Nexus Renascence Editions and the Art of Online Publishing
Risa Bear
Renaissance Society of America, March 2003.
Like Caxton and the other early adopters of the printing press, I am a practitioner of the art of the possible, with an interest in propagating content that appears to me to have merit or at least intrinsic interest as content: something which, when reformatted, performs an action at a distance. The Internet and the World Wide Web have made possible the practice of publishing, of providing public access to texts, on an unprecedented scale. Such a leveling of the publisher's playing field has never before occurred, though the invention of the printing press foreshadows it in many ways. So we now have a great many publishers, and the only prerequisite for participation is perhaps a bit of understanding of HTML and how to maintain a few files on a server.
You tend to hear, at these gatherings, from brilliant minds engaged in what to me is the science of online publishing; how to load data so as to extract quantifiable data from it. On this I have very little, perhaps even nothing, to say. You are now entering the realm of the somewhat less brilliant mind; I am one of that vast array of amateur publishers made possible by the dot.com age of the 1990s.
"Nexus" has the same root as "net," "connect," and "neck;" so it connects persons, places, or things, and has perhaps a connotation of being the knot in the net, a gathering together of threads from one direction and dispersing them in another. A publisher is a nexus of ideas. We speak of weaving a text, that a text, like a textile artifact, has texture, and is like a net. A collection of texts may be a kind of meta-text; if it has some kind of rationale as a collection, and if the texts share some common design elements, this will be more obvious. There will then be a net of nets of nets, which is the text collection, and which of course resides somewhere "on the Net."
A brief history
I became interested in texts and textual design from an early age, having received at ten, as a gift, a subscription to the Heritage Press series of public domain works, beginning with the wonderful Gullivers Travels illustrated by the renowned engraver Fritz Eichenberg.
This interest, never diminished through a decade of work in forestry, led to my apprenticing myself in 1983 to John McCandless, a retired letterpressman who had taught printing at Black Mountain College. He founded the Hemlock Press, which operated from the 1950s until 1984.
In the 1980s I worked as commercial pressman, doing mostly foil stamping, embossing, and die cutting. I bought a Chandler and Price hand-fed press and did a small side business in note cards, business cards, ticket numbering, and the like.
Presswork still interests me, but the part of printing I liked best was typography. I found typesetting in foundry type laborious, however, and didn't own a Linotype machine, on which I had trained at the Hemlock Press.
My love for text reawakened with the arrival of the early personal computers. I began my digital career in 1988, typesetting a Quaker pamphlet on a CP/M Kaypro 4, with 64K of RAM, running at 4.77 megahertz. The pamphlet just fit on a single floppy, which could hold 191K of RAM.
While working on the M.A. in English at the University of Oregon, in 1992, I became interested in producing texts for Internet distribution as an alternative to writing term papers. My professors agreed, and I created, by typing, a series of introduced and annotated texts, each in fulfillment of course requirements, during the years 1992-1993. These were:
There being basically no World Wide Web at the time, these were initially ASCII texts and were deposited with the Oxford Text Archive.John Gay, The Beggars Opera Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender Lady Mary Sidney Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie Selected Prose and Poetry of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Philip Sidney, The Lady of May This activity proved habit-forming, and upon my graduation in 1993, I embarked upon the ambitious task of typing Spenser's Faerie Queene. The project, complete with proofing, took up a year of my spare time and was completed in early 1995.
Oxford Text Archive already had an edition of FQ, but one that was prepared according to an already outdated scheme of line-numbering and coding. It was about this time that I discovered HTML, and with the guidance of Joe St. Sauver of the University of Oregon's Computing Center, created the Faerie Queene as an HTML coded text, hand coding with macros in a program called PCWrite on a 286 computer, uploading to the University's server via XMODEM at 300 baud, and checking my work with LYNX, the text-based browser available on the mainframe.
My first HTML project, then, was a single work, in eight files, comprising some two million characters. It may be that I am not entirely compos mentis.
Now that I had two major works by Spenser on hand, and a World Wide Web available on which to publish them, it occurred to me that a home page for Spenser might be a good thing. Many Shakespeare web sites existed, but nothing for Spenser other than a few scattered excerpts from the poems, and a Faerie Queene at the University of Virginia that was accessible only on that campus. I began in earnest to transcribe works by one author, and in 1996 designed and built the original Edmund Spenser Home Page.
The Edmund Spenser Home Page was wildly popular, and the discussion group which I provided to go with it kept me very busy. Recently, as my workload in the library where I work has steadily increased, I reluctantly concluded to shed Spenser so as to be able to get some sleep at night. I advertised the opportunity on the list, and the applicant chosen was Cambridge University. They now host and maintain both the site and the list, which recently joined forces with the Sidney list to unite most of the scholars in the world working on Spenser and Sidney into one online community. I'm very pleased with the results.
