Being Practical. Electronic editions of Flemish literary texts in an international perspective

This is the text of my lecture at the International Workshop on Electronic Editing (9-11 February 2012) in the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.

The slides of this lecture have been published on Slideshare.

Keep it cool: the electronic edition & the fridge

Over the last couple of years, I have been observing my children's continuous development of skills with growing amusement. And, as those amongst you who are parents or grandparents will agree, kids sometimes really amaze you. From the age of two, my boys know, for instance, how to operate a fridge. As far as I can recall, neither their mother nor their father taught them how it worked and I'm pretty sure the grandparents didn't tutor them privately either. Nevertheless, they have since been very successful in opening the door of the fridge, exploring (if not rummaging) the contents, finding what they are craving for, picking one or two incidentally found extra's on their way out, and running off with their treasures after having closed the door again. They also noticed quite early on that the light is operated automatically on opening and closing the door and that they don't need to use a switch for that.

While I was witnessing one of their recent scavenger's hunts, it occurred to me that the fridge was the perfect model for what we have been looking for for over almost two decades now in the design of electronic textual editions. A fridge is an intuitively designed repository of a diverse range of foods from which anyone may quarry what they need. It offers an ideal storage space for a selection of fresh meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, dairy products as well as for semi-prepared foods, finished dishes, and leftovers. It is also the most economic and safest option to defrost foods. Although there is a generally acknowledged plan by which a fridge should be filled – bottles go in the inside of the door, vegetables and herbs go in the boxes at the bottom, meat goes on the bottom shelf and dairy products go on the top shelf – the internal organisation of the foods on the shelves is decided on by whoever fills it up, and can be changed according to the insights and preferences of any user. The products can, for instance, be grouped according to food group, meal, user frequency, size and so on. The fridge can be refilled, products can be replaced by fresher ones and new products can be introduced. Another feature is that one only needs some pieces of paper and a couple of magnets or post-it notes to annotate the contents of the fridge, put up shopping lists, or leave instructions about the next meal. By the same technique the appearance of the fridge is altered on a daily basis by moving around the notes, introducing new ones, taking old ones off, embellishing the outside with various collections of fridge magnets or with your children's artistic creations. The fridge's main function is to preserve foods over a certain period of time and to offer easy access to a wide range of products from within people's homes. And fridges are available in many models with various features like freezing compartments, ice makers and water dispensers which extend the fridge's central function. Unfortunately, it must be admitted, a fridge can't cook you a meal.

Electronic editions, by comparison, or at least the electronic editions we want to be making, should be intuitively designed 'repositories of information, from which skilled scholars might quarry what they need' as Peter Robinson stipulated once (Robinson, 2003b). Michael Sperberg-McQueen reminded us that 'any edition records a selection from the observable and the recoverable portions' of an 'infinite set of facts to the work being edited.' (Sperberg- McQueen, 2002) He mentions the apparatus of variants, glosses for some words, historical or literary annotations and the like as possible selections and 'visual effects, atmospheric sound, music, film clips of readings or performances' as possible elements of inclusion. Scholars who have written on the preferable contents of electronic editions like Susan Hockey (Hockey, 1996, p. 13-14), Marilyn Deegan and Peter Robinson (Deegan and Robinson, 1994 [1990], p. 36), Peter Shillingsburg (1996b) and Thomas Tanselle (Tanselle, 1995b, p. 592) agreed already in the mid-nineteen nineties that full accurate transcriptions and full digital images of each witness were essential parts of the edition, and both Tanselle (Tanselle, 1995b, p. 591) and Shillingsburg (1996a, p. 95) added to this the requirement of critically reconstructed texts. Whereas the 1997 CSE Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions were fairly prescriptive on the contents of an electronic edition,1 Dan O'Donnell observes in 2005 that no 'standardization exists for the electronic editor' (O'Donnel, 2005b) while he points to electronic editions without textual introductions, without critical texts, without traditional textual apparatus, and without glossaries. The last version of the Guidelines published in 2006 (CSE, 2006), however, does not prescribe the contents of an electronic edition anymore, but provides some generalizations of the methodological orientation by which specific materials are edited. These Guidelines state that reliability is a defining quality of the scholarly edition and that this can be established by accuracy, adequacy, appropriateness, consistency, and explicitness. About how this is achieved in the edition, the Guidelines only observe that 'most scholarly editions' include a general introduction and explanatory annotations; they 'generally' include some sort of editorial statement; and 'commonly' include documentation of alterations or variant readings in appropriate textual apparatus or notes. In the attached list of Guiding Questions for Vetters of Scholarly Editions to these Guidelines, one could find all elements of the contents of an electronic edition as prescribed in the 1997 version of the Guidelines, but no minimal or defining score for scholarly editions of any nature is given. Robinson (2007a, p.8) summarizes: 'for a digital edition to be all it can and should be, then it will let the editors include all that should be included, and say all that needs to be said.'

