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Maya Bielinski

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Conference! Legal Texts and the New Philology

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Dear readers! Allow me to introduce you to the conference I am co-organizing with Faculty of Law Professor Simon Stern. Consider this a sneak preview before your inbox is bombarded by the relevant listservs.

The conference title is “Legal Texts and the New Philology.” Its focus is on an exciting topic, and one that has come up in a number of my classes so far (including the usual suspects like Law and Literature and Legal Archaeology, but also first-year Contracts and Administrative Law). The conference seeks answers to this question:

“How has bibliographic context shaped—and how does it continue to shape—the way legal texts are written, disseminated, read, copied, de- and re-contextualized, and otherwise used by their audiences?”

The New Philology

Scholarship on legal texts has yet to reflect the work of literary critics such as Jerome McGann, who, in the 1980s, introduced the notion of the “textual condition.” This is the idea that strings of words, and the concepts and ideas they convey, are inextricably linked to the medium in which they are embedded, and are not simply free-floating communications that persist over time, bare of their means. Some philologists employ textual criticism to highlight these ideas, some analyze texts mainly through the lens of textual production and socio-history, and some connect their analyses to more hermeneutical investigations.

Source: Scientific American, June 22, 1872. Uploaded to Flickr by Marcel Douwe Dekker.

Source: Scientific American, June 22, 1872. Uploaded to Flickr by Marcel Douwe Dekker.

The Conference

The conference, held March 20-21, 2015, will serve to focus and intensify the debate over the changing nature of editorial approaches to legal texts. This is important to the fields of legal history, legal theory, and legal text editing, and is of particular significance now, as we interpret texts in today’s digital environments (and as legal texts are more and more frequently encountered exclusively online, and by-and-large in contexts shaped by commercial entities).

If the basis of our legal system depends on communications of authority, and if, as the work of literary critics suggests, the mode of transmission of this authority is unstable, then the work of the new philologers has great significance for legal theorists and practitioners alike.

By showing that law is a product of its own materiality—and is therefore authored by web designers and database engineers and well as by legislators, judges and clerks—we hope to highlight an overlooked aspect of the legal textual condition and bring these insights to lawyers, jurists, and emerging scholars who attend the conference.

Legal Texts poster small Legal Texts Poster (click to launch PDF)

Note: some of the text of this post was lifted from a summary I co-authored with Professor Stern.

Phantasmagoria and Other Poems–the digital object

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LandingPage

The landing page for the digital object (which will hopefully be mounted online soon, and available through the Queen’s library catalogue).

After a bit of a search-around for a digital edition framework to help me mount the W. D. Jordan Special Collections copy of Lewis Carroll’s Phantasmagoria and Other Poems online, I came across this javascript application that mimics the functionality of a book. I customized the app, loaded in our images, altered the landing page to include the covers of the book, created a linked-up ‘table of contents,’  and slapped it all into a Twitter Bootstrap site that also includes (TEI-adherent) textual and (Emily Murphy-authored) extra-textual material.

Murph and I had very specific design goals for the object: we wanted a simple, clean, and intuitive layout that represented as closely as possible a reader’s engagement with the material edition. This ix-nayed scrolling layouts that vivisect the book by presenting the object more than once on a page. We wanted a visually cohesive object. The result is what you see below.

OpenBook

When a user clicks on the book, the booklet.js app is revealed. Here’s the inside cover of Phantasmagoria, with the advertisement for Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The ‘Contents’ sidebar, on hover-over, reveals a linked-up index of the poems. Hovering over the left or right edges of the book reveals a peek at the next pages in the book, and a simple click in this area of the representation turns the page (with an attractive, but hopefully not too distracting, animation).

TheTrystyng

Here’s the first page of Canto I of Phantasmagoria (navigated to from the sidebar).

TheTrystyngInfo

The javascript application allows for extra-textual information to be included with each page, which is revealed when a user hovers over the ‘i’ in the bottom right corner of the page image.

Footer

Emily and I have also included contextual information on the site: an introductory and historical essay, some information about the physical object, and a statement that outlines the reasons behind our various design choices.

Digital Edition Framework or Boilerplate?

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I’m working with Emily Murphy (who organized THATCamp Queensu 2013 with me) to image, transcribe, encode, and provide annotations for a Queen’s University Special Collections copy of the first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (check out this edition of the text, or the Gutenberg.org edition, which are in the public domain). It’s a charming text, and the Library’s copy is in good shape.

phantasmagoria

I’m looking for a framework that will allow us to publish our digital edition online. I love TEI Boilerplate (the main site seems to be down at the time of posting, but the source code is still available on Grant L. Simpson’s GitHub), but I’m looking for a something that allows me to load up images of the text we’ve encoded, and connect extra-textual critical apparatuses to the images and transcription. In an ideal world the whole thing would be easily navigable and searchable. I’ve just learned about the TEICHI framework, which I am currently looking into. Any other resources I should know about?

Do not adjust your terminal

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I’ve decided to dive in and join the throngs of people who are doing a Year of Code. I’ve got 42 points racked up on Codecademy (only one mini-course in; here’s my profile!), and I’m looking forward to the course “Digital Humanities Databases” at DHSI, which starts on Monday in beautiful Victoria, BC.

There are so many resources out there for beginners who want to learn how to code! A sampler pack: check out the MIT Python Course, the Human-Computer Interaction course offered by Stanford, or any of the offerings from Ladies Learning Code.

