Interviews on the future of digital editing and publishing

IRC Project_C21 Editions Transcript Ref: C21_JOS_KR This research is part of the C21 Editions project (c21editions.org), a three-year international collaboration jointly funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AH/W001489/1) and Irish Research Council (IRC/W001489/1). Page 1 of 4 Interviewer: James O’Sullivan Interviewee: Krista Rasmussen KRISTA RASMUSSEN is the scholarly leader of the digital edition of Grundtvigs Værker (Grundtvig’s Works) at Center for Grundtvig Studies, Aarhus University. January 27th, 2022 JOS: The terms scholarly edition and scholarly editing, what do they mean to you? KR: To me it feeds into a classical tradition within the humanities of doing critical editions - in my case literature of old, classical literature. So to me it’s a continuation of that practice of publishing works that have been critically edited, and perhaps enriched with notes and textual criticism. That is, several texts of the work have been studied to do textual criticism, and in our case, each work is furnished with an introduction and explanatory notes and mark-up, i.e. of people and Biblical references. We are doing a scholarly edition of Grundtvig’s complete works. N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783-1872) was a very famous Danish priest, pedagogue, historian, politician, poet and much more. He is very important to Danish society, thus, it is also a matter of providing access to an important part of cultural heritage. JOS: I wonder if you could just talk me though that project and where you’re at with it? KR: It’s a large-scale project because we’re publishing approximately a thousand works, around thirty-six thousand printed pages. The project was granted by the government in Denmark and is scheduled to run for twenty years. We’re halfway through the project by now. We’re doing a digital scholarly edition of all works published by Grundtvig during his lifetime. It is the most extensive Danish authorship ever. At Center for Grundtvig Studies we also conduct research on Grundtvig, i.e. within digital humanities. The project was started ten years ago, we have between ten and twelve full time editors working on the project, four student assistants and several researchers, some of the are on and off attached to the project. Initially there was a preprocess outlining the guidelines for the edition. It was meant planned as a historical, critical edition in which all the variants are included, but it was not possible to follow through within our timeframe. It would simply take too long to give all the variants. Instead we called it a critical edition and we had to downscale a little during the process. We are half way through the project now; we’ve published almost 17000 pages, 505 works, which is 53 % of our total corpus. JOS: What do you feel digital editions do well, what might be done better? KR: First of all, I think it would be impossible to do this as a print edition because it would be, I don’t know, one hundred volumes perhaps. I don’t think anyone would have any interest in that because it’s a very diverse authorship. But we can make the complete works of this author available as a digital scholarly edition, and furthermore provide a curated corpus with texts edited according to scientific methods which means it’s a very clean data set of good use within digital humanities. A clean and smooth data set like ours is useful for many purposes and freely available. We also give awareness to Grundtvig and provide texts for people interested in his thoughts and ideas. So it has these three dimensions. JOS: Do you think projects of this nature generally give enough emphasis to the importance of that underlying dataset? KR: I hope so. I mean we are very concerned about our mark-up and editorial texts, like introduction and textual notes. We use XML and TEI as most projects do and we have put a lot of effort into that, but for the digital humanities in general, they often don’t need the XML IRC Project_C21 Editions Transcript Ref: C21_JOS_KR This research is part of the C21 Editions project (c21editions.org), a three-year international collaboration jointly funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AH/W001489/1) and Irish Research Council (IRC/W001489/1). Page 2 of 4 or the TEI mark-up, they basically need the text. They can have different purposes so just making the clean data set is in itself a great advance compared to other data sets, at least those available in Danish. But one of the main concerns right now, for us at least, and I think for a lot of projects is the long-term preservation. What to preserve for instance? Should we preserve the data or the edition itself as it is built by us. I see this as two opposite things because it’s more or less straight forward to preserve the data, we have an infrastructure for that, but preserving the edition is a completely different thing because then you have to preserve the structure of the edition which is unique for this and other projects. JOS: And when you think about digital editions and digital editing, what are the dominant tools and platforms that come to mind? KR: We use XML and TEI, and Oxygen for editing, but we don’t use any of the open source tools that are available for the edition. I think it’s because this project was initiated in 2008 in the slipstream of another great digital edition in Denmark: the works of Soren Kierkegaard. Around this time, there wasn’t many possibilities for open source publishing tools, so we built our own website. One of our main concerns at the moment is preservation, a standalone website is not viable. Our hope is to establish a standardised plan for preservation and dissemination for Danish digital editions in general. JOS: So if I can bring you back to some work that you did in 2016, you wrote about the role of the reader in digital scholarly editions, I wonder if you could speak to that? KR: I think that research came out of an interest in the difference between print editions and digital editions at a time in scholarly editing where everyone was talking about all the possibilities of the internet. I had done research into digital literature as well and it’s sort of like the same theme, there is this great optimism, we have to free ourselves from the pages of the book and I think it was Peter Robinson that said ‘if you can dream it you can make it’. But I wanted to take a step back and look at what you actually need, what are the interests for a scholarly edition. Making a great site where people can contribute, it costs a lot of money, it takes a lot of manpower and I just wonder if it's worth it because primarily you want to as a reader is to read the text, and how do you do that the best in digital terms? For most people it’s actually just a PDF file they need. It is not very easy to read a four hundred page on a screen on an online edition because it’s difficult to see all of it and it’s very hard to follow the process, you know, when you sit with a book you always know how far you are, you know when you’re half way. Making a work available for readers just to read is the primary goal of a digital edition. How do you