The use of a general markup language like the TEI for the encoding of the electronic edition's contents and its exploitation by publication suites that take advantage of this encoding allow the organisation and reorganisation, that is the grouping and selection, of the edition's data according to a variety of principles. One of the earliest noted advantages of the electronic edition is, as far as it is not published on a fixed medium like a CD-ROM, as was the case in its early days, its openness to revision and change. But how we should keep track of the subsequent versions of such an edition is another matter which we may discuss in the session on preservation on Friday. The issue of third party annotation creation and display in a digital edition is another much debated central component of the electronic edition we want to be making (e.g. Robinson, 2003a; Boot, 2007a; 2007b). As a matter of fact, user driven annotation tools were often integrated in the SGML publishing software with which early electronic editions were published (e.g. De Smedt & Vanhoutte, 2000) but disappeared when interfaces to electronic editions were built on the basis of open source engines and suites of XML related formatting, stylesheet and query languages. Possible models to empower the user have recently been proposed by Shillingsburg's knowledge sites (Shillingsburg, 2006) and Ray Siemens' social edition (Siemens et al., forthcoming). Also on Friday, we can discuss this further in the session led by Anna Gerber.

The main function of an edition, whether it is conceived of and published electronically or in print, is to mediate, as Paul Eggert has reminded us, 'according to defined or undefined standards or conventions, between the text of a document made by another and the audience of that anticipated publication.' (Eggert, 2002, p. 17) Thereby the editor is involved in taking attitudes towards the preservation, presentation, and transmission of an existing text (Eggert, 2002, p. 17-18). Consequently, the electronic edition must contain the data to present a text and ways to explicate the editor's attitudes. On top of that, the electronic edition may contain analytical tools by which the user can replicate the editor's methodology and data processing. Another essential function of the edition is what I am calling the communicative function, namely to make sure that it reaches as wide an audience as possible.

This is where the fridge-model does not represent the reality of electronic editions anymore. The relative failing of the electronic edition has been lamented by their creators on many occasions (Robinson, 2005; 2010; Vanhoutte, 2009). Overall, the existing electronic editions have lacked to find their audience and thus failed in their communicative function. As an undergraduate student taking my philosophy exam I had to answer the question whether a chair on Mars was useful. The correct answer, which I happened to produce, was that the usefulness of a chair on Mars was dependent on the presence of subjects to whom the chair could be useful. If we take for granted that Mars is not populated by subjects who could appreciate the functional qualities of the chair, that chair is useless and functionally non-existent. Peter Robinson once claimed that 'an edition is an act of communication.' Consequently '[i]f it does not communicate', he says, 'it is useless.' (Robinson, 2009 [1997-2002]) By contrast, the fridge appeals to everyone, from the food addict, the really hungry, and the professional chef, to the keen amateur cook, the incidental snacker and the complete novice, to the food hater. From the omnivore, to the health guru, to the vegetarian and the vegan. But if fridges and electronic editions have so much in common, why is it then that not every household has at least one of each? The fridge's success can be explained by its consistent offer of the same functions and opportunities to all human beings and through them even to animals – dog and cat food are also preserved in the fridge. On top of that, the basic interface and functions are fixed and independent of what colour, size, type, or design the fridge itself takes. The fridge's success is thanks to its design for one culture. The electronic's edition's failure is due to its design for two cultures.

The problem of two audiences and two natures

John Lavagnino identifies the communicative function of the edition as problematic and points at an anomaly in the context of academic publishing. Whereas scholars across all disciplines mainly publish within the circle of their peers and address a larger community in popularized writings, 'a scholarly editor', according to Lavagnino, 'is still always expected to serve a larger community that may not – and, at present, usually does not – take any great interest in the discipline of editing.' (Lavagnino (2009) [1997-2002]) In this greater community, which Lavagnino also names 'the popular audience' or 'the common reader', he includes many scholars who haven't had any involvement or interest in editing, and thus don't understand the codes of the scholarly edition. The tension between serving both the common reader and the editor's peer with the same product he calls 'the problem of two audiences'.

The literary critic is in the first place a reader, possibly an academic, and exceptionally a textual critic or a scholarly editor. As Dirk Van Hulle has reiterated, '[L]iterary critics tend to take the text for granted by assuming that the words on which they base their interpretations are an unproblematic starting point.' (Van Hulle, 2004, p. 2) Scholarly editing as a product generating activity can react to this observation in two extreme ways. The first possibility is not to contest the literary critics' or common readers' assumptions about the definite singularity of the text and provide them only with the result of scholarly editing, namely an established text, preferably accompanied by annotations of some sort. The second option is to confront them with their wrong assumption and draw their attention to the multiplicity of the fluid text caused by its genetic and transmissional history. This can be done by introducing them to the data of textual scholarship.