 

For the summer reading list

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With two exams in the next two days (Restoration literature and Statistics!), I really don’t have time to be trolling blogs. But A&L Daily, which is one of my faves, linked to a review of Terry Eagleton’s new book, The Event of Literature (not yet released). I love Terry Eagleton, and his Literary Theory: an Introduction was my first foray into thinking critically about what makes literature literary–so I can’t help but give this particular bit of new-book news a bit of attention.

I can’t wait for this title; and I can’t wait until summer when I’ll have time to read for pleasure again! For now, back to Pope and Dryden (and later, Bayes and Mann-Whitney)…

Serendipity

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The word “Serendipity” is one of only a handful of words whose etymologies are clearly documented. Inspired by the tale written by Voltaire, Horace Walpole wrote to Horace Mann in 1754 that he formed the word

from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib, from Tamil “Seren deevu” or from Sanskrit Suvarnadweepa or golden island (some trace the etymology to Simhaladvipa which literally translates to “Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island”[4]).

(From Wikipedia)

Last night I spoke at Serendipity Hall (held at the Grad Club), a speaker series inspired by Trampoline Hall in Toronto (which has gone on tour in Canada and has even shimmied over to the Yankee side). Over pints and nachos, non-experts talk intelligibly or rant vehemently about anything from reforms to the educational system to the correct way to tie leather dress shoes. I closed the night last night raving about “Etymologies You Should Know”–an ostentatious title for an informal meandering through a list of neat word-histories.

The friendly and seemingly ubiquitous Asad Chishti originated the event here in YGK, and I hope to see many more sets. Keep your eyes peeled for the locale of the next organization of orators over at that Serendipity tumblr.

Bootstrapping DH

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What a brilliant talk from Dr. Melissa Terras from the Centre for Digital Humanities of University College London:

Dr. Melissa Terras: The Vision After the Sermon

She offers a great list for those who are interested in setting up a hub for digital humanities:

  • Eat your own dog food – (this includes using best practices and having an active digital presence)
  • Get a good team
  • Maintain high visibility – attend events, reach out
  • Invest the time
  • Invest the resources
  • Get institutional backing

The video is really worth a watch. Among the many gems is this poster promoting the Centre (this falls under “visibility”):

From the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities Flickr Feed

Cross-Hop!

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Though its preliminary successes got a warm reception at the CSECS conference last October on an intimate DH panel (with Alison Muri, coordinator of the Grub Street Project), the Cross-Hopkins Diary Project is still very much a hatchling. I dove into TEI encoding with zero prior knowledge, and have really been learning as I go.

The ambitious goal of the project is to have a database of information that allows users to both close-read and ‘distant-read’ the records: we want the tags anchored to locations on the image, but also a flexible database of which plays were performed on what day and how much cash each show brought in to the theatre (so that exciting statistical analysis can be performed). Marginalia is a large part of the Diary’s neato-factor, so it would be great to have the complete notes tagged intelligently, too: people, places, organizations, and dates.

To give you an idea of what I’ve been doing so far, here’s a snippet of an image of the manuscript with its accompanying XML:

 

<row xml:id="r49">
      <cell role="production">49</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-11-27">Fry 27</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><title ref="#VEN">Venice preserv'd</title> + <title ref="#LOT">Lottery</title></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="150">150</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <row xml:id="r50">
      <cell role="production">50</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-11-28">Sat 28</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><title ref="#PRW">P: Wife</title> + <title ref="#LOT">D<hi rend="superscript">o</hi></title></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="170">170</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <row xml:id="r51">
      <cell role="production">51</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-11-30">Mon 30</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><title ref="#ORP">Orphan</title> + <title ref="#ANA">Anat</title></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="100">100</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <add place="inline">
     <milestone unit="month"/>Dec<hi rend="superscript">r</hi>.</add>
     <row xml:id="r52">
      <cell role="production">52</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-12-01">Tus 1<hi rend="superscript">st</hi>:</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><del><title ref="#ORP">Orphan</title> + <title ref="#ANA">Anatomist</title></del>
     <add place="below"><title ref="#STR">Stratagem</title> + <title ref="#LOT">Lottery</title></add></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="120">120</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <note place="opposite" type="aud"><name ref="#PRN" type="person" role="royalty">Prince</name> + <name ref="#PRS" type="person" role="royalty">P.</name></note>
     <row xml:id="r53">
      <cell role="production">53</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-12-02">Wed 2<hi rend="superscript">d</hi>.</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><del><title ref="#STR">Stratagem</title> + <title ref="#LOT">Lottery</title></del>
     <add place="below"><title ref="#REC">Recr: Officer</title> + <rs type="ent">Dancing</rs></add></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="120">120</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <pb/>

It’s definitely not perfect, and I’m not even sure it’s totally TEI-adherent! I’ve adapted aome tags to suit my own purposes until I find out how to express what I really need (I’ve been using <milestone/>, for example, to identify holidays and months), and the structure doesn’t really give the reader a sense of the layout of the manuscript (particularly with the “note” that mentions the Prince and Princess’s attendance, which is on the opposite page in the diary but refers to the December 2nd performance – I know XSLT is my friend, but we’re still unacquainted). It’s far from anchored to the facsimile, anyway. Other problems include my dodgy uses of the ‘del’ and ‘add’ elements, and my somewhat blind use of the ‘ref’ element.

Anyway, it’s a work in progress. From my code so far I’ve created an OpenOffice spreadsheet of the tabular data, and have from that been able to extract some pretty interesting statistical findings (which my supervisor and I presented at CSECS). All this to say that I’m looking for a hardier option (Scripto or Scribe may fit the bill).