When I ran out of Spenser texts to transcribe, I realized that transcription, rather than running an author site, was my first love, and I began again to explore other authors. At this time, also, I began hearing from others who sought a venue for their efforts. Chief among these, in terms of productivity, was the famous Judy Boss, who had started out in the early 1970s with an ASCII transcription of the original 10-book first edition of Paradise Lost.
To accommodate this wider range of texts, I began to keep a site, parallel to, and related to, the Edmund Spenser Home Page. Casting about for a name and mission for the project, I remembered the collections of public domain reprints that had been dear to my youth: Classics Club, Heritage Press, the Modern Library. These had made classic works of literature, philosophy, and history available to a wider readership than had ever before been possible, and I wished to emulate them.
I thought of the name Renaissance Editions, but I knew that there was already a print publisher's series, Renaissance Books. I remembered, however, the title of Edna St. Vincent Millay's lovely first book, Renascence and Other Poems. This alternative spelling, infrequently used outside the world of antiquarian scholars and students of Southern literature, appealed to me, and I created the site banner still in use today.
The site grew rapidly from 1997 to the present. There are now 172 titles. Traffic, sporadically measured, has grown accordingly, with over six million hits since the beginning. Here are the figures for
January 2001. I expect to add only a few more texts to Renascence Editions myself; my eyesight is not what it was, and I'm beginning to become aware that my remaining time for going fishing is less than it was. I would like to find an official home for the site, so that it can attract a modest amount of funding (something it has never had), and provide a bit of a soft-money project for my retirement, lording it over the efforts of a few earnest work-study students. Whether this dream achieves reality or not, I do hope to do something for Philip Sidney's Arcadia in the near future.
The dual mission of Renascence Editions is to provide readable Web editions of early modern English works and translations to the general public and to provide a site for publication of such works. Graduate students who are considering producing such texts as part of a term paper or thesis may find that publishing with Renascence Editions is a good way to gain exposure and recognition. Those working on a dissertation, however, may prefer to work within "normal" channels of distribution so that issues of scholarship and peer review will not be problematical, given the conservatism of most faculty in matters of publication.
As it happens, the majority of the volunteers have been professors or emeritus professors of English! One is an academic librarian at the University of Oregon. One is a parliamentary librarian down under. An undergraduate class at a university in the midwest has undertaken to produce a text, yet to be determined. Recently a graduate student at University of Nevada, Reno has undertaken an edition of Phineas Fletcher's The Purple Island in relation to a thesis; this is exactly what I had envisioned in the early days of this project, and I very glad to see that it has begun to happen.
A theater group at a college in Indiana used our text of Aphra Behn's The Rover as their playbook, another outcome for which I had hoped.
A project which I had hoped to incorporate into the site in some way, but which I have never found the means to do, is to establish a "copyright conservancy" on the model of the Nature Conservancy. The idea would work like this: build a database of out-of-print titles that would have value as online texts but which are still covered by copyright. Identify the current copyright owner and request that the copyright in this instance be reassigned to the public good, or licensed or sold for a small consideration with the understanding that it will be released to the public domain. I think we all know of works for which something of this sort ought to be done.
A bit about the modus operandi
Renascence Editions is very eclectic, and is not perhaps as driven by literary canons as some other collections. Texts have been chosen for several reasons.
One is simple availability: is there a facsimile or other out-of-copyright copy text suitable for conversion? Neither I nor any of my volunteers has the time and resources to visit museums and special libraries in any kind of effort to work from actual copies of early editions, or manuscripts, or to collate any versions of these. For this reason, many of the texts on the site are based on nineteenth century editions which scholars would recognize as inferior to more recent work. This is notably true of much of the Spenser, taken from the edition of the pietistic Alexander Grosart. A professor at University of Moscow wrote to me to tell me that our edition of Spenser has become the default edition in Russia. I'm not sure that's a good idea, and I hope it will soon be replaced by a better.
Another reason is that there would be a probability, in our judgment, of suitability: does the item have probable interest for a wide readership, or for pedagogical purposes, or both? One clue is that the texts hold our own interest as people who are simply fascinated by Early Modern history and thought. My personal interests are driven by encountering texts that have some bearing on theories of rhetoric, texts of Shakespeare sources, texts by notable women authors, and texts that shed light on the histories of certain cultural practices, such as fishing; other volunteers have other interests. Most of us are admirers of the great anthology, The Renaissance in England, by Rollins and Baker. My friend the parliamentary librarian, however, is driven mostly by an interest in political crises such as the English Civil War. We work under the simplistic but utilitarian assumption that if we like it or find it useful, others will also.
Yet another consideration is link-rot. If a good site is going down, we try to be available as a new home for the texts. The Duchess of Malfi was acquired in this way.