The first option is a function of the reading edition, which I am calling the minimal edition (Vanhoutte, 2010), the second option is a function of the historical-critical or variorum edition, which I am calling the maximal edition. The minimal edition is a cultural product that is produced by the scholarly editor who acts as a curator or guardian of the text, whereas the maximal edition is an academic product that is produced by the scholarly editor who demonstrates their scholarly accuracy and scrutiny. The minimal edition is targeted towards well but negatively defined audiences – that is, readers who are not interested in scholarly editing – and present only the conclusions of the full critical and historical research on the genetic and transmissional history of the text. Besides an editorial statement and some sort of commentary, they most importantly present a citeable text which can be enjoyed as an aesthetic reading object. The maximal edition, then, presents the critical and historical research itself in an attempt to engender understanding amongst the editor's peers.

The two audiences are neatly but separately served by the minimal and the maximal edition which are essentially different in nature. Therefore, the commercial reality of scholarly editions of the minimal and the maximal type should be taken into consideration when theorizing about their essential function and audiences.

But who are the other audience – the editor's peers? I guess there does exist a small but growing group of literary critics who do take some interest in scholarly editing. Besides this group, there are other scholarly editors who may be interested in a scholarly edition for a variety of reasons. One group may be interested because they are editing or have been editing the same text. Given the reality of scholarly editing, however, this is very unlikely, except, perhaps, for a couple of important and much debated texts. Another group may consist of editors who work or have been working on editions of texts by the same author. Often, these editors work in close collaboration with each other and hence don't really form the most critical group. A third group consists of editors who work or have been working on texts from the same period or the same literary tradition; texts with a similar document architecture or complexity; or texts with a similar transmissional or genetic history. This group is interested in the edition's theoretical solutions to a variety of problems offered by the text. A last group consists of editors who are interested in another editor's methodology, the edition's technology, and the editorial models suggested, explored, and demonstrated by the edition.

The first two groups are interested in all of the presented texts across the fullest appearance of the edition, including the record of variants, the commentary and all other parts of the edition that are focused on gaining an understanding of the text. It has to be added that their interest may be comparative in nature. The third group is only interested in those parts of the texts which are problematic to scholarly editing and useful to their own purposes. The interest is often in methodology, visualisation procedures, and techniques. The last group is not interested in the text or its meaning, but only in the technology applied to the text and the edition.

The members of all of these groups change according to the edition. Since I have mainly edited works by Flemish authors, for instance, I belong to the first two groups whenever an edition of works by one of these authors appears or in the very unlikely situation when a text I have edited is edited again. I belong to the third group, however, when consulting editions of works of Flemish authors I haven't worked on or of a modern foreign author. However, I most often belong to the fourth group when looking at editions of classical, mediaeval, or renaissance texts, or any electronic edition I can lay may hands on. A member of the first two groups, I will study the integral edition in the hope the edition will add to my understanding of the text. A member of the third group, I will try to isolate some samples in the edition which demonstrate a problem akin to the problems I'm working on in the hope that the edition will add to my understanding of how to deal with these kind of problems. My attention will go in particular to the editorial statement and the textual essay explaining the applied methodology. A member of the last group, I will explore the edition's functionalities and architecture, study the edition's markup and rendering, including its design, and try to understand the edition's technological issues. My attention will go in particular to the technical documentation, the encoding strategies, and the source files I can rip off the edition.

Being practical

At the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature, we create editions for both of these audiences and exploit either the print or the digital medium. For the common reader, we're editing a series of complete works by modern Flemish poets which are published in print. Since 2004, four volumes appeared with the collected poetry of Jos De Haes (1920-1974), Hugues C. Pernath (1931-1975), Paul Snoek (1933-1981), and Eddy Van Vliet (1942-2002). These poets are roughly comparable in name and fame to British poets like Philip Hobsbaum, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith, and John Silkin. For the kind of editions with an explicit cultural function, we developed the text-critical edition which presents itself explicitly as a reading edition, but contains elements which are traditionally found in a study edition, for instance concise annotations and the textual essay containing chapters on the genetic history of the text, on the transmission of the text and the bibliographic description of the extant witnesses, and on the editorial principles. The textual essay is written from the perspective of the reader who wants to be informed about the reading text rather than from the perspective of the textual scholar who wants to demonstrate the results of their research. It has to be noted that this textual essay can easily be ignored, which is why we print them after the reading texts. The books are easily between 500 and 900 pages, are published in paperback and are sold for no more than € 30. The edition of the complete poems of De Haes sold 585 copies in three years time, Pernath sold 663 copies in two years time, the edition of Snoek – the most voluminous one – sold 1,126 copies in only three months time, and Van Vliet sold 756 copies in three years. And it's not only poetry that sells. An annotated reading edition of the selected letters of Herman De Coninck (1944-1997), another Flemish poet and critic, sold over 3,800 copies in two years time. I'm convinced that the successful sales figures of these editions are thanks to the unambiguous focus on the common reader who wants to read texts as aesthetic and historical objects.

