The Electronic Piers Plowman Archive and
SEENET
Four years ago Thorlac Turville-Petre and I found ourselves
talking about the simultaneous usefulness and unreliability of
the electronic editions of the Middle English texts available to
us. My own attempt to determine the metrical rules underlying
the composition of Middle English alliterative verse and our
common use of electronic materials in editing The Wars of
Alexander for the Early English Text Society had convinced
both of us that electronic technology offered extraordinary
opportunities to students of medieval literature, but we both had
found that, in most respects, those electronic texts available to
us were less reliable than most printed texts. Eventually, our
conversations led to our forming the Society for Early English
and Norse Electronic Texts (SEENET). We cannot claim any
originality in the idea, since Furnivall had anticipated us by
well over a century in forming the Early English Text Society
(EETS). Indeed, our first thought was to approach the EETS
governing board with the idea of cooperating in publishing
electronic versions of their texts. Initially, we thought to
call the new society the Early English Electronic Text Society,
but the EETS thought that rather too close to its own title to be
quite suitable, and in 1991, its board saw little point in
electronic editions. We approached a number of university
presses, and in 1992 only the University of Michigan and Johns
Hopkins University presses saw any significant future for
electronic books, at least in medieval texts. Since then, the
situation has changed dramatically, and if electronic books have
become not quite as "digne as diche-water," they are no longer a
radical novelty, certainly not among medievalists.
At the time we began to contemplate SEENET, a number of
textual projects were already in existence, perhaps chief among
them the Oxford Text Archive (OTA), a major collection of
electronic versions of books already in print. I have
contributed three or four texts to the OTA, and with each text, I
included a caveat lector to the effect that it had been
inadequately proofread and that it represented only a digital
transcript of parts of an extant printed edition. In my
experience, the major difference between my contributions and
those of others in that series was the warning to users about the
probable defects of my texts. To say that much is to make no
criticism of the immensely useful Oxford Text Archive. It was
acknowledged that texts in that collection were usually prepared
in a "quick-and-dirty" fashion to make them swiftly available and
that frequently the base printed edition was chosen not because
it represented an authoritative text but because it was out of
copyright. Such texts will not, for the most part, gain the CEA
stamp of approval, but they have enabled kinds of literary
scholarship formerly unavailable to us. That said, such a
series, perhaps most like the printed editions of Everyman's
Library, is not steadily reflective of the highest standards of
editorial thinking or performance. We can and ought to do better
in the new medium.
We formed SEENET to make it easier for editors to do well,
better, and best in producing electronic texts, intending through
it to procure, produce, and disseminate scholarly electronic
editions of Old Norse, Old English and Middle English texts. We
want our texts to combine exploitation of the full capacities of
computer technology with preservation of the highest standards of
traditional scholarly editing. We want not only to publish
reliable machine-readable texts but we want them accompanied with
highly competent introductory materials, glossaries, annotations,
and apparatus. We want our texts to bear all of the virtues of
traditional print editions and at the same time to begin to
create the new kinds of text enabled by computer
technology.
It has become commonplace in predictions of the effects of
electronic technologies on the study of literature to compare
modern editors with Gutenberg and Caxton, to speak of fundamental
and revolutionary developments to come in our conception of text.
I have written such prose myself, and I don't dismiss such
claims; however, I want here to summarize a recent piece from
The European English Messenger that suggests another
possible view of the matter. The editor, hoping to stimulate
submissions on electronic texts, detailed his experience with a
real electronic text, an edition of Virginia Woolf's novel The
Waves. He found a number of problems, all soluble, but all
fairly tedious to deal with. Some reflected conventions of early
computer editing; for instance, the entire text was in upper case
letters. Still worse, the text itself was not reliable and
required substantial revision. Worst of all, once he had
corrected the text, he found it useless: "What," he somewhat
plaintively asked, "are we to search for?" Moreover, he found
that his condition was general amongst literary critics:
A first set of letters to literary critics
and media experts at other universities, asking what on
earth one is to do with all this electronically stored
textery, garnered some expressions of sympathy, but not
more. Some of them suggested it was a good question,
they might get in touch with me again. The rest is
silence.... May I appeal to readers who have
discovered what to do with or to a text on the computer
to advise us what pleasures those of us miss who are
puzzled by all these oysters that refuse to yield the
pearls they had promised?
