Balisage Paper: Rebuilding a Digital Frankenstein by 2018

Overview of the Bicentennial Frankenstein Project

In the fall of 2016, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) joined together with a goal to prepare an updated and improved digital edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, conformant with current TEI P5 standard. In October 2016, Elisa Beshero-Bondar met with Raffaele Viglianti and Rikk Mulligan to discuss a strategy for updating the Frankenstein edition on Romantic Circles. Viglianti and Beshero-Bondar subsequently met over Skype with Neil Fraistat and Dave Rettenmaier and agreed that by May of 2018 we would prepare a new edition to update the one currently published on Romantic Circles, MITH’s refereed website on scholarly editions from the British Romantic era. Romantic Circles. Fraistat indicated that currently Frankenstein is by far the most clicked-on text in the Romantic Circles archive, so this is a site of high visibility. We initially agreed to improve the existing edition by collating the 1818 and 1831 editions, which are currently saved in two separate files and compared by viewing in Juxta Commons. We aimed to improve the precision of the collation by processing with CollateX software, which automates the location of alignments and deltas in multiple versions of a document. Processing plain text versions of the separate 1818 and 1831 edition files with Collatex would provide the basis for a thorough overhaul of the TEI encoding in the Romantic Circle's edition, because it would output a single document holding variations tagged according to the TEI P5 critical apparatus markup. The document output by Collatex is plain text that holds critical apparatus tagging, and represents a first phase of up-translation to a new and improved TEI document. The next stage would be to apply auto-tagging with regular expressions to reconstruct the body of the edition in TEI as a single document from which multiple editions can be generated for reading and for genetic studying of textual variation over time.

Though our initial goal was to revise and improve the existing edition on Romantic Circles, we realized that we had an opportunity to produce a much richer edition, if we could incorporate a rarely studied 1823 edition of the novel into our collation. Incorporating this edition requires OCR of a Google Books scanned edition and careful correction to prepare a text file formatted consistently with the files representing the 1818 and 1831 editions. Finally, we would include pointers into the Shelley-Godwin Archive edition of the manuscript notebook drafts of the novel.

As we began analyzing the XML code underlying the Romantic Circles edition, we discovered inconsistencies with the semantic standard of TEI. List elements were used to hold paragraphs, for example, and we learned that the TEI had been generated from an XSLT process of translation from a previous digital edition, the Pennsylvania Electronic hypertext edition produced in the 1990s. TEI elements appeared to have been selected for their correlation to HTML presentational elements, but we were mystified about the decisions to organize chapters of a novel thus:

            <p rend="emph">Chapter 18</p>
<p> </p>
<list type="simple">
<item>
<p>DAY after day, week after week, passed away on my
              return to Geneva; and I
              could not collect the courage to recommence my
              work. I feared the vengeance of the disappointed
              fiend,
              yet I was unable to overcome my repugnance to the
              task which was enjoined me. I found that I could not
              compose a female without again devoting several
              months to profound study and laborious disquisition.
              I had heard of some discoveries having been made by
              an English
              philosopher, the knowledge of which was material
              to my success, and I sometimes thought of obtaining
              my father's consent to visit England for this
              purpose; but I clung to every pretence of delay, and
              shrunk from taking the first step in an undertaking
              whose immediate necessity began to appear less
              absolute to me. A change indeed had taken place in
              me: my health, which had hitherto declined, was now
              much restored; and my spirits, when unchecked by the
              memory of my unhappy promise, rose proportionably. My
              father saw this change with pleasure, and he turned
              his thoughts towards the best method of eradicating
              the remains of my melancholy, which every now and
              then would return by fits, and with a devouring
              blackness overcast the approaching sunshine. At these
              moments I took refuge in the most perfect
              solitude. I
              passed whole days on the lake alone in a little
              boat, watching the clouds, and listening to the
              rippling of the waves, silent and listless. But the
              fresh air and bright sun seldom failed to restore me
              to some degree of composure; and, on my return, I met
              the salutations of my friends with a readier smile
              and a more cheerful heart.</p>
</item>
<item>
<p>It was after my return from one of these rambles
              that my father, calling me aside, thus addressed
              me:—</p>
</item>