There is no use in taking advantage of digital technology for the publication of electronic editions of these collected poetry because the audience is simply not there, and the common reader who is buying the print edition does not want the electronic edition. In 1999-2000 I edited a novel by Stijn Streuvels. The text-critical reading edition was published in 1999 by a literary publisher and sold all of the 375 copies which were printed in less than three months time. Although the demand was there for a second print, the publisher was not interested and refused. A year later, the electronic-critical edition of the same novel, targeted at a more academic public was published with an academic publisher. Some 200 CD-ROMs got sold and I still consider this a success. It seemed however, that there was a clear distinction between the different audiences of either product. The reading edition was completely sold to the group of common readers. The electronic edition, however, was sold to a more diverse group of people, namely the four groups of peers I introduced above, accompanied by common readers with an interest in scholarly editing, collectors of Streuvelsabilia, policy makers, and the technologically curious. I estimate that the anticipated audience which was really interested in the genetic and transmissional history of the text as explained by the electronic edition, consisted of about thirty people. At least, I have the impression I know each one of them by name. But the momentum was there for the electronic edition. The publisher had just returned from a visit to Jerome McGann's Rossetti Project in Virginia when I contacted her. She had heard about SGML, and I offered her an SGML encoded edition at that very moment. After a 15-minute chat and a demonstration, the contract was signed for the production and distribution of 500 CD-ROM's. I know that I will never be able to close such a deal ever in my life again. In 2007 I managed the production of probably the most successful electronic edition on CD-ROM ever. A total of 2,350 copies of the electronic edition of Willem Elsschot's Achter de Schermen was produced. But none of them was sold individually: 650 copies were inserted into Dirk Van Hulle's book on genetic criticism, 750 copies were sold to the Elsschot Society who gave it out as part of the membership package, 960 copies were presented as a Xmas gift to the contacts of the Dutch Huygens Institute, and 90 were retained for marketing and demonstration purposes.

These figures are interesting, because they suggest that these electronic editions have found their audience and they argue against the failure of the electronic edition. However, their audience has come by accident to the electronic edition. These electronic editions were not successful because they were state of the art products of textual scholarship, but because of the immense popularity of the original author, because of the inclusion of digital images of the manuscripts, which always appeals to collectors, because of its novelty character, or because of the big give away campaign. These accidental audiences were never taken into consideration when producing the edition. But if this accidental audience does become the target audience of electronic editions that is instrumental in the fulfilment of the communicative function, the edition must also provide this audience with access to a text and access to understanding by means of the same product. If this is the case, we are in the business of creating electronic editions of two cultures.

Editions of two cultures

The electronic edition distorts the efficiency of this system by ignoring the problems of two audiences and two natures in trying to combine two cultures in one product. The technical possibilities of the electronic edition brought to scholarly editing the option of all-inclusiveness which led early anticipators like Shillingsburg to visions of blurred distinctive lines among electronic archives, scholarly editions, and tutorials (Shillingsburg, 1996b, p. 25). Three central qualities of the electronic edition answered the call in conventional scholarly editing for the discipline's movement towards a true science, namely storage capacity, text encoding, and visualization technology.

The cornerstone of true science is the principle of external replication. This means that the scientific results or data obtained under conditions which are the same each time should be reproducible by peers in order to be valid. Further, the report on the research should contain sufficient information to enable peers to assess observations and to evaluate intellectual processes (Council of Biology Editors, 1994). This is exactly what maximal editions do by the presentation of their formalized and formulized apparatuses – apart from providing the data for a more or less correct assessment of the genetic and transmissional history of the text. The scientific reflex in editorial theory could hence be interpreted as the recognition that the function of the maximal edition is not to inform the reader but to protect the editor. This is why I call these maximal editions ambiguous and ambidextrous. Ambiguous because the presentation of the genetic and transmissional variants subverts the stability of the reliable textual basis the literary critic is looking for, but at the same time, the presentation of an established reading text may be too speculative for geneticists and scholars interested in the variant stages of the work. Ambidextrous because a maximal edition logically contains a minimal edition and presents the textual archive alongside. The key feature of the electronic edition, then, in order to appeal to many audiences would be a differentiation of the supply by user controlled selection mechanisms which can turn the all-inclusive edition into a minimal version presenting one citeable text accompanied by selected categories of commentary. Only, as I argue elsewhere (Vanhoutte, 2009), the electronic edition, despite its dynamic architecture, fails through its medium as cultural product and can't compete with any printed version of the text which is easily available for the reader. We should have learned by now that common readers seldomly turn to the screen for aesthetic experiences other than those offered by the exposition of full colour digital facsimiles of exceptional manuscript material.