Surely the emperour of CD does have some clothes on?1
A second story concerns, at least for medieval texts, the
radical importance of editors having mastered the traditional
philological disciplines as well as the new technology. Three or
four years ago at Kalamazoo, after I had first described our
plans for editing Piers Plowman, a young man expressed
considerable interest in the Piers
Plowman Electronic Archive and asked "What must I do to
edit a Middle English electronic text?" I responded that he
should first master Old and Middle English, reading broadly in
both major and minor texts in a variety of dialects; that he
should study languages, at a minimum Latin, Old French, and Old
Norse; that he should devote time to formal study of historical
linguistics, especially the history of English; that he should
study paleography and codicology; that he should learn as much as
he could about scribal practice and the usus scribendi of
the author(s) he wished to edit. "But what about the computer
programs?" he asked. "Oh, that," I responded, assuring him that
he could learn what he needed to know about the computer programs
in a month or so. For as crucial as the machine is to computer
editing, the indispensable disciplines to master first are the
traditional ones, that body of knowledge built up laboriously
over the past two or three centuries--in short, the Old
Philology.2
I am, like most folk assembled here, convinced that the new
technology will revolutionize the old disciplines, even the hide-
bound Old Philology. Imagine where we would be today had the
Reverend Walter W. Skeat possessed a fast micro-computer!
However, as confident as I am that we live at an exciting time of
textual discovery, I am about equally certain that the new
"electronically stored textery" is not likely to result in
validating last (or even this) year's flavor in literary theory.
The fundamental principles and processes of textual editing have
not changed in essence as the result of the newly introduced
technology, at least not yet. I am tempted, against better
judgment, to predict they will not change.
However, it is easy, in any case, to see that at least one
centuries-long debate will, in an age of electronic editing, no
longer divide theorists. The technology already available makes
irrelevant the question of whether the editor's task should
consist of constructing conservative documentary editions or
interventionist critical texts. We can now see that the old
argument was economically and technologically constructed, based
on limitations that no longer need trouble us. With electronic
texts, we may, indeed, we ought to, have both kinds of text.
Editors of the next decades should steadily present "best text"
diplomatic transcriptions of some, most, or all the important
manuscript witnesses to a text. But the editorial project need
not stop there, for editors may, and I think should, present in
the same edition archetypes and hypearchetypes and as many
theoretical constructions of a critical text as their good sense
requires and their ambition and energy permit.
There ought to be many mansions in the house of electronic
texts, many viable models for text editing. The most basic kind
of edition is the bare textual archive. The Tudor Poetry
Textbase at the University of Otago in New Zealand offers one
such model. When it is completed, it will incorporate some
quarter million lines of Tudor poetry, all in TEI-conformant SGML
markup, but with a minimal amount of apparatus and annotation.
It will serve primarily as a textbase, an accurate rendering in
electronic form of a complete historical corpus of poetry in
machine-manipulable form. In this instance, adequacy of markup
and the accuracy of its representation of the original texts will
constitute its fundamental virtues. In this respect, such a
project represents the ethos of the Oxford Text Archives and the
Center for Electronic Technology in the Humanities
(CETH), but perfected with
scholarly care in editing the texts afresh from the primary data.
Such text bases, reliably edited, but with a minimum of
annotation and apparatus, are likely to have permanent
value.
