[Mirrored from: http://www.ukc.ac.uk/library/ICCC/tetreault.htm]
ICCC/IFIP Conference: Electronic Publishing '97
New Models and Opportunities
14-16 April 1997 - University of Kent at Canterbury
Conference Paper Abstract
Electrifying Wordsworth--a Progress Report
Ronald Tetreault, Department of English, Dalhousie University
Together with my research partner in the US, I am working on a
scholarly hypertext edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical
Ballads. Initially, we plan to digitize the four lifetime editions
(1798, 1800, 1802, 1805) by compiling transcripts based on original
printed volumes, marking these up with SGML in conformity with
the TEI guidelines, and collating them with special software to
discover variants and generate an apparatus criticus. Each poem
would then become the focus of its own hypertext web, showing
all four versions together for the sake of immediate visual comparison,
and linking each to digital images of the printed text, especially
to pages where manuscript corrections provided printer's copy
for a subsequent edition. Our purpose is to show the development
of the poems in the Lyrical Ballads collection, and in the case
of the poems by Wordsworth to show how these evolved towards their
final authorized texts. Cambridge University Press has undertaken
to publish this electronic edition on CD-ROM in 1998, to commemorate
the bicentenary of the first edition. Wordsworth was chosen for
this project because his restless habit of revision produced so
many versions of each poem that trying to represent them in print
stretches that medium to its limits. New media functionalities
of electronic text, digital images, and hypertext may offer the
capacity to fully exhibit this poet's diversity. To know Wordsworth
is to know not one but many selves, expressed in a succession
of texts that mark the different stages of his personal development.
Which to choose has always been the editor's dilemma; establishing
a text has always meant that we must privilege one version over
others, and settle for a static representation of what might be
better understood as a dynamic process. By digitizing Wordsworth,
we hope to show that the electronic medium is best adapted to
capture this protean romantic self. The new medium thus does not
replace books but strives to do things books could never accomplish.
Going beyond the book calls for new paradigms of representation.
As the member of the editorial team responsible for hypertext
design, I am exploring the frames function of HTML and SGML browsers
as a means to present an array of windows that will allow four
versions of a poem to appear on the screen at once. Navigation
through these is achieved by a guide I call a "variant map",
a sort of table of contents to each line in the poem showing places
where revisions were made. Each revision becomes a "hotspot"
linked to the corresponding lines in all four versions on the
screen, which scroll simultaneously to the line in question. So
far, I have completed an HTML prototype of this system based on
"Simon Lee". This winter I expect to create a more complex
web for "We are Seven", using SGML and incorporating
later versions of the poem together with digital images. By summer
we should be well on our way to applying these patterns to the
remaining poems in Lyrical Ballads. I propose a presentation that
would be a sort of progress report on the project, probably concentrating
on the display of the "We are Seven" web.