This was cleverly exploited a couple of years ago by the Dutch Royal Library which provided on-line access to the full colour facsimiles of the famous Flemish Gruuthuse manuscript shortly after their acquisition caused a political scandal in Flanders. The Flemish common reader on the one hand argued against their own government who had let the manuscript leave the country, but on the other hand praised the newly achieved access to the facsimile edition which was just right: an introduction, the digital facsimiles and a transcription offered in two interfaces, namely a Flash version which allows you to browse through the manuscript, and an HTML version which presents the digital facsimiles next to the transcriptions. Also very clever from a marketing point of view is the direct entrance to the most famous song in the manuscript offered from the welcoming page of the on-line exposition. This on-line edition provides access to data rather than understanding and is a huge success with the public thanks to its singular focus on one culture.

The central assumption of the electronic edition that the reader's understanding of a text is better catered for by a capacious edition representing a multitude of versions and states of the text under study and databases of critical analyses and commentaries submitted by the (co-)editors and critical user is based on the utopic concept of the professional student of the text, not on the concept of an educated and interested reader with other professional occupations. Electronic textual editions are highly specialized tools that are only understood by scholars who are akin with the principles and functions of textual editing and have read the users' manual. Editions for everyone are therefore a utopic concept.

Editions for everyone

In From Gutenberg to Google, Peter Shillingsburg introduces the concept of the Knowledge Site as an elaboration of his early vision of the blurring distinctive lines among electronic archives, scholarly editions, and tutorials (Shillingsburg, 1996b, p. 25).

The space and shape I will try to describe is one where textual archives serve as a base for scholarly editions which serve in tandem with every other sort of literary scholarship to create knowledge sites of current and developing scholarship that can also serve as pedagogical tools in an environment where each user can choose an entry way, select a congenial set of enabling contextual materials, and emerge with a personalized interactive form of the work (serving the place of the well-marked and dog-eared book), always able to plug back in for more information or different perspectives. (Shillingsburg, 2006, p. 88)

The knowledge site would provide the information needed to understand the meaning of textual variation rather than information needed to preference one text over another or separate right from wrong readings. Peter Robinson's concept of 'fluid, co-operative and distributed editions' (Robinson, 2003a, p. 125) that are truly actively interactive4 through their instinctive interface design (Robinson, 2007a; forthcoming a; b; c)5 realizes Shillingsburg's concept of knowledge sites through the formation of active on-line communities.6 This is a loud echo of Lavagnino's suggestion of a model for electronic editions based on interactive, collaborative work on texts: 'In this model, you not longer have the sharp division between producers and consumers of information [...] an interactive and collaborative edition would instead be open to incorporating work from everyone who's interested in contributing'. (Lavagnino, 1997-2002) Also, Robinson's ideas of 'electronic editions for everyone' (Robinson, forthcoming b) correspond with Shillingsburg's concepts of the convenient and the practical edition (Shillingsburg, 2005) that must bridge both the theoretical and practical differences between textual and literary critics and that goes back to Fredson Bowers' concept of the 'practical edition'.7

These new models of distributed and collaborative editions Shillingsburg and Robinson develop, however, will not provide the general model for electronic editions nor will they propose a generally applicable and stable interface for electronic editions that would approximate the fridge model. The distributed and open model for electronic editions may well be suited for the specific texts from classical, medieval, and Victorian Anglo-American textual traditions Robinson and Shillingsburg are involved with and they may well respond to the needs of the broad communities interested in them, but they may prove less useful for editors of texts from smaller and language specific traditions.8 Editors of modern Dutch and Flemish texts, for instance, work for a mostly receptive audience of only a few interested academics, and a reading public of a couple of hundreds who mainly want a practical reading edition in print. The idea of the active involvement of a computer literate and critical community with a knowledge site built around a modern Dutch or Flemish text is but an idle phantasy.

