Knowledge Representation and Digital Scholarly Editions in Theory and Practice
Abstract
In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is a publicly available scholarly edition of twelve unpublished poems written by Freytag-Loringhoven between 1923 and 1927. This edition provides access to a textual performance of her creative work in a digital environment. It is encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) P5 Guidelines for critical apparatuses including parallel segmentation and location-referenced encoding. The encoded text is rendered into an interactive web interface using XSLT, CSS, and JavaScript available through the Versioning Machine (www.v-machine.org/). One aspect of textual performance theory I am exploring within In Transition concerns the social text network. The social text network these twelve texts always and already represent presupposes the notion of a constant circulation of networked social text systems. The network represented by In Transition is based primarily on issues of reception, materiality, and themes which engage and reflect the social nature of the text in the 1920s and now. This is to say two things: (1) that the concept of the network is not new with digital scholarly editions; and (2) that these networks in a digital edition foreground the situated 1920s history of these texts as well as the real-time, situated electronic reading environment. The argument of a digital edition like In Transition is formed as much by the underlying theory of text as it is by its content and the particular application or form it takes. This discussion employs the language of knowledge representation in computation (through terms like domain, ontology, and logic) in order to situate this scholarly edition within two existing frameworks: theories of knowledge representation in computation and theories of scholarly textual editing.
Index terms
Keywords :
digital editions, knowledge representation, interface development, scholarly editing, text encoding, versioningOutline
Full text
1. Introducing In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
- 1 More information about the Versioning Machine is at www.v-machine.org/. The iteration used f (...)
1In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is a publicly available scholarly edition of twelve unpublished poems written by Freytag-Loringhoven between 1923 and 1927. Alongside extensive annotations and a critical introduction, this edition serves to provide access to a textual performance of her creative work in a digital environment. It is an interaction that is made possible by using the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) P5 Guidelines for critical apparatus including parallel segmentation and location-referenced encoding. The encoded text is rendered into an interactive web interface using XSLT, CSS, and JavaScript available through the Versioning Machine (VM).1 In this discussion, I show that a digital edition like In Transition is formed as much by the underlying theory of text as it is by its content and the particular application or form it takes. This discussion employs the language of knowledge representation in computation (through terms like domain, ontology, and logic) in order to situate this scholarly edition within two existing frameworks: theories of knowledge representation in computation and theories of scholarly textual editing.
2. Knowledge Representation and Digital Scholarly Editions in Theory
2John F. Sowa writes in his seminal book on computational foundations, that theories of knowledge representation are particularly useful “for anyone whose job is to analyze knowledge about the real world and map it to a computable form” (Sowa 2000, xi). Sowa’s suggested approach to designing systems for digital knowledge representation is not dissimilar to the principles set forth in the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) “Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions” (2007). The MLA Guidelines recommend that an editor “choose what to attend to, what to represent, and how to represent it” according to “the editor’s theory of text” or “a consistent principle that helps in making those decisions” (MLA 2007). An analogy can be made between these guidelines and Sowa’s assertion about the application of knowledge representation: “Knowledge representation,” he writes, “is the application of logic and ontology to the task of constructing computable models for some domain” (xii). Sowa’s concept of logic or “pure form” maps to the MLA guidelines’ consideration for how a text is represented in an edition; his use of ontology or “the content that is expressed in that form” maps to the MLA guideline’s concern with what is attended to or represented in an edition; and Sowa’s consideration for the domain maps to the MLA guidelines’ notion of an edition’s underlying theory of text (Sowa 2000, xiii). Further, the MLA guidelines consider a scholarly edition “a reliable text” by measuring its “accuracy, adequacy, appropriateness, consistency, and explicitness” against what editors define as the edition’s form, content, and theory of text (MLA 2007). Similarly, Sowa notes that knowledge representation is unproductive if the logic and ontology which shape its application in a certain domain are unclear: “without logic, knowledge representation is vague, Sowa writes, “with no criteria for determining whether statements are redundant or contradictory,” and “without ontology, the terms and symbols are ill-defined, confused, and confusing” (xii). Knowledge representation is the work of all editors. Moreover, the work that scholarly editors undertake in a digital environment must take into account, not only traditional textual scholarship, but theories in computation. It is thus useful to theorize the extent to which the production of knowledge in a digital edition is unique to this environment.