<item> I remembered also the
            necessity imposed upon me of either journeying to
            England, or entering into a long correspondence with
            those philosophers of that country, whose knowledge and
            discoveries were of indispensable use to me in my
            present undertaking. The latter method of obtaining the
            desired intelligence was dilatory and unsatisfactory:
            besides, I had an insurmountable aversion to the idea
            of engaging myself in my loathsome task in my father's
            house, while in habits of familiar intercourse with
            those I loved. I knew that a thousand fearful accidents
            might occur, the slightest of which would disclose a
            tale to thrill all connected with me with horror. I was
            aware also that I should often lose all self-command,
            all capacity of hiding the harrowing sensations that
            would possess me during the progress of my unearthly
            occupation. I must absent myself from all I loved while
            thus employed. Once commenced, it would quickly be
            achieved, and I might be restored to my family in peace
            and happiness. My promise fulfilled, the monster would
            depart for ever. Or (so my fond fancy imaged) some
            accident might meanwhile occur to destroy him, and put
            an end to my
            slavery for ever.</item>
        

             <lg>
<l>
                                          "The
                sounding cataract<lb/>
                Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,<lb/>
                The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,<lb/>
                Their colours and their forms, were then to
                him<lb/>
                An appetite; a feeling, and a love,<lb/>
                That had no need of a remoter charm,<lb/>
                By thought supplied, or any interest<lb/>
                Unborrow'd from the eye"*
</l>
</lg>
         

In October 2016 we experimented with text extracted directly from the Romantic Circles 1818 and 1831 editions, and processed these with CollateX. The experience showed us worrisome problems at the level of the text, angle brackets poised in the text and other anomalies such as misnumbering and missing italics. We decided that perhaps the transformation that the digital Frankenstein had undergone in 2009 for Romantic Circles republication was not kind to the text and that to work with a reliable foundation for our bicentennial edition, we should return to its origin in the early 1990s hypertext Pennsylvania Electronic Edition. We also determined that we had better proof check the texts of all documents against originals. What we may have considered an up-transformation to meet new web standards in 2009 appears to us on close inspection to have potentially damaged a cleaner earlier encoding.

The Dream of 90s Hypertext: The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition

The Pennyslvania Electronic Edition (PAEE) represents a much more extensive scholarly effort than what is rendered of it on its supposedly updated version on Romantic Circles. While neither edition renders the 1823 text, whose publication was supervised by William Godwin, the PAEE prepared a table of hand-collected variants indicating how the 1823 edition differs from the 1818 and 1831. Meanwhile, what appears of the better-known early (1818) and late (1831) publications is rendered side-by-side in old-fashioned (long since deprecated) HTML frames built from 238 separate HTML files (each usually representing a few paragraphs) of the 1818 and 249 files of the longer 1831 novel. The particulation of files represents an editorial method of juxtaposition of tiny pieces, in keeping with the hypercard format of early hypertext books. The early editors (Stuart Curran and Jack Lynch of the University of Pennsyvlania), took care to produce a highly legible, color-coded collation in hypertext, and while dates of preparation or publication are not clear in the files, a short web publication about the edition by Curran from November 1994 in Penn Magazine indicates the production was well underway at that moment, with plans for release of a CD-ROM edition and non-profit production on the web. The goal appears to have been to reach high school and college students, and to place before them (in Curran’s words) a convenient repository of otherwise widely scattered scholarly and critical materials through which they are given an opportunities to browse, to read in a non-linear fashion and discover for themselves a rich store of contexts and, effectively, a way to read the 1818 and 1831 editions together rather than just one or the other. Curran described his aim as an assault on print-bound habits of reading:

What is immediately evident is the precision and care taken in the first edition, even in its apparent lack of awareness of the TEI as it was developing an alternate SGML form in the mid 1990s. Also evident, ironically, is the net loss of information in the translation of the PAEE into TEI for Romantic Circles in 2009, where the difficulty of negotiating between HTML 1.0 and the XML standard of TEI appears to have been strained in favor of expressing the presentation view of the texts while removing the more adventurous aspects of pseudomarkup. The editorial annotations were transferred from the HTML to the XML syntax, no effort was made in the conversion of 2009 to apply the apparatus criticus of TEI to curate the handiwork in pseudomarkup of the original PAEE editors.

