Editing Literary-Historical Manuscripts
Submitting Institution
De Montfort UniversityUnit of Assessment
English Language and LiteratureSummary Impact Type
CulturalResearch Subject Area(s)
Information and Computing Sciences: Information Systems
Language, Communication and Culture: Literary Studies
History and Archaeology: Historical Studies
Summary of the impact
Contributing to the preservation of literary materials through innovative
use of technology, DMU's Centre for Technology and the Arts (CTA) —
subsequently renamed the Centre for Textual Studies (CTS) — pioneered new
digital techniques for analysing, editing and presenting
literary-historical manuscripts of international significance. These
techniques revolutionized the scholarly task of capturing data about
manuscripts, permitting new kinds of analyses, editing and dissemination,
now widely practised to facilitate public access and cultural enrichment.
In particular, the CTA/CTS invented a manuscript description standard
taken up by major libraries across the world, the International Standards
Organization (ISO) via the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and by
commercial publishers.
Underpinning research
DMU's CTA was established in 1998 to develop research into electronic
editorial practice under the leadership of Peter Robinson
(1993-2004), working with Norman Blake (1998-2004). The CTA
produced editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales based on fresh
analysis of all the early manuscripts (HRB funded £100,000 1996-99, AHRB
funded £394,000 1999-2004, Leverhulme Trust funded £60,000 1995-98). The
prevailing digital document encoding standard at the time — the Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI) P3 standard — could not cope with the problems
of encoding 400-600 year old English manuscripts. By examining hundreds of
relevant manuscripts, Robinson derived a new taxonomy of
contextualizing information that could be extended by repetition within
elements to produce manuscript descriptions of unprecedented length and
sophistication. The new standard for manuscript description was formally
defined via the newly created Extensible Markup Language (XML), the
advanced features of which it was amongst the first to exploit. In 1999 Robinson's
edition of The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM won the Beatrix
White Prize for the best contribution to Medieval and Renaissance
scholarship.
Robinson recognized that were his standard to be adopted by
libraries worldwide it would enable the creation of an online union
catalogue of all their manuscript holdings. In 1999, he initiated the
"Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records" (MASTER)
project, funded by the EU (376,000 euro 2001-03) and the European Science
Foundation (100,000 French francs 1999). MASTER, with DMU as lead partner
of six collaborating European universities, promulgated Robinson's
standard and developed and distributed the necessary software for its
adoption. Details of MASTER's achievements are archived at
http://master.dmu.ac.uk (accessed 13/08/13).
The CTA developed other research projects deploying new approaches to
scholarly editing enabled by Robinson's work, anticipating the
revolution in digital publishing and making the core documents of our
literary heritage accessible to all. In 2005, a collaboration with the
British Library, the University of Wales Bangor and Keio University,
Japan, was established to work on manuscripts of Malory's Le Morte
Darthur http://malory.dmu.ac.uk (accessed 13/08/13). In 2004, the
CTA was renamed the Centre for Textual Studies by its new Director Peter Shillingsburg
(2002-10) and launched further projects, including Briggs
(1994-08)/Shillingsburg's `Woolf `"Time Passes"' project
(Leverhulme, £52,780 2006) and partnership projects with UCL on Dante's Commedia
(AHRB 2002-04), with Princeton on the Monarchia (AHRB 2003-04),
and with the University of Liverpool (AHRB 2003-04).
The CTA/CTS developed a wholly new kind of study adapted from the methods
of evolutionary biology, called Phylogenetic Analysis using Parsimony
(PAUP). Treating random word alterations that occur during scribal
transcription as analogous to random genetic alterations in biological
processes, PAUP produces 'family trees' showing the manuscripts'
linguistic relatedness, called cladograms. This research led to a 2008
landmark article in the world's most-cited and influential
interdisciplinary science journal, Nature (circulation 53,000,
readership 424,000).
The CTA/CTS developed a new publication technology — the XML-based
Anastasia system (2000) — enabling literary-historical scholars to combine
complex manuscripts and transcriptions in a single digital package. This
technology was first delivered by CD-ROMs and later over the Internet.
http://www.sd-editions.com/anastasia (accessed 13/08/13).