2.1. The Domain and Theory of In Transition: Textual Performance
3In Transition reflects a theory of text I am calling textual performance. Textual performance theory is based on John Bryant’s notion of fluid text theory in which social text theory is combined with the geneticist notion that a literary work is “equivalent to the processes of genesis that create it” (Bryant 2002, 71). What is productive about this theory for this discussion is the notion that a textual event is a “flow of energy” rather than a product or a “conceptual thing or actual set of things or even discrete events” (Bryant 2002, 61). Accordingly, a text in performance comprises multiple versions in manuscript and print, various notes and letters and comments of contemporaries or current readers, plus the element of performance, which entails time, space, and a collaborative audience. We can perceive these elements working together in the meaning-making event of a text if we consider a literary work to be a “phenomenon . . . best conceived not as a produced work (oeuvre) but as work itself (travaille), the power of people and culture to create a text” (Bryant 2002, 61). As well, considering the literary work as a phenomenon situated in space and time corresponds to the Baroness’s notion of “lifeart,” which reflects a concept of art that was germane to the Dadaist movement, one even Ezra Pound adopted as “an act of art” instead of “a work of art” (Gammel 2002, 14). In other words, as a Dadaist, the “act” of art was intricately tied with one’s ability to provoke a response from fellow Dadaists and the bourgeois culture, which were the targets of most Dada performances. Because provocation was at the root of Dadaist art, the context in which Dada art is performed and the fact of a live, collaborative audience are essential to the art. Likewise, this concept of the “flow of energy” within fluid text theory is a useful way of thinking about how meaning is being produced when a reader interacts with an electronic edition of the Baroness’s poetry.
- 2 This number represents a reel and frame number from the microfilm of the Papers of Elsa von Freytag (...)
4The Baroness’s particular perspective on creating art coheres to this sense of flow and the nature of creation in terms of historical time and place. First, the Baroness believed that for the artist, “art” is conceived in a wave of imagination that comes before its logic or form and that the medium then serves as a catalyst or a signpost within the creative act. In a letter to Djuna Barnes the Baroness refers to the overwhelming nature of being an artist and the productive and enabling forces of the logic or form of poetry. She writes to Barnes that her “rambling” way of “analytical speculation by emotional facts” is an “endless way —until now only to be mastered by rhythmical [sic] and symbolical force of poetry” in which “the logic is already the motive of the very start—and is contained in it and is the thing itself” (UMD 2.144).2 In another letter the Baroness notes, “I am all wave—first—arrangement—ability—comes later” since “the possibility of the structure grows your wings to ‘create’” (UMD 2.45). In other words, various poetic expressions may start from the same wave, but each medium’s particular structure lends itself to a unique performance of that expression. This method is apparent in other poems by the Baroness such as “Orgasmic Toast,” “Statements on Circumstanced Me” (also called “Purgatory Lilt” and “Hell’s Wisdom”), and “Christ – Don Quixote – St. George,” which have multiple versions written as prose in paragraphs and other versions structured into more traditional stanza-and-line formats.