Add to this another characteristic of the average scholar which C.P. Snow already observed in his seminal 1959 Rede Lecture entitled The two cultures and the scientific revolution, namely that intellectuals are Luddites, further complicates the case of the distributed collaborative knowledge site-like edition. The theoretical model of the electronic edition for everyone as envisioned by Robinson, will in practice be the most specialized edition thinkable for the smallest group thinkable, consisting of editors of the same work or text and the same author and those literary critics interested in the scholarly edition of this specific work.

Being practical, again

Therefore, at the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies, we have developed a model that considers the electronic edition as a maximal edition that logically contains a minimal edition. An essential function of this maximal edition is that it fulfils the users' need for a reliable textual basis by the inclusion of a critically established reading text. Rather than providing a valuable supplement to a print edition, as is often the reduced function of an electronic edition in an editorial project, this model empowers the user to check upon the choices made in the critical establishment of the text by way of access to the textual archive. At the same time, the model allows the user to ignore the editors' suggestions and to develop their own perspective on the maximal edition, or to generate a minimal edition of their choice. The reproducability of the thus generated minimal edition is guaranteed by a record of the choices that informed it. This documentary feature of the electronic edition facilitates the scholarly debate on any one of the many texts and provides any reader with a clear statement on the status of the minimal edition generated and printed for distribution or reading. Because of the scholarly basis of the electronic edition as a whole, even the most plain reading text with no additional information generated by the user qualifies as a scholarly edition. By emphasizing the on the fly generation of user defined printable editions as a central feature in our system together with the documentation of its definition, we strive towards the re-evaluation of scholarly editions as cultural products. So we see the electronic edition – or the maximal edition – as the medium par excellence for the promotion of the scholarly reading edition – or the minimal edition – and the recentering of the printed edition.

I will demonstrate this with the electronic edition of De trein der traagheid which will be published online next May, after having served for many years as our tinkertoy for our experimental modeling approach. The edition currently presents a critically established reading text and nineteen versions of the novella from its print history. The result of the collation of all versions is documented according to the TEI parallel segmentation method inside a master XML file that also contains all editorial annotations. This guarantees the completely equal treatment of each version of the text in the generating processes invoked by the user. Through the interface of the edition, the user can exploit the underlying TEI encoding by selecting any version and generate three possible views of the texts: XML for analysis, XHTML for consultation on the screen, and PDF for printing out as a reading edition. Any version can also be combined with any combination of any number of witnesses whereby the initial version functions as orientation text and the other selected versions are displayed in a lemmatized apparatus variorum. From within this apparatus, the generated edition can be reoriented from the point of view of any included witness. The model applied to this specific textual history allows the user to generate 10,485,760 possible editions of the complete text of the novella and when taken into account that editions for each separate chapter can be generated as well, this figure is multiplied by 35 which gives a total of 367,001,600 possible editions.1 Any one of these editions can again be exported to XML, XHTML, or PDF. Any number of versions, depending on the dimension and resolution of the user's screen, can also be displayed in parallel and the respective lists of variants can be generated on the fly.2 The minimal and the maximal editions are fully searchable, and the search results can be displayed in a KWIC concordance format.

The edition is powered by a dedicated suite of open source XML-aware parsers, processors, and engines combined with appropriate XSLT, XQuery and XSLFO scripts.

Concluding remarks: Teach the audience how to swim

On the 1997 Toronto Conference on Editorial Problems, Michael Sperberg-McQueen and Peter Robinson wrapped the thesis of their papers in a swimming metaphor. Sperberg-McQueen advised the audience not to teach their edition how to swim, but instead concentrate on the content, not on the behaviour of the edition in order for it to survive. His paper summoned its audience to invest in the data and to use encoding standards like the TEI for that purpose. In a later revision of that paper, Sperberg-McQueen retained the metaphor but reversed its polarity, explaining now how to teach your edition how to swim. In that revision he refined his earlier focus on the content by adding that editions should also be given the capabilities 'of doing things interactively with the reader.' (Sperberg-McQueen, 2009 [1997-2002]) Peter Robinson, in his paper, replied to Sperberg-McQueen by contending that: '[T]he great promise of electronic editions [...] is not that we will find new ways of storing vast amounts of information. It is that we will find new ways of presenting this to readers, so that they may be better readers. To do this,' he added, 'we will have to teach our editions to swim to the readers.' (Robinson, 2009 [1997-2002]) Discussions on text-encoding, he called 'dry-land swimming' and in order to 'make some real editions for real readers' he reminded us why editors have to learn to swim.

