Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Promotion and Tenure. December 2006.

http://search.mla.org/search?q=promotion+tenure. Web.

Naughton, John. “If You Have Lofty Ambitions for Your Legacy, Head For the Attic,” The Observer, 9 January, 2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/09/digital-archiving-cloud-computing-salman-rushdie. Web.

NEH/NINES call for applications. Summer Institute: Evaluating Digital Scholarship.

http://www.nines.org/news/?m=201010. Web.

Nelson, Dr. Naomi. Private Conversation. February 12, 2010.

Shakespeare Illustrated. Harry Rusche, Director.

shakespeare.emory.edu/illustrated_index.cfm Web.

Smith, Sidonie. “Beyond the Dissertation Monograph.” 2-3. Modern Language Association Newsletter. Spring 2010. http://www.mla.org/nl_archive Web.

“Tenure in a Digital Age.” Inside Higher Ed. Web.

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Sheila T. Cavanagh is Professor of English and 2010-2011 Emory College Distinguished Teaching Scholar at Emory University. Author of print books on Edmund Spenser and Lady Mary Wroth, she is Director of the web-based Emory Women Writers Resource Project and Editor of the digital journal, The Spenser Review.

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APPOSITIONS:

Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern

Literature & Culture,

http://appositions.blogspot.com/,

ISSN: 1946-1992,

Volume Four (2011): Texts & Contexts

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