References to the research
1) Peter Robinson: "A Stemmatic Analysis of the Fifteenth-Century
Witnesses to The Wife of Bath's Prologue" in N. F. Blake and Peter
Robinson (eds.) Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers II
(London: The Office for Humanities Communication, 1997): pp. 69-132.
2) Elizabeth Solopova: "Chaucer's Metre and Scribal Editing in the Early
Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales" in N. F. Blake and P. M.
Robinson (eds.) Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers II
(London: The Office for Humanities Communication, 1997): pp. 143-164.
3) Norman Blake: "Editing the Canterbury Tales: Preliminary
Observations" Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 116
(1998): 198-214.
4) Norman Blake "The Links in the Canterbury Tales" in Susan
Powell, Jeremy J. Smith and Derek Pearsal (eds) New Perspectives on
Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R. A. Waldron (Woodbridge:
Brewer, 2000): 107-18.
5) Takako Kato: "Irregular Textual Divisions in Caxton's Morte
Darthur: Paraphs and Chapter Divisions" Poetica: An
International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies, (53), 2000,
15-38. (2000)
6) Peter Shillingsburg: "Private Reading, Public Writing: W. M.
Thackeray, Mrs. Grundy, and the Market" Variants: The Journal of the
European Society for Textual Scholarship, (2-3), 2004, 271-78.
(2004)
Evidence of Quality: all peer reviewed. (Outputs available on request)
Details of the impact
Over the census period, the reach and significance of the
CTA/CTS research programme have been global. The importance of the
Canterbury Tales project to cultural heritage preservation
is acknowledged by the National Library of Wales, the repository of the
Hengwrt Chaucer, the earliest extant Chaucer manuscript. A digitised
version of the manuscript was prepared with DMU, using the techniques
developed in the CTA/CTS, and enabled the Library to better understand and
preserve the fragile parchment of one of its greatest treasures, providing
the widest textual archaeology of the Hengwrt manuscript and its scribe
explicitly for `the benefit of the public'. Visitor numbers now total
approx 100,000 annually with over two million remote visitors to its site.
Building on the CTA/CTS research, the Library is now established as one of
Europe's leading centres for digitisation, and its three-year strategy for
agile electronic access 2011-14 is recognized as a model for facilitating
access to recorded cultures.
In the census period, the CTA/CTS work on a standardized system called
MASTER for manuscript description achieved catalogue integration across
the holdings of the Royal Library in the Hague, the Arnamagnaean Institute
in Copenhagen, L'Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes in Paris,
the National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague, the Bodleian Library,
Oxford, the British Library, the Vatican Library and the Biblioteca
Ambrosiana, Milan. This amounts to 61,000 manuscripts — the core of
Europe's rare manuscript holdings — being combined into a single
searchable catalogue using the CTA/CTS standard.
The latest manifestation of this is the EU-funded 5.57M euro ENRICH
project (2007-09), which explicitly builds on the basis of the CTA/CTS
achievement in this field. This created a base for a digital library of
European cultural heritage, which made available more than five million
digitized pages for a wide range of non-academic users, including
`libraries, museums and archives, policy makers and general interest
users'. Examples include the National Library of the Czech Republic,
Prague, Centro per comunicazione e l'integrazione dei media, Florence,
SYSTRAN S.A., Paris, and Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, Spain.
The XML-based Anastasia system enabled scholars working on
manuscript-based historical and literary projects to publish their
editions without additional technical support, and it has been adopted by
those working on ancient Biblical manuscripts of major theological
significance. These include Digital Nestle-Aland, which is an
electronic version of the standard scholarly edition of the Greek New
Testament published in Stuttgart 2012 (ISBN 978-3-438-05140-0), and the
online edition of the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the most important
books in the world, produced in 2009 in an international partnership
between the British Library, the National Library of Russia, St
Catherine's Monastery and Leipzig University Library.
From 2007, this CTA/CTS standard for manuscript description officially
became the whole world's standard. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is
an affiliated organization of the International Standards Organization
(ISO) — itself a body with consultative status on the United Nations
Economic and Social Council — and it has adopted the CTA/CTS standard. In
2002, the P4 version of the TEI guidelines (an interim release) adopted
the CTA/CTS approach to produce its first systematic instructions on
encoding manuscript descriptions, and the latest version, P5 published in
2007, fully incorporates the CTA/CTS work. The CTA/CTS-initiated MASTER
project thus became the model for other projects attempting to build
inter-library union catalogues.