Looking back on origins of our electronic Frankenstein monster, we see something of a history of strained relations between chunky hypertext books and creamy TEI which in those days applied SGML in favor of the semantics of document hierarchies to show interrelationships.^[1] The PAEE attempted an apparatus criticus in preparing tiny hypercard chunks in HTML 1.0 frames as an interface that prioritized a study of variation, and even coded that variation in markup of their own that used angle brackets, square brackets, boldface, and italics to provide through the web browser interface a synoptic view of a variorum edition. Fortunately the edition is still served from its original University of Pennsyvlania URL, apparently unchanged over the years, but in a time of generational transference marked by rapid aging of electronic texts prepared in non-standard ways, the old edition’s fragility and ambition are worth contemplating now. In 2017-2018, we preparers of a new edition (just like our predecessors) are standing on the proverbial shoulders of giants, and if we are single-minded about preparing the documents in a format we can readily process and publish, we stand potentially to lose the scholarship and the impressive mass of paratext surrounding that first edition. We underestimate these early editions to our peril (or to our potential cultural impoverishment). Indeed, the PAEE contains hundreds of paratext documents, including an impressive corpus of other literary texts in its Works Included in this Edition bordering on and relevant to Frankenstein, as well an impressive array of Contexts pages covering religious, mythical, geographic, scientific topics. Whether we can help preserve the vision of the first editors in interlinking contextual materials with their critical variorum edition, or whether we should try to do so, are open questions at this stage in our work on the Bicentennial Frankenstein project. Our own team, itself pressed for time and finding a need to invent a new expression of Frankenstein’s contexts, is not likely to curate the paratextual assemblage of documents in the PAEE, as we have prioritized for the bicentennial moment to reconstruct the electronic variorum and add more to it than available in the original.

Stages in Up-Translating the Pennsylvania Electronic Edition

In December 2016, I harvested the nearly 500 individual HTML files of the PAEE representing the 1818 and 1831 editions and began a painstaking process of up-translation, with the following major stages in view:

My concentration for this paper is on a stage of what is completed already, and my sustained interaction with the PAEE hypertext edition. We first decided to process a predictable plain text with pseudomarkup to preserve information from the markup, and we decided that each stage of our up-conversion would produce a distinct and re-usable edition in its own right, whether in plain text, or a preliminary stage of XML for collation, or ultimately the collated edition in TEI P5. In this context, the PAEE files take on multiple afterlives in plain text and XML forms.

At the time of preparation, we were uncertain whether plain text of simple XML formatting was best suited for collation processing, and in the course of that processing we discovered indeed that XML was preferable since the collation software could be programmed to read and process and ignore particular elements. The pseudomarkup in our plain text, however, served (and continues potentially to serve) as a viable intermediary format, trivally easy to up-translate into XML, and co-existing alongside its hierarchially organized kin.

We began, then, by producing plain text from the old PAEE hypercards. The following documents my decisions and actions taken on the 1990s files to prepare them as plain text editions, prior to collation.

            <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
version="3.0">

   <!--2016-12-28 ebb: Prepared to process from a collection organized unambiguously by filename and output a single file. Filenames were prefaced by a number to process in sequential order.-->  
  <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
    <xsl:output method="text" encoding="UTF-8"/>

   <!--ebb: Uncomment one of the following lines to process the appropriate edition, either 1818 or 1831.--> 
  <!--<xsl:variable name="paEdition" select="collection('../frankenTexts_HTML/PA_Electronic_Ed/1818_ed')"/>-->
   
 <xsl:variable name="paEdition" select="collection('../frankenTexts_HTML/PA_Electronic_Ed/1831_ed')"/>
   