That value comes not least from the fact that a reliable
electronic text provides a foundation upon which textual
scholarship of the future may build. When Thorlac Turville-Petre
and I began work on The Wars of Alexander, W. W. Skeat's
1886 EETS edition was immensely useful in helping us define the
editorial problems, but it was still necessary to re-transcribe
both manuscripts. We might well have simply proofread Skeat's
texts against both manuscripts, a practice honored over time, but
whatever the decision made at that point, there would always come
a time when the entire document had to be recopied. In the case
of the Wars, that happened twice, first when the working
transcription had to be re-typed for my dissertation and again at
the end of the process when the entire text was entered into the
publisher's computers to be typeset. In both cases, fresh errors
were introduced, and weeks of proofreading ensued. In the case
of our forthcoming edition of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS
201 (the notorious manuscript F of the B version of Piers
Plowman) each proofreading has served to correct errors in a
base text; each set of keyboardings bringing the text closer to
perfection. What is got right once can be kept right and used as
a base either for new thinking about the text or for markup for
new and different kinds of critical enquiry.3 Probably nothing
will shorten the tedious process of proofreading to assure
maintenance of the quality of the base texts, but complete re-
transcriptions need never again be made.4
We have heard Michael Pidd's characterization of the
Electronic
Canterbury Tales Project and seen portions of Kevin
Kiernan's image-oriented Electronic Beowulf
Project. The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive,
which I am constructing with a team consisting of Robert Adams,
Eric Eliason, Ralph Hanna, Thorlac Turville-Petre, and
Mícéal Vaughan, offers yet another model for the
electronic edition. In the first stage of constructing the
Archive, we are creating documentary editions with full
SGML markup of all the fifty plus manuscripts and early printed
editions. Each documentary edition will include paleographic and
codicological descriptions of each manuscript. We are recording
erasures, subpunctions, and other forms of deletion; marking
suspensions and abbreviations, marginal and interlinear additions
and corrections to the texts, changes in scribal hand or ink or
script, along with any other features of the material text we
recognize as likely to be useful to students of the poem. Since
at this level of the Archive our goal is to provide the
lections of each of the manuscripts in machine-readable form, we
shall in effect be acting as conservative editors, presenting 54
"best texts" of Piers Plowman. At this stage, we will
make no emendations, regularizations, or modernizations of these
base manuscript files.5
When libraries will permit us, we will include in the
Archive digitized color facsimiles of each manuscript,
providing hypertextual linkages that will permit a user to place
our transcriptions in windows beside the facsimiles. We expect
such transcriptions and digitized facsimiles will be of
considerable value to historical linguists, editors, and
paleographers, as well as to students of scribal habits and
methods. Though the combined facsimiles and transcriptions can
never entirely replace direct study of the manuscripts, they
permit textual study at sites remote from the originals with a
better basis than any form of photography formerly available.
Indeed, for many purposes, a color digital facsimile is superior
to the original itself because it is manipulable for
magnification as well as for color or gray-scale analysis. For
those who lack immediate access to the original manuscripts,
color digital facsimiles will answer to most literary and
philological purposes, providing immediate and inexpensive access
to their readings.
Electronic collation of a very complex documentary tradition
is now possible--thanks to Peter Robinson's splendidly useful
COLLATE program--and editors wishing to produce critical texts
can machine collate the transcriptions to produce the corpus of
variants from which they will construct the archetypes. In the
case of Piers Plowman, consistency in this large task will
be facilitated by access to computer-generated concordances of
each of the manuscripts as well as to edited texts of all three
versions of the poem.
A recent and exciting development in computer applications
in textual editing has been Peter Robinson's work with Robert J.
O'Hara, using PAUP cladistic analysis to establish genetic
relations among manuscripts.6 Cladistic
analysis has been developed over the past thirty years by
evolutionary biologists to reconstruct the descent of related
species. Both evolutionary biologists and textual critics seek
to explain the existence of a varied population as the product of
branching descents over time from a common ancestor. For textual
critics, the population to be accounted for consists of manu-
scripts, and the descent is by scribal copying. For evolutionary
biologists, the population is life itself, and the descent is by
reproduction. The theoretical identity of the central concerns
of the two otherwise unrelated disciplines continues to be
explored. Most recently, Robinson and O'Hara have used PAUP
successfully to analyze a large group of Old Norse manuscripts.