5Using different styles, genres, and forms was part of the Baroness’s creative process. She writes in a note on a version of “Purgatory Lilt” she has included in a letter to Barnes that “This is not a poem but an essay—statement. Maybe—it were better not to print it in this cut form—perpendicular but in usual sentence line—horizontal?” (UMD 2.226-227) Hans Richter calls this process of revision more dream-like than fancy: “What is important is the poem-work, the way in which the latent content of the poem undergoes transformation according to concealed mechanisms,” transformations “that work the way dream-work strategies operate—through condensation, displacement, and the submission of the whole of the text to secondary revision” (1965, 80). For these reasons, the Baroness’s manuscripts often do not correspond to a sequence that manifests the teleological evolution of a poem. In some cases, the extant manuscripts show little evidence of a clear, creative evolutionary path within a text. Indeed, the Baroness’s manuscripts often manifest experiments on a theme, making one version’s relationship to another an example of alternative choices rather than a system of rough drafts leading to final versions. Richard Poirier claims that this is a modernist technique: “[m]odernist writers, to put it too simply, keep on with the writing of a text because in reading what they are writing they find only the provocation to alternatives” (1992, 113). A reading environment where the reader can experiment based on textual provocations reflects these Dadaist and modernist textual practices.
6One aspect of textual performance theory I am exploring within In Transition concerns the social text network. The social text network these twelve texts always and already represent presupposes the notion of a constant circulation of networked social text systems. A social text network is entered much like one enters McGann’s “editorial horizon”: the entrance point is “the words that lie immediately before a reader on some page [which] provide one with the merest glimpse of that complex world we call a literary work and the meaning it produces” (Textual Condition 12). The network represented by In Transition is based primarily on issues of reception, materiality, and theme which engage and reflect the social nature of the text in the 1920s and now. This is to say two things: (1) that the concept of the network is not new with digital scholarly editions; and (2) that these networks in a digital edition foreground the situated 1920s history of these texts as well as the real-time, situated electronic reading environment.
7Social networks are not new. Indeed, the notion of the network is used both by Bruno Latour and Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin to ameliorate the polarities that exist in the current discourse between nature and technology and between “old” and “new” technologies. Notions of the “network” help to diminish the polarities within the overriding discourse. In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Bruno Latour explores the notion that the hybridization of nature and culture in this age of new technologies has necessitated discourses of purification and denial; these discourses, he argues, seek to create an age of digital “revolution” that diminishes what has always been a cyborgian culture (48). “When we see them as networks,” Latour writes, “Western innovations remain recognizable and important, but they no longer suffice as the stuff of saga, a vast saga of radical rupture, fatal destiny, irreversible good or bad fortune” (1993, 48). Bolter and Grusin explore our current, perceived digital utopia as the result of the “double-logic” of “remeditation” (the “repurposing” of old technologies) in which “our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation” (Bolter and Grusin 1998, 5). In Transition is a remediation of social text networks, but it is also the enactment of new social text networks that is in constant circulation or “flow.” The real-time audience participation required within the In Transition interface foregrounds the extent to which these social text networks underlie all textual performances or events.
2.2. The Ontology and the Content: Social Text Networks
8This scenario, in which the making of meaning is a performance that relies on a constant state of shifting social networks corresponds to the edition’s central theme of transition. These twelve texts are included as expressions created during a time of transition in the Baroness’s life between 1923 and 1927 when she moved from New York to Berlin and finally to Paris, but the edition also serves to represent a moment of transition in the culture of little magazines and the technologies of conversation during this time period. This is a period which sees the little magazine change shape from a venue that engages more popular responses and conversations about literature and art—such as the one represented by the inclusion of the Baroness’s poetry in The Little Review—to a venue which begins to address an audience more attuned to and engaged with literature and poetry as high art. Alan Golding associates the “point that modernism becomes Modernism” with the moment that the Baroness left New York to return to Germany in 1923, a point that signals both a highly experimental phase of modernist writing and one in which conversation and dialog was freely flowing (Golding 76).
- 3 Between 1927 and 1929, transition was edited by Eugene and Maria Jolas, Eliot Paul (until 1928), an (...)
- 4 Reception here is considered as part of a “triangular intertextuality” or only as one aspect of the (...)
- 5 This information is indicated in two letters between the Baroness and M rie Jolas at transition no (...)