do that best? Perhaps you do it best by using a form that everyone knows and that form is the book. It doesn’t have to be a print book but it has to use some of the good things from a book and that is the closeness or intimacy. You have everything you need in your hand; you don’t have to flip between different screens and so on. This interest drove my work. Now that I am working as an editor in charge it has also become clear to me, that it is actually what people want. Last year we started making PDF files of the works we had published in our edition and it has been a huge success because people want to be able to download it and perhaps even print it and not having to go to huge efforts to use an edition if that makes sense. JOS: You draw a distinction between the reader, the user and the co-worker, I wonder if you could speak through those distinctions? KR: Yes. When you act like a user, and this is the same with a book, it’s another system and type of engagement. You have to know how to use it, how to use notes for instance, whether they are on the bottom of the page or in the back, and you have to know how to use indexes and so on. This is the same with a digital edition. So just thinking about distinguishing these two roles means you pay attention to making the works accessible for reading but also for using. I call the IRC Project_C21 Editions Transcript Ref: C21_JOS_KR This research is part of the C21 Editions project (c21editions.org), a three-year international collaboration jointly funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AH/W001489/1) and Irish Research Council (IRC/W001489/1). Page 3 of 4 reader, user, and co-worker roles to emphasise that these are roles the reader takes on when engaging with a scholarly edition and as an editor it worth considering how best to facilitate these types of reader-engagement. We have different tools in our edition such as facsimiles, commentaries, textual notes and so on, and when you as a reader engage with the tools, you act like a user. So you can switch between different modalities. With the facsimiles you can see how the works were printed. There are also notes and annotations, i.e. explaining old words the readers might not be familiar with, people mentioned in the works, places, and Biblical references. Most of these annotations we collect in indexes. All in all this provides advice or guidance for the reader, and is the result of having experts working on the text and preparing it for an audience. The editors can point out references to the bible or people mentioned and provide short explanations. Finding out who a 18th Century or 19th Century is can be extremely difficult, you can’t just google it. Tools, commentaries, indexes and so on helps the reader using the scholarly edition, and this user-engagement deepens the readers understanding of the work. That is, the reader switch forth and back between reading and using the edition, and at the same switch between analysing the text and analysing the work. The ‘extra knowledge’ or layers of interpretation offered by a scholarly edition is important and of great interest to me as an editor as it also concerns the relations between texts and works. The role as a co-worker is when the reader engages actively in the making of an edition, i.e. by providing commentaries, annotations or transcriptions. This is not a possibility in the edition of Grundtvig’s Works I’m working on now. I think it was a dream people had that readers could contribute, that they could go in and write notes themselves, compile their own edition. I think it is very few who wants to participate in a project like this, unless you have an audience of expert readers who could engage as co-workers. I’ve seen it work successfully when it’s about transcribing handwritten text from like the 17th or 18th Century, I’ve also seen a Dictionary-project on a special Danish dialect that had people contributing, because they know the dialect. So, in my work on reader roles, it was a question of looking at all these dreams people had on behalf of the scholarly edition and tuning it down a little. Better to use your effort and your concerns on the basic and the most important things of the scholarly edition. JOS: Do you think that this field thinks enough about digital editions from the perspective of interfaces? KR: I don’t think we do, but I think that it’s also very difficult because most of us are not experts on interface. Instead, we work together with experts in the field on our project. However, we are experts on designing scholarly editions. I think that interface is an important issue, but preservation is the main thing here. Interfaces, they come and go which makes preservation difficult, so I think we have to consider how to use interfaces that are good for scholarly editions and that are more easily preserved. JOS: And what might they be? KR: In our case, we have an interface with columns so you can have the text and the notes present or you can have the text, facsimiles, and the notes on your screen. In fact, you can have an infinite number of columns. This was a standardized way of designing a digital scholarly edition around 2010, when our project launched. We adopted the design from a Finnish edition of The Writings of Zacharias Topelius. The idea was that the user should be able to see both text and facsimiles on screen at the same timer. I think this design has a value, but I also think we have to think more about how this would work best. At the moment we’re concerned with long-term preservation and we participate in building infrastructure for the display of Danish scholarly editions in general. Working with website designers can be troublesome. The display of digital scholarly editions has to conform to conventions within textual scholarship, not necessarily general design trends. For instance, it is important to use the metadata, i.e. for different kinds of indexes, and the display of typographical signals from the print origin is no to the edition is no IRC Project_C21 Editions Transcript Ref: C21_JOS_KR This research is part of the C21 Editions project (c21editions.org), a three-year international collaboration jointly funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AH/W001489/1) and Irish Research Council (IRC/W001489/1). Page 4 of 4 trivial matter either. If designers are more concerned with portable designs, i.e. ‘this looks good on a cell phone’, then I will insist that we think and act as textual scholars when planning and designing our interfaces. JOS: So, magic wand scenario, if I gave you unlimited resources and technologies both real and imagined, what would the ideal future edition look like to you? KR: I think it would look a lot like the edition we have now. It would focus on making text that you can read, such as good printing options, because people actually want to print out texts for sustained reading, especially students want to print out complex texts. Theoretically difficult texts are very difficult to read on screen, like philosophical texts, even poetry can be hard to read on a screen. If I had endless funding, I would experiment with building different display models and see what works the best.