Editorial theory has in recent years been much concerned with re-evaluating the assumptions that lie behind the practice of editing, in light of the arguments promulgated by McGann and others that the text we edit is of necessity constructed through social interaction. A parallel argument makes the claim that the electronic medium is uniquely situated to put into practice the claims of the theorists (exemplary articles are included in the collection edited by Landow). While creative collaboration is not a norm in the humanities, it is very much at the centre of disciplines in the performing arts: drama, in particular, involves the interaction of many kinds of creative endeavour before a play is staged. The Internet Shakespeare Editions are uniquely in a position to explore varieties of collaboration that borrow from other disciplines: the open source movement in software development, and the well-developed traditions of collective creativity in the performance arts, since the concept of 'text' in a play by Shakespeare can - and arguably should - be extended to include the history of his plays in performance. This panel will provide a forum to discuss the electronic edition as an exemplar of the creation of a social/performance text as the various contributors to an edition interact and learn from each other.
Many of the collaborative activities in the preparation of an edition for a print press are so familiar as to be transparent: peer review, copy editing, data entry, printing, binding, distributing and so on. The print interface is also very stable, with minimal experimentation with the appearance of the print on the page (but see Jowett, Grusin and Bolter). Those working in the electronic medium, however, are still experimenting with ways of displaying the text and its associated navigational structures. The result is that the lonely textual scholar will ideally become involved in the process of creating much more than simply a word-processor file to send off to the publisher. The team of technical designers and programmers are unlikely to understand what the editor sees as important or what a typical user of the edition will be seeking, and the textual scholar is unlikely to know what opportunities the full capabilities of the medium offer: thus the most effective edition will be the result of a deep and interdisciplinary collaboration between the various creators.
The Internet Shakespeare Editions is a collaboration in many ways. An academic Editorial Board oversees general standards; plays are edited by individual editors, or (in several cases) further collaboration between scholars; the General Textual Editor works with the editors to ensure quality and consistency; and technical experts work on separate but interrelated tasks - the development of the XML structure that is the basis for textual materials on the site, the creation of databases to display images of the texts and of performance materials, the graphic design of the site, and the stylesheets that determine the overall look of both static and dynamic pages.
The analogy with the performing arts is persuasive, since they typically involve a similar interaction between specialists (set design, costume design, choreography, lighting), creative artists (actors, the author perhaps) and administrative/creative personnel (director, producer). Publishers and actors are similarly concerned to reach and engage their audiences. Where the analogy fails, however, is in the contrast between the maturity of the theatre community and the inexperience of those of us working to create electronic texts. Much in the way that the print medium has evolved transparent signposts for navigation within the book, theatre companies have evolved generally consistent and effective structures to manage the collaborative endeavour of producing a play. The challenge that lies ahead for organizations like the Internet Shakespeare Editions is to develop similarly coherent and effective management of collaboration. How can we best ensure that scholars are not intimidated by technical demands, and that the programmers are aware of the full potential of the materials they are responsible for displaying?
As well as providing a potential model for collaboration in the creation of online texts, the analogy with stage performance also provides a warning. Performance (unless on film) is evanescent, leaving traces only in reviews and theatre archives. Methods for preserving print are highly developed, and there is every reason to expect that a book published today will survive for several hundred years if it is judged worth the storage space. But techniques for archiving and for ensuring the permanence of electronic data are also evolving as file formats and the medium itself evolve.
In a recent essay, W.B. Worthen asks
If we take the printform of a work to be like a performance, materializing a historically contingent, socially inscribed instance of the work . . . we may be able to seize a more dynamic sense of the changing interplay between these two enduring, and volatile, modes of production.
This panel will involve a representative group of those working on different activities within the structure of the
Internet Shakespeare Editions as they explore the interplay between multiple modes of production.
Panel members will give short presentations (maximum ten minutes), in order to leave sufficient time for questions both within the panel and from the floor.
Michael Best, Coordinating Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions, will chair the panel, and begin by providing an overview of the academic and administrative structure of the ISE. He will also discuss the audience for which the editions are designed, and the potential of content management software and other software packages that facilitate collaboration.
Jessica Slights, one of two editors collaborating on Othello, will discuss the challenges facing scholars trained in literary studies as they work with the additional demands made by the electronic text, both in the sheer quantity of material the electronic space makes available, and in dealing with the demands of preparing a text in e-format.
Peter van Hardenberg will discuss the need for the XML structures chosen for the texts to reflect adequately the needs of computing humanists.
Wendy Huot is responsible for designing the databases for images and performance materials that will be integral to the editions. Her presentation will explore strategies for developing, in consultation, an overall data model that can organize and interrelate a wide variety of binary and textual objects.
Alan Galey, an editor with extensive experience in programming, will discuss current thinking on archiving and long-term preservation of electronic artifacts.
Michael Best
In 1996, when I first began work on the Internet Shakespeare Editions, I chose to describe my role as that of 'Coordinating Editor' rather than the more usual 'General Editor'. Coordination and collaboration are necessarily at the centre of the development of a major scholarly site that involves both academic and technical organization. Academically, there is an Editorial Board to oversee general standards, a General Textual Editor to crack the whip, and an extensive team of editors, since each play is being edited by one or more scholars. On the technical side the demands are no less complex. Gone are the days that a scholar can, as a sideline, whip up some reasonably effective HTML code and publish it; Web users now expect attractive, professionally designed pages, intuitive navigation, and full searching capabilities. In addition, sites are increasingly being generated from centralized relational databases requiring sophisticated programming skills. All this costs money, and it is still true, in Canada at any rate, that granting agencies tend to be frugal in apportioning funds for what seem more like computer science than Humanities activities. One solution is to apply for funding for student assistants — coop positions, MA or PhD fellowships and so on — since these can be more readily justified as academic expenses than the fees of professional programmers.
The challenge thus becomes the management of two teams, largely separate in their activities, but requiring collaboration before the editors' texts can be effectively displayed by the structures created by the technical team. In his paper, Peter van Hardenberg will discuss the problems that he faces in creating an effective XML schema for the complex documents the editors produce as they transcribe, modernize, collate, and annotate texts that often have multiple origins; Wendy Huot will discuss the process by which she is designing a database that will respond flexibly to a wide range of textual and multimedia artifacts created by the performance of Shakespeare. On the academic side, Jessica Slights will discuss the learning curve that a textual scholar faces when preparing materials for electronic publication, and Alan Galey will bring the perspective of that rare bird, a textual scholar who is also familiar with programming, to the discussion of the long-term viability of the texts we are publishing.
The technical team also requires a high level of internal collaboration. Academic editors are used to working on their own, but the various activities of the programmers — designing templates for a consistent look, developing XML, and designing the database — are deeply interconnected. There are also important external consultants on graphic and interface design. To facilitate collaboration, we are using standard processes — email lists, a Yahoo discussion group, and conference calls — but we are also looking at possibilities for software solutions: a content management system that would permit flexible access to the site, at the same time as making networks of communication available to those working on parallel projects.