Advancing Scholarship through Digital Critical Editions: Mark Twain Project Online
نویسنده
چکیده
Digital critical editions hold the promise of supporting new scholarly research activities not previously possible or practical with print critical editions. This promise resides in the specific ability to integrate corpora, their associated editorial material and other related content into system architectures and data structures that exploit the strengths of the digital publishing environment. The challenge is to do more than simply create an online copy of the print publication, but rather to provide the kind of resource that both eases and extends the research activities of scholars. Authoritative collections published online in this manner, and with the same rigor brought to the print publishing process, offer scholars: the ability to discover more elusive, granular pieces of information with greater facility; tighter, more obvious and more accessible connections between authoritative versions of texts, editorial matter and primary source material; and continually corrected and expanded "editions," no longer dependent upon the print lifecycle. This paper will explore these benefits and others as they are instantiated in the recently released Mark Twain Papers Online (MTPO) (http://www.marktwainproject.org), created and published as a joint project of the Mark Twain Papers & Project at The Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley (the Papers), the University of California Press (UC Press), and the California Digital Library of the University of California (CDL). This current release of MTPO is comprised of more than twenty three hundred letters written between 1853 and 1880; over twenty eight thousand records of other letters with text not held by the Papers; nearly one hundred facsimiles; and makes available the many decades of archival research on the part of the editors at the Papers. Of particular focus in this discussion will be several key features of the system which, despite the many challenges they presented in development, were felt to be essential pieces of a digital publication that could support scholarship in new and significant ways. Those features include facets, which create intellectual structure and support serendipity; advanced search, which provides a means for researchers to apply their own analytical frameworks; citation support functionality, which serves to secure and record the
منابع مشابه
Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America’s Asia
The bestselling status of the Autobiography of Mark Twain (2010) and the recent controversy over the 2011 NewSouth edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (in which the n-word has been replaced with “slave” throughout) attest to Twain’s unique appeal as an author of popular and formally sophisticated works that satirize US formations of race and empire. For a ...
متن کاملDigital Documentary Editions and the Others
It is a truth universally acknowledged that documentary editions have found a very welcoming home in cyberspace. Documentary editing has often been considered a lower form of scholarship, as suggested by its being commonly called "noncritical editing," a name that barely hides the conviction of its being a non-or prescholarly endeavor. 1 However, this allegedly humble form of editing has now ta...
متن کاملEvaluating Digital Humanities Resources: The LAIRAH Project Checklist and the Internet Shakespeare Editions Project
The following paper presents a case study of the way that the research done by the LAIRAH project may be applied in the case of a real digital resource for humanities scholarship. We present an evaluation of the Internet Shakespeare Editions website according to the checklist of recommendations which we produced as a result of our research. The LAIRAH (Log analysis of Internet Resources in the ...
متن کاملA case of social scholarship for multi-player research in government information sources
Introduction. This paper presents the results of an experiment in using participatory research methods in a classroom among ten students taking an advanced master's level course in library and information science. The project goals were motivated by the course content, an advanced course in research using official government documents. Method. Ten graduate students taking an advanced course in ...
متن کاملEditing in the Digital Age : Informatics and Humanities Research
Our project-The Electronic Variorum Edition of Don Quixote, 1605-2005 (EVE-DQ)-is a collaborative initiative started in 1998 by a team of researchers in Humanities and Computer Science at Texas A&M University's Center for the Study of Digital Libraries. 1 It received initial research support from the Office of the Vice President of Research and the College of Liberal Arts, and is funded at pres...
متن کامل