Sufficient external evidence exists to establish the genetic
relations among those manuscripts, and that unusual situation
permitted Robinson and O'Hara to test the program, which indeed
reproduced in all essential respects the stemma attested by the
external evidence.7 At the medieval conference in Kalamazoo in
May, 1992, Robinson ran a small sample of 100 lines from six
manuscripts of Piers Plowman and achieved extremely
interesting results, suggesting that it may be possible with this
program to overcome problems created by contamination or
coincidental variation. We are not convinced that the program
will work with our texts, largely because of massive
contamination and coincidental variation, but we plan to give it
a full test on the Piers Plowman manuscripts.
When we have reconstructed the A, B, and C archetypes, we
will in each case construct a critical text, for though some
recent theorists have concluded that the editorial project is
completed with the production of accurate documentary and
facsimile editions of the witnesses, we consider it only to have
been well begun. No single witness to Piers Plowman
accurately reflects Langland's poems. Some manuscripts are in
general better witnesses to the authorial text than others, but
no single witness carries more a priori authority than any
other. Therefore, if we are to read a text more nearly authorial
than is represented in any manuscript witness, editors must
engage in the perhaps quixotic but essential project of creating
an authorial version from this corpus of variant readings.
Some of you must already have wondered whether this archival
game is worth the candle. We might ask ourselves how many
scholars, including those most insistent upon privileging scribal
versions of the poem, will read fifty-four editions of very
similar poems? Why should so many marginally different "poems"
find readers? As it stands, few specialists in late Middle
English will have read all three published versions with the same
attention they have given B. This surplus of textual material,
even with meticulous hypertextual linking, is at once too much
and too little.
Too much, certainly, if one thinks of the text only
as an aesthetic object.8 And much too little, if one thinks of the
text primarily as an aesthetic object. I have recently
argued that in spite of the recent and unlamented "death of the
author," many naifs still want to read
the poems Langland wrote, as he wrote them and
without scribal lapses or accretions. Medievalists, of
course, have never had occasion to celebrate the kind of
author whose demise has been announced.9 We know,
for example, virtually nothing about the historical poet who
composed the three versions of Piers Plowman. The
autobiography of Long Will, the dreamer-protagonist, is
constructed as much by thematic considerations as by
knowable events in the poet's life and may well be
completely fictional. Whether "Langland" means anything to
us other than a name to attach to the three poems, we
recognize in those poems the work of a poet of extraordinary
power. We want to read his words. Without wishing for one
moment to deny the intrinsic interest of scribal practice to
bibliographers, students of reception, linguists, metrists,
or cultural historians, we recognize that scribal accretions
are of secondary interest to most readers. In any case, the
import and direction of scribal changes are recognizable
only in relation to a concept of the authorial text. That
is, we cannot study the reception history of texts like
Piers Plowman as it is reflected in the manuscript
witnesses until editorial work distinguishes what each
scribe or editor did from what was inherited from an
exemplar. Without doing collations, without establishing
archetypal or critical texts, without an attempt to
construct a stemma, textual variation is difference without
significance. Though the fifty-four documentary editions
constitute necessary groundwork for critical editing, each
witness with its own set of differences will not be fully
meaningful until its relationship to the other texts in the
tradition can be established.10 That
requires critical editing.
You will have realized as I have delivered this paper that,
in spite of our very passionate commitment to the exploitation of
electronic technology, the essential goals of the Piers
Plowman Electronic Archive would not differ greatly from
those that motivated George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson a
generation ago nor Skeat at the close of the last century. What
I hope is equally clear is that I regard the recent theoretical
claims of the irrelevance of authors and of authorial intention
to be rank folly. Though we are unlikely ever to establish
unequivocally the text that represents Langland's final
intentions--it seems moderately clear that this inveterate
tinkerer with his texts had no final intention--it is
equally clear that it is Langland's creative work that validates
the entire editorial project, that in spite of the historical and
codicological interest we may take in scribal versions of the
poem, it is our attempt to recover Langland's versions of
Piers Plowman that makes our work worthwhile.