Because virtually all commercial publication of scholarly works uses the
TEI guidelines, the CTA/CTS standard has become ubiquitous in commercial
publications based on manuscript sources. Virtually every publisher uses
TEI encoding when handling complex manuscript materials. Typical examples
include Cambridge University Press, which used the CTA/CTS standard to
publish two volumes of the letters of Samuel Beckett in 2009-11 (ISBNs
978-0521867931, 978-0521867948). In 2009, Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and
Nienke Bakker edited the artist's letters using the CTA/CTS standard for
the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (ISBN 978-0500238653). 2,000 pages of
Isaac Newton's manuscripts have been digitized using the CTA/CTS standard
as part of Indiana University Press's `The Chymistry of Isaac Newton'
project. Between 2009 and 2011, AMS Press of New York published three
volumes of the work of James Fenimore Cooper using the CTA/CTS standard
(ISBNs 978-0404644673, 978-0404644666 and 978-0404644796). A full list of
projects using the TEI standard is given in section (5) below; all those
involving manuscript work use the CTA/CTS standard developed at De
Montfort.
Sources to corroborate the impact
For more information about the Hengwrt Chaucer, its importance and DMU's
role in its digitisation, please see http://www.llgc.org.uk/?id=257
(accessed 13/08/13). For more information about the libraries digitisation
programme, please see http://www.llgc.org.uk/index.php?id=122
and the links therein (accessed13/08/13). For the reference to `benefit of
the public', please see http://www.llgc.org.uk/fileadmin/documents/pdf/nlw_strategy_s.pdf
(accessed 22/08/13)
Evidence for the catalogue integration across Europe can be seen from the
MASTER project — please see http://master.dmu.ac.uk/
For further information about the ENRICH project, please see http://enrich.manuscriptorium.com/
This describes the project "ENRICH: Towards a European Digital Library of
Manuscripts", which built on MASTER to bring in more libraries and further
develop the CTA/CTS manuscript encoding standard (accessed 13/08/13).
To see examples of the internationally important books which have been
put into the public domain as a consequence of this research, please see
the following links (both accessed 13/08/13):
-
www.codexsinaiticus.org
This describes the scope and progress of the work on the Codex
Sinaiticus, building on its adoption of the CTA/CTS encoding standard
and its publication software.
-
http://nestlealand.uni-muenster.de
This describes the University of Munster Institute for New Testament
Textual Research's adoption of the CTA/CTS encoding standard and its
publication software.
Evidence for becoming the world's standard: developing the Text Encoding
Initiative:
-
http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/Master/Hermes/index.htm
This describes how the TEI first began its adoption of the manuscript
description standards created by the CTA/CTS MASTER project (accessed
13/08/13). See the sections "1 Introduction" and "2 Background" for the
leading role of MASTER within the international collaboration that led
to TEI P5's incorporation of the CTA/CTS work.
-
http://www.tei-c.org/About/Archive_new/Master/Reference/oldindex.html
This describes the TEI's final adoption of the manuscript description
standards created by the CTA/CTS MASTER project. See in particular the
"Intro's" assertion "In its present form, the system documented here was
produced as a major deliverable of the MASTER (Manuscript Access through
Standardization of Electronic Records) project, funded by the European
Union Framework IV program from January 1999 to June 2001."
- For the current TEI guidelines, please see http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
(accessed 13/08/13). This shows that the CTA/CTS research on manuscript
description became the basis of the TEI's standard and hence the
standard for all the world, including virtually all commercial
publishing of manuscript materials, which is almost invariably achieved
using TEI P5.
-
http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects
This is a list of the projects using the TEI standard that is based on
the CTA/CTS manuscript encoding standard. (accessed 13/08/23)
In addition, Barbrook, Adrian C, Christopher J. Howe, Norman Blake and
Peter Robinson "The Phylogeny of The Canterbury Tales" Nature
394 (1998): 839 is an article in the world's most widely read science
journal, showing the impact of the CTA/CTS work beyond its disciplinary
boundaries.