   <xsl:template match="/">
     <xsl:text>********************************************************************************
        # FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS
        
        ## The Pittsburgh Bicentennial Edition
        
        ### INTRODUCTORY NOTE ON THE TEXT: 
        
This is a plain text edition of the </xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="($paEdition//head[1]/tokenize(title, ', ')[2])[1]"/> edition of _Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus_ by Mary Shelley <xsl:text>prepared for the Frankenstein Bicentennial project, which commemorates the 200th anniversary of the first published edition of this novel in 1818.
     </xsl:text> 
      
      <xsl:text>Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus: Pittsburgh Bicentennial Edition is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. <!--ebb: Check with project team. Do we want this to be a free culture license, meaning we permit commercial uses of this work? If so, change this to read:
     
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus: Pittsburgh Bicentennial Edition is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
      -->
      </xsl:text>
      <xsl:text>Date this text was produced: </xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="current-dateTime()"/><xsl:text>. 
      </xsl:text> 
      <xsl:text>This edition is part of the Pittsburgh research team's contribution to the Bicentennial Frankenstein Project, and is prepared by Elisa Beshero-Bondar of the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg with assistance from Rikk Mulligan of Carnegie Mellon University. We are grateful for consultation from Wendell Piez, David J. Birnbaum, and Raffaele Viglianti, as well as Neil Fraistat and Dave Rettenmaier. This edition's stages of development are stored and documented in the Pittsburgh_Frankenstein GitHub repository: https://github.com/ebeshero/Pittsburgh_Frankenstein/ .

We have produced this plain text edition for two purposes:

1) To prepare for automated collation of the 1818, 1823, and 1831 editions of _Frankenstein_ using CollateX, in order to generate a TEI XML document that stores the variations of these texts.

2) To provide a reliable digital base text of each edition tractable for future projects.

      </xsl:text>
     
     <xsl:text>This plain text edition is one of two, representing the 1818 and 1831 editions of the novel. This pair of editions is based on the Pennsylvania Electronic Edition of _Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus_ by Mary Shelley, edited by Stuart Curran and assisted by Jack Lynch, located at http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/ and hereafter referred to as PA EE. Elisa Beshero-Bondar and Rikk Mulligan *are correcting* these texts against photo facsimiles of the 1818 and 1831 texts. 
        * We will alter the previous sentence in this header when this phase of proof-checking is completed.
     </xsl:text>
      <xsl:text>Our plain text edition preserves the rendering of italics, square brackets, and centered text from the PA EE HTML texts. 

* In the PA EE there is no distinction between italics for titles and italics for emphasized words. Because the asterisk is used to signal footnotes in the text, we use the underscore (`_`) instead to mark off italicized text of any kind. 

* Square brackets (`[ ]`) are placed around text marked as small caps. (We have commented out the one instance in the 1831 PA EE HTML in which square brackets were used to hold a normalized variant of a word, to suppress that from the output.) 

* Centered text is marked between percent symbols: `% %`.

* Each unit of PA EE HTML texts marked with a structural element to indicate line break (`<br>`) or paragraph (`<p>`) is produced as a unit line in the plain text. Thus, an entire paragraph appears as a single line. Every unit line is followed by two newline characters. 
      </xsl:text>
      <xsl:text>Note for later processing: In the PA EE of this text, there are </xsl:text><xsl:value-of select="count(distinct-values($paEdition//body//a/@href))"/> encoded links, each pointing to an editorial annotation.
      <xsl:text>********************************************************************************</xsl:text>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="$paEdition//body"/>
   </xsl:template>
   
<xsl:template match="br">
   <xsl:text>
      
   </xsl:text>
</xsl:template>
   <xsl:template match="p">
      <xsl:apply-templates/><xsl:text>
         
      </xsl:text>
</xsl:template> 
  <!-- <xsl:template match="text()">
      <xsl:apply-templates select="normalize-space(.)"/>
     2016-12-28 ebb: normalize-space() causes problems: too much tightening up of the output so words are run together, also when applied at <p> template, child nodes aren't processed. 
  Using regex and Text-Wrangler on the output file to remove its excess lines.
   </xsl:template>-->
   