However, in an electronic archive, the reconstituted
authorial text is privileged only at the level where such
privileging is appropriate. At other levels of the archive, we
will represent the scribal versions of the text--their
ordinatio of the page, their passus divisions and
rubrications, their verse paragraph markers, their hierarchy of
scripts, their use of color and line in emphasizing and
presenting text, their choice of dialect terms, spellings, and so
forth. The electronic text at this level ought to be as faithful
to scribal intentions as--on a different level of abstraction--it
is to the author's. In the electronic archive, the user/reader
will be able to move easily between levels, but the editors must
first do the traditional editorial work and supply the
linkages.11
In summary, I claim that most of the characteristic features
of printed editions should appear in the electronic text,
differing primarily by being hypertextually linked. Unlike
printed editions, the electronic text will permit readers to
manipulate, search, compare, or concord the individual
manuscripts, the reconstructed archetypes, and the critical
texts. Readers seeking linguistic information on a form can move
easily from the glossary to the phonological discussion or
between textual and historical notes and the text itself. When
we have failed some readers, as inevitably we must, they may
insert their own annotations in their copies of the text. We
intend to set up a procedure whereby users of the Archive
who wish to add their annotations to it may submit suggestions to
the Editorial Board, who will from time to time update the
Archive. Moreover, it is worth repeating that once the
base work of transcription and markup has been done, editors of
the future may construct from it better editions than we have.
The completed Archive will, in short, provide an
electronic base for kinds of literary, linguistic, and textual
scholarship presently unimagined, if not quite unimaginable.
However, all of these wonderfully revolutionary things
cannot be achieved if the literary portion of the academy
continues its mindless rejection of empirical investigation and
its distaste for the methods and controls of the harder sciences,
if the Old Philology is displaced from our graduate programs just
at the point at which the tools become available that will help
us do it better than ever before. There is reason to be
encouraged. Fashions, after all, by their very nature are
changeable. The anti-philological theory of much recent critical
discourse has begun to fret as well as strut as it leaves the
stage. Editors in this new age of electronic technology need to
be careful of embracing the fashionably revolutionary for fear of
missing what is truly revolutionary in the technology--its
capacity to help us collect, organize, analyze the empirical
evidence to answer more precisely and comprehensively the
perennial questions. Our attempts to answer those questions will
inevitably generate new questions. But we should not expect that
tomorrow's revolutionary discoveries will correspond too closely
to today's fashionable pieties.
1 The European English Messenger 3
(1994): 86-87. Back to document
2 Stephen G. Nichols, ed. The New Philology,
Speculum 65 (1990): 1-108; Keith Busby, ed, Towards a Synthesis? Essays on the
New Philology (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993); and William D. Paden, ed. The Future of the
Middle Ages: Medieval Literature in the 1990s (Gainesville: U Florida P, 1994.)Back to document
3 This claim may represent no more than a
pious hope, for as Willard McCarty has recently reminded us in "Handmade, Computer-Assisted,
and Electronic Concordances of Chaucer," in Computer-Based Chaucer
Studies, ed. Ian Lancashire, CCH Working Papers 3 (Toronto: U of Toronto Centre for
Computing in the Humanities, 1993), pp. 49-66, transience may be the essence of
electronic texts--or, as a wag in the first computer lab I worked
in drolly put it, "To err is human, but if you really want to
screw up, you need a computer." Electronic texts offer both the
base for textual permanence and for a kind of mouvance
that would shame the most libertine of medieval scribes. Back to document
4 In my experience as an editor, simple
accuracy is perhaps the hardest thing to achieve. Electronic
technology scarcely affects the labor of transcribing and
proofreading. Transcription at a keyboard, like writing on animal
skins with a quill, still takes place character by character.