9The social text networks represented by In Transition comprise three primary relationships within this context. The first relationship is based on the reception environment at transition magazine3 where the editors at first accepted and then rejected the Baroness’s poems for their audience in the late nineteen-twenties.4 For instance, during the period between 1927 and 1929, three of the twelve poems included within In Transition (“Café Du Dome,” “Xray,” and “Ostentatious”) were published in transition while five of the other poems—”Ancestry,” “Christ—Don Quixote—St. George” (a subsection of “Contradictory Speculations”), “Cosmic Arithmetic,” “Sermon On Life’s Beggar Truth,” and “A Dozen Cocktails Please”—were under consideration by the transition editors and ultimately rejected for future issues.5 Cary Nelson argues that this time period is one in which “a revolution in poetry seemed naturally to entail a commitment to social change [. . .] all the arts were in ferment and aesthetic innovations were politically inflected” (230). Much of this fermentation, innovation, and commitment to change was generated by the relationships between writers and editors. Indeed, the conversation at the root of modernism extended to the offices of the little magazines where writers read each other’s work and discussed it both in person and in print. These eight poems share a relationship tied to the particular social text network engaged by the transition editors in the 1920s.
10A second relationship represented by the textual network within this edition includes the material space that some of these poems share, a relationship that in some cases overlaps with the ties just mentioned. For instance, in some cases, draft versions of certain poems appear on the verso or in the margins of the manuscripts for draft versions of other poems. Versions of “Café Du Dome,” “Ancestry,” and “Sermon” appear on versions of “Ostentatious” while versions of “Orchard Farming,” “Sermon,” “Christ —Don Quixote —St. George,” and Ostentatious“ appear on versions of “Xray.” The material nature of these relationships is useful for considering the role that materiality plays in situating these poems in a particular time and place, both historically and in the present. That is, a reader could assume that two poems were produced in close succession because they share a manuscript leaf, but it is also true that the Baroness was quite poor and could have reused these sheets multiple times over a long span of time for economical reasons. Further, it is difficult to say if the proximity of one poem influenced how the Baroness wrote another. At the same time, in the current iteration of In Transition in which images of the manuscripts are used, the reader is exposed to multiple poetic events each time she opens a manuscript leaf that shows multiple poems. As a result, these material relationships play a role in both the text’s perceived material history and the materiality of its current performance.
11The third interconnected relationship embodied by the content within this edition is one that is determined by thematic ties between poems written during this time period. The remaining three poems “Purgatory Lilt/ Statements by Circumstanced Me,” “Orgasmic Toast,” “Matter Level Perspective” have thematic ties with a variety of the aforementioned texts. For instance, the interplay among historical, personal, scientific, and creative forces in “Hell’s Wisdom” points to themes inspired by the Baroness’s fellow Dadaists, but it is difficult to decipher the abstract logic that the arithmetic in a poem like “Hell’s Wisdom” represents unless one also reads “Cosmic Arithmetic.” The other poems share thematic ties as well, such as images of “radiance” in “Orgasmic Toast,” “Sermon on Life’s Beggar Truth,” “Purgatory Lilt,” and “Xray” or mathematic formulas in “Orgasmic toast,” “Purgatory Lilt,” and “Cosmic Arithmetic.” More of these relationships are explored in the extensive introduction and annotations to the edition.
