Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland,
and Ireland is a historical tome,
published in multiple volumes. It was actually written by multiple authors, not
just Holinshed. The authors’ brought to the book varying backgrounds and
viewpoints. The book, first printed in 1577 with a second edition in 1587,
compiles British history into one handy reference source.
It was these two editions, printed ten years apart,
which the researchers at the Centre for Early Modern Study (CEMS) at Oxford
University wanted to facilitate a comparative study of, in The Holinshed Project. The project was planned
in anticipation of the printing of “a
new fifteen volume edition of the Chronicles”[1]
by Oxford University Press. The project coordinators felt that this work had
not been fully researched and was therefore not meeting its full potential in
the scholarly community. Chronicling the history of 16th century
England, the book had served as a resource for writers, politicians and people
of that era and can therefore be used to help modern scholars studying that
time period.
The aim of the
Holinshed Project was to create basic digital versions of the two texts (the
1577 and the 1587 editions of the book) allowing them to be compared side by
side. Early English Books Online (EEBO) had already created an encoded digital
version of the 1577 edition and granted permission to the Holinshed Project to
use those XML files. EEBO was then commissioned to encode the 1587 edition of Chronicles as well. It could be argued
that in this collaboration[2],
the Holinshed Project has forfeited control over the initial encoding of the
text of the 2nd edition. However it ensures consistency, that the 2nd
edition will be encoded in the same style as the first had been. The focus of
the Holinshed Project was not to encode the texts, but to facilitate
comparison. The encoding of the text was just a step on the way to the end
goal.
For the Project the researchers worked
with the Research Services department at Oxford
University Computing Services to create a tool to compare the encoded texts.
The TEI Comparator Tool that they developed allows users to compare selections
of the two editions, side by side and to search within the text. They utilize
XML to make the two texts machine readable and therefore searchable-
facilitating comparison. It is especially useful given that the order of
certain sections of texts differs from one edition to the next.
I can read on the About page that they decided to encode the texts on the paragraph level, however I cannot see the tags that they used. Pierazzo (2016) writes about the many potentials in XML code, including being able to tag words/phrases multiple times if there is ambiguity or more than one voice present. The volumes were written by many authors, thus representing many voices. Being able to see if multiple XML tags were used could potentially help a scholar.
A problem that
the researchers at the Holinshed Project stated was that in some cases text in
one edition may be illegible (represented by place holding squares). They do
suggest that sometimes it may be legible in the other edition. The search
function makes it easy to find that passage in the other edition if it exists, for
comparison.
On the website
they list the technical specs of the project in stages, such as the use of TEI
P5 XML. However they do not go into great detail and the source code is not
available. There is a link to the TEI Comparator Tool, but the link is dead, as
the website has not been maintained since 2009. They state that it will be available
in future on the website SourceForge.net. That time is now, the TEI Comparator
is available at: http://tei-comparator.sourceforge.net/
The lack of
access to the XML code is a double-edged sword. On the one hand the researchers
state that the purpose of the project is to facilitate comparisons of the two
editions. They wish in the future to be able to annotate the text (there are a
few footnotes for clarification in places). Being able to compare the two
editions without any annotations, without seeing the choice of tags in the XML
code, presents an unbiased view of the text itself. On the flipside there is a
lack of transparency. There would have been choices made when deciding what to
encode and with which tags, choices that are hidden from the viewer. They do
state on the About page that the final stage of the project was to create two
linked HTML versions of the texts for comparison, but they do not go into
details and it is not entirely clear why they chose to do this or why the XML
source files were not made available.
From this
Project arose the TEI Text Comparator Tool which is now available for free
download and it is not just limited to TEI XML.
REFERENCES:
Flanders, Julia. "Collaboration and
Dissent: Challenges of Collaborative Standards for Digital Humanities." In Collaborative
Research in the Digital Humanities, edited by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.) Flanders - collaboration and dissent.pdf
Pierazzo, Elena. "Textual Scholarship and Text
Encoding." In A New Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by
Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2016.) http://go.utlib.ca/cat/10577300
“The Holinshed Project.” Centre for Early Modern Studies: University
of Oxford. Last modified, 2013. http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/
“The Holinshed Project: About The
Project.” Centre for Early Modern
Studies: University of Oxford. Last modified, 2013. http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/about.shtml
“The Holinshed Project: The Texts.”
Centre for Early Modern Studies:
University of Oxford. Accessed Oct. 10, 2016. http://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/
[1] “The Holinshed Project: About The
Project.” Centre for Early Modern
Studies: University of Oxford. Last modified, 2013. http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/about.shtml
[2] Julia Flanders, "Collaboration and
Dissent: Challenges of Collaborative Standards for Digital Humanities," In Collaborative
Research in the Digital Humanities, edited by Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.) p.67 Flanders - collaboration and dissent.pdf
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