<xsl:template match="i">
   <xsl:text>_</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates/><xsl:text>_</xsl:text>
</xsl:template> 

   <xsl:template match="small">
      <xsl:text>[</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates/><xsl:text>]</xsl:text>
   </xsl:template> 
   
   <xsl:template match="center">
      <xsl:text>%</xsl:text><xsl:apply-templates/><xsl:text>%</xsl:text>
   </xsl:template>
       
</xsl:stylesheet>
        

Collation Discoveries: Flattening and Chunking Again

At the time of this writing, two members of our team completed proof-checking the plain text files generated by the above stages of processing against photofacsimiles of the nineteenth-century editions. We have undone the normalized spellings of the PAEE to restore the original spellings of the nineteenth-century texts, and have corrected transcription errors, improving what we can. We also painstakingly labored on correcting a plain text file generated by OCR from ABBYY Finereader of the 1823 text. We discovered it was best to convert these to XML (easily done with a series of Find and Replace operations from pseudomarkup to angle brackets). In May 2017, we processed our first collation of the documents, and discovered in the process that we could output plain text tables to align the outputs side by side, as well as XML output, both of which are useful. We also discovered two things that have caused us to return to revise substantially the documents we had prepared:

The need to work on the collation in small units is further exacerberated by analysis of the work ahead on working the manuscript notebooks into the collation with the print editions. At first we thought that ur-text file would be an XML document containing angle bracket markup in the form of critical apparatus tags, thus:

            <p>I am by birth a
<app>
    <rdg wit="#c56"><ptr target="http://url.shelley-godwin"/></rdg>
     <rdg wit="#p1818">Genevese</rdg>
      <rdg wit="#p1823">Scotsman</rdg>
      <rdg wit="#p1831">Martian</rdg>
</app>.
</p>
        

Our plan is to pull out the line elements, use the existing markup to locate paragraph, and preserve information about insertions and deletions in the TEI of the Shelley-Godwin Notebooks. The new version of XML we produce would then be more or less compatible with the editions we prepared of the 1818, 1823, and 1831 texts for the purposes of collation, working in some additional information from the diplomatic edition and finding a way to signal that information in the critical apparatus output. We would need to stitch the thousands of notebook pieces into the larger chunks at alignment points we can identify across all of the documents. This will undoubtedly prove the most challenging stage of our work so far.

Reflections toward a theory of up-translation

The Bicentennial Frankenstein project’s encounter with an impressive early hypertext edition raises more general questions worthy of reflection towards theorizing the up-transformation process:

The fragmentation of the early Frankenstein into nearly 500 pieces represents a particulated vision of collation that made difficulties for our up-translation process, and we did not anticipate that we would need to chunk the documents yet again, and yet once more (for the manuscript notebooks) in our own software-assisted collation.

The survival of a particulated, chunky Frankenstein edition is the most remarkably persistent feature of our work thus far. We have been discovering that large documents with entrenched hierarchies are difficult process in portions. When we prepare chunks or segments of text for collation, we need to make sure their start and end points are aligned in some way, so we look for those moments of alignment and set milestone units as signal posts. But to produce tractable files, cutting through volume divs (for example) raises problems, particularly when those structural units of hierarchy are not consistent in the editions being compared.

What have we learned? We discover that deep-nested hierachies create problems when we need to compare different editions of the same text whose hierarchies are not aligned. We discover that readily fragmentable output may be preferable for indicating points of intersection. We consider that the process of up-conversion and up-translation might best produce multiple formats of output, where plain text and XML co-exist. We find on the path of our goal in producing a synoptic TEI edition, a desirability in sharing both a hierarchic document that stores information about comparison as well as separate edition files of each document. The imposition of structural and crit-apparatus hierarchy represents one interpretation of our documents, but that will not be the only one worth preserving over generations. Apparently, we need simple, granular documents, too.