Writing a "Paper" for the Web

H 157

Manuscript p.537

Manuscript p.538

Manuscript p.555

H 155 Verso Manuscript

Revision Argument Conclusion

Publishing History

Writing a "Paper" for the Web

Generalizations

In what other instances might this be an important factor? DePaul new master's class exploring -- classes in writing for the web. But what about academic papers?

Statistics

Base

Text: 564 words excluding footnote, poem, and Works Cited (explication.html)

Enhanced

Text: 564 words excluding footnote, poem, Works Cited (explication_extra.html) NUMBER of words would change if the message "Study Links added but not obvious"
Concordance: 10 files ADD WORDS
Vocabulary: 10 files same words as above
Scripts: 2 files overLIB.js, pitstudy.js
Stylesheets: 2 files pit.css, track.css (these could probably be combined)
Miscellaneous: scansion.html

Super-duper Enhanced

Advantages of Enhancing

#links not obvious so don't interfere if only study notes. No back and forth on footnotes-danger of forgetting "back" link. Use of stylesheet means no more text stretched across entire screen. Visual presentation of scanning - open to verification/contradiction. Visuals on consonants.

alliteration and other observations I've captured several instances in my tracking files: short i, s-sound, m-sound. There are lots of others that I could and may do. It's one thing to say that the s-sound begins to sound like hissing and another to see how whole lines appear to be nothing but s's. I created separate HTML files for each which require the user to click on the link and to close the window when finished. Then I created popup Study Notes which are smaller in size and can close by waving the mouse into them. A lot more work for the preparer but more fluid and less intrusive for the user (I think).

Advantages of Super-Duper Enhancing

Context History Examination of primary texts Presentation of argument behind choice of version for poem without interfering with the explication/losing focus.

The whole issue of the fascicles, their order and then disorder, the loose sheets: all this is critical. It COULD stay in the realm of a close-reading of the poems in question: I tie my hat, the volcano, a Pit. Perhaps it should. But it doesn't HAVE to! In a sense, at every place where an author must choose which path to pursue or make a choice as to what to include or leave out, the web presentation allows for those decisions to be recorded and at least notes left (for further papers?) and the direction of the reader to other resources and discussions.

Disadvantages of Enhancing

# of files, size of files.

USING FRANKLIN VERSION

Files containing facsimile images of all Dickinson's original manuscripts (one file per document).
p1.gif, p2.gif
Files containing e-text (electronic text) versions of the original manuscripts.
Files containing facsimile images of all printings of Dickinson's writings; i.e., facsimile images of printings by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Susan's daughter), and Thomas H. Johnson and R.W. Franklin (variorum editors).
Files containing e-text versions of all printings.
Files containing e-texts of related textual, critical, biographical contextualizations; i.e., from textual notes and critical commentary about the Emily-Susan correspondence and relationship to layouts of the Homestead and the Evergreens (Dickinson houses in which the two women lived side-by-side for more than thirty-five years), to maps of Amherst, to Jay Leyda's compilations of contemporary reviews, newspaper articles, national and local events (in Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson), etc.

Considerations for Enhancing

Filenaming Conventions

Okay, now that I've decided to break the vocabulary file into pieces for reuse, I need to distinguish them from the concordance files. I've chosen v_creator. Should probably use c_creator for concordance.

Which brings up the next question of site structure. If these are going to be shared files, then they should be in their own location, c's in one, v's in another -- probably as subdirectories of ED.

Study Notes

Placed text in array inside javascript file for easy editing and tracking.

Manuscripts, Holographs, Autographs, Fascicles

Which brings up the thing about the typewriters. I had no idea that the poems were typed at all. How did I miss that? In particular, the fact that the World I only typed capitals is fascinating. As if one didn't already have problems with Dickinson's capitalization! This should be factored in with the above on punctuation, etc.

Web Presentation Considerations

Content and Display are the two big problems especially in light of the above. For instance, where would the info on fascicles go? It could be a simple link within the text. How important do I think it is that the link be available on the site in general (such as at the top or side?) as well as in text?

What about the vocabulary stuff?

I have not edited the vocab file even though I know a particular word in the poem is a verb not a noun. There are nuances that can be picked up and I choose to let the reader do that. On the other hand, in the text of the paper I might pick a particular definiton to use.

The alternate method I used on Prayer was to put a list of links on the left, one for each word. I also added "Cf." to link to concordance files (which I deliberately did NOT link to the actual poems). How would I apply this to "A Pit"? Especially since the timeline is also vertical? Obviously, one could go left, the other right.

More on concordance -- it could be interesting to collect the numbers for all the poems referenced in all the concordance files (for a particular poem) and see how many times the same number appears!

Crap! I just remembered that I need a conversion table for Johnson numbers to Franklin!

Further on the vocab: since I only had 1828 and 1913 available, that's all I used. However, I have access (currently) to Oxford English Dictionary. I could pick up the pertinent definitions and also include those, sort of an extra added-value.

Text-initiatives, Etc.