Optical character recognition software does not presently exist
to shorten the task. Proofreading still requires serial
re-readings to compensate for eye-skip, arrhythmia, dittography,
homoeoteleuton, or for the manifold other failures of concentra-
tion that have marred scribal efforts since literacy began. Our
original plan provided for five separate readings of each tran-
scription against the photocopies and a final proofreading
against the original manuscript, but our practical experience
with F suggests that in the case of a difficult or complex
manuscript more readings will be necessary. Back to document
5 SGML markup permits editors of
documentary texts to record discrepancies between scribal
intention and performance while remaining strictly literal in
transcription. Lapses of the pen can be easily entered in dual
form, one with the text as the scribe wrote it and another with
his probable intention. For example, the F scribe occasionally
writes "a tese," almost certainly reflecting his pronunciation of
the phase, for "at ese." With a tag reading <reg orig="a
tese">at ese</reg>, we provide a toggle switch that
permits display (or search) for either the manuscript form or the
intended phrase. Neither version is privileged save by the
interest of the user. Nor is either suppressed editorially. Both
readings, what the scribe actually wrote and what the editor
thinks he must have intended to write, are represented in the
edited text.Back to document
6 D. L. Swofford, PAUP: Phylogenetic
Analysis Using Parsimony, Version 3.0. Computer program
distributed by the Illinois Natural History Survey, Champaign,
IL, 1991. Back to document
7 P. M. W. Robinson and R. J. O'Hara.
"Cladistic Analysis of an Old Norse Manuscript Tradition,"
Research in Humanities Computing 4, ed. Nancy Ide and
Susan Hockey (Oxford: Oxford U P, forthcoming). For cladistic
theory, see also Elliot Sober, Reconstructing the Past
(Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988) and N. I. Platnick and H. D.
Cameron, "Cladistic Methods in Textual, Linguistic and
Phylogenetic Analysis," Systematic Zoology 26 (1977): 380-
385. See as well Peter Robinson's "An Approach to the Manuscripts of The Wife of Bath's
Prologue'," in Computer-Based
Chaucer Studies, ed. Ian Lancashire, CCH Working Papers 3
(Toronto: U of Toronto Centre for Computing in the Humanities,
1993), pp. 17-48.Back to document
8 As I have argued in "Some Un-
Revolutionary Aspects of Computer Editing," in Richard J.
Finneran's The Literary Text in the Digital Age (Ann
Arbor: U Michigan P, forthcoming):
Such a view of text is, of course, more than a
little parochial, since literary texts serve a variety of
other functions in modern attempts to recreate and under-
stand our past. Less parochially, fifty-four electronic
transcriptions and facsimiles--perhaps none of them ever
serving as a traditional reading text--will offer scholars
not only new ways to study the text and the textual
tradition of the poem but also possibilities for gaining
fresh insights into other aspects of late medieval literary
culture. Students of text reception may readily access
formerly inaccessible marginal and interlinear annotations
or significant scribal changes to the text itself. The
Archive will enable study of the changes both in
language and literary focus wrought by the revising
sixteenth-century scribe who created Toshiyuki Takamiya, MS
23, or by Robert Crowley's protestant rebaptism of the poem
in his three 1551 printed editions of the B text, each
converting Langland's Middle English into something more
appropriate for its Tudor audience. Since Piers
Plowman was copied in virtually every late Middle
English dialect, historical linguists will be able to study
patterns of regional variation in lexicon, phonology, and
orthography. The facsimiles will be useful to students who
once lacked access to large collections of primary
manuscript materials. Moreover, students of form and style
and meter can add their own markup for other, as yet
unimagined, kinds of study. It matters little that no one is
ever likely to want to read all fifty-four documents.
Many will want to use them.
Back to document
9 For thoughtful comment on this formalist
gambit, see Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the
Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and
Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). Back to document
10 Robert Adams decries "the recent
penchant for ... treating scribal errors as instances of medieval
literary criticism" ("Editing Piers Plowman B," p. 33).
Cf. Barry Windeatt, "The Scribes as Chaucer's Early Critics,"
SAC 1 (1979): 119-141, and Derek Pearsall, "Editing
Medieval Texts: Some Developments and Some Problems," in
Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, ed. Jerome
J. McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 103,
with George Kane, "The Text," in A Companion to Piers
Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U
California P, 1988), p. 194.Back to
Document
11 Bernard Cerquiglini, Eloge de la
variante; Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil,
1989), imagines a new kind of electronic text not unlike that
proposed here, though he appears to be content with the archival
element of compiling vast collections of linked data but without
considering it necessary to move beyond accumulation of data.
See Mary B. Speer, "Editing Old French Texts in the Eighties:
Theory and Practice," RPh 45 (1991): 22, for sensible
criticism of Cerquiglini's position. Back to
document