Robinson's concepts of editions have been based on the anticipated reader which forms the essential basis for his understanding of text and meaning ('Text does not exist outside the meanings we create: and these meanings are all the text we will ever know.' (Robinson, 2009 [1997-2002])); for the purpose of encoding ('We do not ask: what is the right encoding of this word. We ask: who is to use the text we make? What use do they want to make of it? What do we think this text is saying? How can we, as editors, help the text speak to its readers?'); and for the edition ('A transcription, an edition, is 'right' only in that it might serve these purposes'). Or in a more direct formulation which appeals to Sperberg-McQueen's point: 'Editions do not survive because they are preserved in elegant encoding and in government-maintained electronic archives. They survive because they are read. They survive because people find them useful, they survive because scholars, students, school children find they help them read.' (Robinson, 2009 [1997-2002])

In my lecture today, I have tried to illustrate why I think this last statement is problematic when tested against the reality of electronic editions. Instead of teaching how (not) to teach your edition how to swim, or teaching the editors to swim, I suggest that we start teaching the audience to swim. When I, just minutes away, argued that electronic textual editions are highly specialized tools that are only understood by scholars who are akin with the principles and functions of textual editing and have read the users' manual, I meant what I was saying. We need to accompany our electronic editions with detailed manuals that outline the functionalities of the edition; that explain the anticipated audience how they can make use of the knowledge which has been put into the edition; how they can operate the included tools; how they can replicate the editor's research; how they can interact with the edition; and how they can contribute to the edition. We have to publish in papers and essays examples of the research questions generated by the edition as a trigger for scholars to dive into the edition and come up with suggestions and hypotheses which might solve them. We have to continue the communication about the discipline so that working with electronic editions becomes more academically acceptable.

But above all, as editors, we have to make sure, that each audience is allowed to swim in the pool which is best suited to their skills and purposes. I think we all know how annoying it is to try to float in an attempt to reach the state of weightlessness in a pool full of lane swimmers, and to try to swim lanes in a pool full of floaters. If the fridge was a utopic model for the electronic edition, a well organised swimming pool is a realistic one.

References

• Boot, Peter (2005). Advancing Digital Scholarship using EDITOR. In Humanities, Computers and Cultural heritage. Proceedings of the XVI international conference of the Association for History and Computing 14-17 September 2005. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, p. 43-48.
• Boot, Peter (2007a). A SANE approach to annotation in the digital edition. In Braungart, Georg, Gendolla, Peter and Jannidis, Fotis (eds), Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie, 8: 7-28. Also published in Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie - online.
• Boot, Peter (2007b). Mesotext. Framing and exploring annotations. In Stronks, Els and Boot, Peter (eds.), Learned Love. Proceedings of the Emblem Project Utrecht Conference on Dutch Love Emblems and the Internet (November 2006). The Hague: DANS, p. 211-225.
• Bowers, Fredson (1969). Practical Texts and Definitive Editions. In Hinman, Charlton and Bowers, Fredson, Two Lectures in Editing: Shakespeare and Hawthorne. s.l.: Ohio State University Press, p. 21-70.
• Council of Biology Editors (1994). Scientific style and format: the CBE manual for authors, editors, and publishers. 6th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• CSE (1997). Guidelines for Electronic Scholarly Editions. (1 December 1997, revised June 2002).
• CSE (2006). Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions. (Last revised 7 April 2006) Also published in Burnard, Lou, O'Brien O'Keeffe, Katherine, and Unsworth, John (eds.) (2006). Electronic Textual Editing. New York: Modern Language Association of America, p. 23-46.
• Deegan, Marilyn and Robinson, Peter (1994). The Electronic Edition. In Scragg, D.G. and Szarmach, Paul E. (eds.), The Editing of Old English. Papers from the 1990 Manchester Conference. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.
• De Smedt, Marcel & Vanhoutte, Edward (2000). Stijn Streuvels, De Teleurgang van den Waterhoek. Elektronisch-kritische editie/electronic-critical edition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press/KANTL.
• Eggert, Paul (2002). The Importance of Scholarly Editing, and the Question of Standards. In Plachta, Bodo and Van Vliet, H.T.M. (eds), Perspectives of Scholarly Editing / Perspektiven der Textedition. Berlin: Wiedler Buchverlag.
• Lavagnino, John (2009 [1997-2002]). Access. In Julia Flanders, Peter Shillingsburg & Fred Unwalla (eds.) Computing the edition. Thematic Issue of LLC. The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 24/1: 63-76.
• O'Donnell, Daniel Paul (2005b). O Captain! My Captain! Using Technology to Guide Readers Through and Electronic Edition. The Heroic Age. A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe, 8.
• O'Reilly, Tim (2005). What is Web 2.0. Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. O'Reilly. http://www.oreilly.com.
• Price, Kenneth M. (2007). Electronic Scholarly Editions. In Siemens, Ray and Schreibman, Susan (eds.), A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Malden, MA / Oxford / Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, p. 434-450.
• Robinson, Peter (2003a). Where We Are with Electronic Scholarly Editions, and Where We Want to Be. In Braungart, Georg, Eibl, Karl and Jannidis, Fotis (eds.), Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie, 5: 125-146. Also published in Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie - online.
• Robinson, Peter (2003b). The History, Discoveries and Aims of the Canterbury Tales Project. The Chaucer Review, 38/2 (2003): 126-139.
• Robinson, Peter (2005). Current issues in making digital editions of medieval texts–or, do electronic scholarly editions have a future? Digital Medievalist,. 1.1 (Spring 2005).
• Robinson, Peter (2009 [1997-2002]). What text really is not, and why editors have to learn to swim. In Julia Flanders, Peter Shillingsburg & Fred Unwalla (eds.) Computing the edition. Thematic Issue of LLC. The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 24/1: 41-52.
• Robinson, Peter (2010). Electronic Editions for Everyone. In McCarty, Willard (ed.), Text and Genre in Reconstruction. Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, p. 145-
• Shillingsburg, Peter L. (1996a). Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age. Theory and Practice. Third Edition. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
• Shillingsburg, Peter (1996b). Principles for Electronic Archives, Scholarly Editions, and Tutorials. In Finneran, Richard J. (ed.), The Literary Text in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, p. 23-35.
• Shillingsburg, Peter L. (2006). From Gutenberg to Google. Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Snow, C.P. (1961). The two cultures and the scientific revolution. London: Cambridge University Press. Originally delivered as the 1959 Rede Lecture.
• Siemens, Raymond, Timney, Meagan, Leitch, Cara, Koolen, Corina & Garnett, Alex (forthcoming 2012). Toward Modeling the Social Edition: An Approach to Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the Context of New and Emerging Social Media. Forthcoming in LLC. The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.
• Sperberg-McQueen, C.M. (2009 [1997-2002]). How to Teach Your Edition How to Swim. In Julia Flanders, Peter Shillingsburg & Fred Unwalla (eds.) Computing the edition. Thematic Issue of LLC. The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 24/1: 27-39.
• Tanselle, G. Thomas (1995b). Critical Editions, Hypertexts, and Genetic Criticism. The Romanic Review, 86/3: 581-593.
• Vanhoutte, Edward (2009). Every Reader his own Bibliographer: an Absurdity? In Deegan, Marilyn and Sutherland, Kathryn (eds.), Text Editing, Print and the Digital World. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009, p. 99-110.
• Van Hulle, Dirk (2004). Textual Awareness. A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Editorial - LLC. The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 27/1