12Reception, thematic, and materiality networks are also reflected in the relationships between words and forms of punctuation across different versions of the poems. For instance, in the poem “Sermon on Life’s Beggar Truth” words are underlined in one version and then not emphasized at all; dashes and colons are deleted and replaced with periods or spaces or exclamation points (and vice versa); and all of these relationships occur in an order that seems to contradict a linear evolution of text. For instance, Figure 1 shows the relationship between the words “Menacing” and “Behold,” which function as “heading” words for two prose stanzas. These words change in similar ways across multiple versions but not in a similar sequence. In versions one and two, “Menacing” and “Behold” remain consistent, underlined with a colon. In versions three through six, “Menacing” is not underlined but is separated from the following prose group by a space. In versions five and six it has a colon while in versions three and four, it has an exclamation point. “Behold” is always on its own line but the colon is deleted and replaced by an exclamation point in version five while versions three, four, and six maintain the colon and so on. The progression shows a network of relationships that hint at multiple performances or instantiations of the poems instead of a teleological process towards an end result. In contrast, there are other social text networks between versions that are linear. The poem “Xray,” for example, which was published in transition (October 1927) has nine extant versions that show changes that we can map to the reception and materiality relationships between nodes. For example, the first three lines of the first stanza of the published version read:
Nature causes brass to oxidize
People to congest–
By dull-radiopenetrated soil . . .
13In the first version in the interface, the first line is “Nature causes brass to oxidize,” which changes to “Nature intends brass to oxidize” in version six. The second line in the first version is “Nature causes people to amass,” which becomes in version six, “Nature intends people [sic] to amass”; this line evolves in version two to “Nature causes people to congest” and eventually becomes, in the published text, a truncated clause: “People to congest—.” While the evolution of these lines are relatively easy to follow, the third line becomes something that seems entirely different if one merely looks at the last version in comparison to the first: “Because of latent ideal of brilliancy” becomes “By dull-radiopenetrated soil” (see Figure 2). The Baroness’s compulsive desire to create multiple versions of each work is reflected in the ontology or content across which particular words, punctuation marks, and symbols move and change.
Figure 1: The words “Menacing” and “Behold” compared across versions of “Sermon on Life’s Beggar Truth” in the Versioning Machine
Figure 2: “Xray”, versions one, eight, and the published 1927 text, in the Versioning Machine
14In short, all twelve poems participate by and through multiple and varied relationships based on reception, materiality, and theme within the textual network that was circulating between 1923 and 1927. In Transition stages a textual performance that sets these social text networks into play.
2.3. Logic and Form: the TEI in the Versioning Machine
- 6 More information about the Versioning Machine is at www.v-machine.org/. The iteration used f (...)
15Encoding a transcription of a printed or manuscript text is a method for creating a computable model of a text that can be instantiated or implemented with computer programs for a variety of applications such as search and retrieval, linguistic analysis, or visualizations. This modularity facilitates the various stagings within a given textual performance. For instance, the TEI-encoded documents of which In Transition is comprised include logical and ontological metadata that can describe both the physical and the semantic nature of the manuscript. Currently, the TEI schema is the most productive standard available for creating a scholarly edition of the Baroness’s poetry because it is able to express the dynamic network of relationships that exist when multiple versions of a poem are performing at once. Created primarily for use with linguistic and literary documents, the standard has a robust schema for considering manuscript texts in multiple versions, making it suitable for the particular textual ontology on which a scholarly edition based on these kinds of texts depends. In particular, methods corresponding to the “Critical Apparatus” guidelines called “parallel segmentation” and “location-referenced,” allow an editor to designate and thus visualize networks among linguistic codes (words, phrases, lines, paragraphs, etc.) and bibliographic codes (page images, page breaks, column breaks, and milestones) that correspond across various versions. In terms of In Transition, the TEI parallel segmentation encoding facilitates the reader’s ability to compare the social text networks of a poem like “Xray” or “Sermon on Life’s Beggar Truth” described above. In particular, In Transition uses the open platform application called the Versioning Machine (VM),6 which renders the TEI XML (shown in Figure 3) into a dynamic HTML page using XSLT, CSS, and JavaScript (shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2). Figure 1 and Figure 2 are examples from In Transition in which lines from various versions of “Xray” and “Sermon on Life’s Beggar Truth” are being compared. With the VM styles, these comparisons can be enacted by readers dynamically in a browser window in two primary ways: (1) the scholar can open and rearrange version panels as needed and (2) the scholar chooses which networks to highlight by selecting lines of interest.
Figure 3: An excerpt of “Xr