Terry Brooks (iSchool) and Miceal Vaughan (UW Textual Studies) are collaborating on producing a digital version of Piers Plowman, a fourteenth century English poem that is the subject of textual studies and whose interpretation is taught to undergraduate and graduate students alike. The goal of the project is to make the variety of interpretations and versions of the poem digital accessible. Terry Brooks has developed and is refining an XML schema that is capable of encoding the different versions of the text and accompanying annonations to it.
In today’s talk, he presented the XML Schema as well as an XML editor that allows a scholar like Miceal Vaughan to add alternate versions of a word, write annotations, and, in essence, to create a master copy/archive of Piers Plowman in a digital format.
Note: [link to the Electronic Piers Plowman project page]
Some Insights
Brooks learned very quickly that the level of granularity that an XML encoding of poetry requires is down to the level of words and punctuation. A particular example of this is how commas are treated. Some versions require that whitespace appear before a comma. Brooks solution to this is to breakdown a poem’s lines into individual units: a word is a unit and so it a punctuation mark, like a comma. Then, whitespace requirements and other attributes are encoded in the XML schema for that unit. This way, Brooks and Vaughan can describe peculiarities important to poetry, such as whitespace.
Other version differences that Brooks has handled or will have to handle include: missing lines, reordered text, and spacing between letters.
When Vaughan gave these versions to his students to use in class, he found that students often printed out the text. There exists a tradeoff when you decide what to print on a page. Readers give up the interactivity and many layers of information that existed in the digital representation for the sake of readability and other advantages. This is a interested balance to explore.
On presentation: Vaughan insisted that the poems be presented in a clean manner: “I don’t want underlining. I don’t even want the colored text [for in-text links]“. From a usability perspective, this suggests that users approach Brooks’ application with different modes of reading: from enjoying the poem as is to investigating its intricaties, down to the punctuation.
Some Discussion and Comments
On Generalizing your work -
+ You will want to explore different kinds of poems and presentation formats to better generalize your XML schema
+ This work will be helpful add a concrete example and perspective to standards committees for XML schemas such as these.
On user-applications
+ Permit students or other communities to contribute annotations of there own
+ We need studies of how the academic community goes about studying texts and how users read such poems. This will better inform the UI design.
Tags: Medieval Studies, Piers Plowman