A concomitant concern is the ever-growing disaster of books that have begun to decompose. As we all know, paper began, about 1830, to be made from wood pulp rather than from linen rags, and the result has been that books are self-destructing with sulfuric compounds. Nineteenth century editions of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu are simply falling apart, which I understand from some notable scholars is perhaps a "good thing," as her early editors treated her very shabbily; but someone someday may benefit from the opportunity to study the chauvinism of that editing. Hence the edition of some of her work that was produced from one of those very brittle volumes.
A consideration with which we have never concerned ourselves is authority. Again, none of us has the resources to pursue "author's final intention," and we are suspicious as to whether such a goal is achievable. Jerome McGann argues, I believe persuasively, for a look into social context when editing, and for withholding judgment as to authoritative text -- that final intention, for example, is not always the best or only useful form of a text, assuming we have in hand anything we have the right to call "final intention." He cites Auden's "September 1, 1939" as a famous instance:
The instruments agree that this is one of Auden's most important works, so that a collected edition without it -- particularly a posthumous edition -- seems an anomaly. Agreement is also general that the removal of the eighth stanza weakens the poem. In all respects, then, the case illustrates the relative nature of authority in matters dealing with cultural products like poems . . . . this final Auden example graphically reveals the ambiguity in a concept like the authority of the text. The work we know as "September 1, 1939" exists in print in several different versions, and one of these is an absent text (as it were), a suppressed poem. (88-89)Each text in Renascence Editions represents a kind of snapshot of one possible way of presenting what the author may have written; we make no other claim.We are generally quite a bit behind the technology curve. Some of the texts have been scanned, but most have been typed. Most of the copy texts I work with are not conducive to OCR scanning, so at present I'm getting by with an old laptop, using the version of Composer that came with Netscape 4.7 as my editor of choice. Here's a sample of one of our copy texts, a print photo-facsimile of the Shepheardes Calender.
Though not all the texts are of the same quality or have the same stylistic conventions, the general idea has been to approach, as nearly as simple HTML will allow, what is known among scholars as the type facsimile. That is, do what you see in the copy text. Match font size, indentation, ornate initials, and punctuation and spelling as found. We do make some obvious emendations within [brackets], such as for what in letterpress are called turned letters;"n" and "u" looking exactly the same, for example, when drawn from the case, were often accidentally substituted for one another.
Whether scanned or typed, the texts are proofed line by line, the most difficult part of the process. Professor emeritus Ben Schneider sent me a scan of Florio's edition of Montaigne. I began the task of proofing right away. Except for representing Greek quotations, and finishing the "Apologie for Raymond Sebond," we're done. This has taken five years.
Each text has with it some information as to its provenance and the level of editing (generally minimal) carried out by its transcriber. There is also a "mailto:" link directly to me for reports on errors. In this way, the public gets to participate in the maintenance of the texts.
Considerable effort has sometimes been expended on imitative typography. Dropped initials, for example, can be created with tables:
<table border = 0 width = "4%" align = left cellpadding = 3><tr><td><font face = "Times,
Times New Roman"><font size = 7>C</font></td></tr> </table><font size = 2> <br></font></font>ATCHWORDSAnd this is the preceding coding as it might look in your browser:
CATCHWORDS and pagination, however, have usually been eliminated, the entire text, when possible, being placed in one file for ease of downloading. We have deliberately omitted the pagination of the copy text to encourage students not to regard these online texts as actual primary texts or as scholarly editions. An important aspect of bibliographic research in any field is to gain familiarity with texts edited with benefit of the best recent scholarship in that field. Renascence Editions does not provide this.
Marked-up texts are valuable to scholars as they provide tools for research. Renascence Editions leaves to others any additional markup that they need in order to make such use of our material, and in fact this has been done, at the University of Virginia and elsewhere.
The site is deliberately very simple in construction; it is possible for a library of limited means to print out, bind, and shelve these books. There is little HTML beyond 1.0, no XML, no stylesheets, no popup windows, almost no forms, no advertising, no Flash, no Javascript, no Java, and very few graphics, none of which have animation. The files are intelligible to a text browser and to text-to-speech software, and can even be read from a cell phone. They are popular with readers who have visual disabilities.
Although some of the earlier editions in the site do contain introductions and some glossing, our tendency at present is to leave to the readers and, if they are in classes, their teachers or professors, something to do. Discovering Izaak Walton's plagiarizing of Dame Juliana Berners, or the differing gender implications of Rosalynde and As You Like It, are among the pleasures we have ourselves enjoyed, and we endeavor to leave to others such opportunities as we found them.
Renascence Editions provides access to a reasonable analogue of the old-spelling reading experience, with a reasonable gesture toward early modern typographic conventions, to a very wide readership; something like the living history museum movement. In this I believe the site has succeeded well beyond the expectations with which it commenced.
Cited: McGann, Jerome J. A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: UCP, 1983.
http://www.uoregon.edu/~rbear/chron1.html