I have no idea where all this comes into play, except of course that I think I will need to at least look at it as it relates to my proposed web-paper idea. I've got at least four places to look:

University of Maryland
University of Michigan
University of Pennsylvania
Cornell University

Scripting Accessibility Issues

http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/scripting/script-animation.html

Footnotes

[note 1] http://www.archiva.net/footnoteproject/ Academic web designers have approached the problem by using the more scientific form of the reference mark—employing a number enclosed in brackets and linking the reference mark to the note with anchors. While this strategy tidies up the body text, it exacerbates the problem of reading. The reader must jump back and forth between the main text and annotation. As a result, the reader can become even more disoriented.

Disadvantages: The viewer will need a 4.x browser to display the footnote

portfolio

http://condor.depaul.edu/~american/program/portfolio.html

http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/IV.1.Smith.html The Importance of a Hypermedia Archive of Dickinson's Creative Work MARTHA NELL SMITH

Structure of the Dickinson Archive
Presently plans are for the Archive to be a marked-up structure (SGML) organizing five interrelated bodies of material. Since work on the hypermedia archive will begin with the documents sent to Susan Dickinson, descriptions of their organization will serve as example for the purposes of providing a proposal and model for developing the entire Archive. The five bodies of material are as follows:
Files containing facsimile images of all Dickinson's original manuscripts; i.e., all letters, poems, and letter-poems sent to Susan (one file per document).
Files containing e-text (electronic text) versions of the original manuscripts.
Files containing facsimile images of all printings of Dickinson's writings; i.e., facsimile images of printings by Martha Dickinson Bianchi (Susan's daughter), and Thomas H. Johnson and R.W. Franklin (variorum editors).
Files containing e-text versions of all printings.
Files containing e-texts of related textual, critical, biographical contextualizations; i.e., from textual notes and critical commentary about the Emily-Susan correspondence and relationship to layouts of the Homestead and the Evergreens (Dickinson houses in which the two women lived side-by-side for more than thirty-five years), to maps of Amherst, to Jay Leyda's compilations of contemporary reviews, newspaper articles, national and local events (in Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson), etc.

http://www.emilydickinson.org/archive_description_1997.html DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE ARCHIVE (1997) Rationale: the Need for Electronic Editions

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/fdw/volume1/werner/about.html
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/fdw/volume2/werner/investigations.html

http://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/articles/mcgann.html Imagining What You Don't Know: The Theoretical Goals of The Rossetti Archive
by Jerome McGann

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/fdw/volume1/werner/syllabus.html

http://www.emilydickinson.org/safe/exercises/reorder.html

http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/vgclock.asp#Animating%20The%20Clock11 A Vector Graphics Rendered Animated Clock

http://www.aacu-edu.org/meetings/pdfs/MarthaNellSmithpaper.pdf

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/products/lightbox/about.html

http://www.louisville.edu/a-s/english/subcultures/english613syllabus.html

This hypermedia practicum provides a hands-on introduction to teaching literature, cultural studies, and writing in an electronic environment. Participants will set up and participate in discussion lists and chat/interchange spaces, create and use courseware, do a hypertext edition of a print artifact, compose and assess hypertextual critical and creative writing; learn basic web design, shell navigation, scanning, graphics programs and html editors. We'll learn to use the www as a humanities research resource, and publish original and collaborative research to the web in turn. Most important, we'll support and assess the web-authorship of undergraduate students, and discuss how to integrate this activity with the traditional aims and expectations of students in literature/cultural studies and writing classrooms. Additional instruction will be provided by IQE and guest lecturers, as available.
Instructor: Marc Bousquet Bingham 335B
Hours: M 3:30-5:30, W by appt.
email: marc.bousquet@louisville.edu
W Sept 15 Guest: Dale Billingsley. Archival Literary Scholarship on the Web. Martha Nell Smith, Ellen Louise Hart, and Marta Werner, The Dickinson Archive.

(note: the user name is "Dickinson" and the password is "ink_on_disk".)

Resources To Examine

Kenneth Price and Ed Folsom,
The Whitman Archive
(username: Whitman; password: Dickinson)

Jerome McGann, The Rossetti Archive.

Martha Nell Smith, "The Importance of a Hypermedia Archive of Dickinson's Creative Work," The Emily Dickinson Journal IV.1 (1995)

John Unsworth, "Networked Academic Publishing and the Rhetorics of its Reception. With Eyal Amiran and Carole Chaski. Centennial Review 36.1 (Winter, 1992): 43-58;

George Landow, Putting Victorian Poetry on the Web?, WWW version of Victorian Poetry, Spring 1998.

Andrew Murphy, Electric Shakespeares, The Arden Shakespeare CD ROM;

John Lavignino, "Reading, Scholarship, and Hypertext Editions;"

Jerome McGann,"Radiant Textuality" and "The Rationale of Hypertext.";

MLA Guidelines for Electronic Scholarly Editions

http://www.merrilee.org/tei-mss/collegepark.html

The Bartleby Project http://www.bartleby.com/

Although Thomas H. Johnson's 1955 edition is now the standard edition of Dickinson's poetry, this 1896 edition by Mabel Loomis Todd (Boston: Little, Brown) divides 160 poems into the categories of "Life," "Love," "Nature," and "Time & Eternity" and allows you to see the basis for Johnson's organization of Dickinson's poetry. The Bartleby Project, a collection maintained by Columbia University, contains many early editions of important literary works that you can read online.