It has been an exciting year for the Digital Humanities in general and for LLC in particular. Not only has the Journal managed to raise its subscriptions by 25%, submissions have gone up by an amazing 300% compared to the previous year. In 2011, LLC received 140 submissions, 80% of which got a decision within 3 months. The accepted papers were published in advance access on within 6 weeks after the final decision, and all four issues in 2011 appeared on time or even ahead of time. The issues were packed with slightly more papers than the previous year, and the Journal wants to grow further and negociate a larger page budget with its stakeholders. This is necessary because of the increase in submissions and the current acceptance rate of 55.10%.

The large number of submissions is explained by four evolutions in the Digital Humanities. First of all, the Digital Humanities are in very good health around the globe, which has recently been demonstrated by the Infographic 'Quantifying Digital Humanities' Melissa Terras published. More research is being funded which results in a higher number of theoretical and methodological papers as well as papers presenting research data and results. Publishing these papers will remain the core focus of LLC and I invite the readership to keep on submitting their papers to the Journal. Second, because the Digital Humanities are by definition interdisciplinary, new clusters of thematic research are being formed. This is reflected in a growing number of fine proposals for thematic issues the Journal receives. Although there is still room for unsollicited copy in the 2012 volume, we're already planning thematic issues for the 2014 volume. Together with the success of the Digital Humanities worldwide, a large number of taught courses, MA and PhD programmes are being organised. I point this out as a third evolution which influences the Journal because the introduction of the short paper in LLC especially appeals to young scholars enrolled or graduating from these programmes and has pushed the number of submissions up. The short paper offers young scholars the opportunity to getting acknowledged with the publication procedures of a peer reviewed Journal. At the same time the Journal profits contentwise from the submission of exciting reports on innovative and ongoing research. A fourth evolution in the Digital Humanities is the continuously growing production of publications which are being covered in the Journal by the intensive book review activity by our Reviews Editors.

The Journal also saw some changes during the last year. Huw Price has left OUP as Acting Publisher and LLC is now being looked after by Sarah Scutts. I'd like to thank Huw for all the hard work and the many fruitful discussions about the nature and the future of the Journal. I am looking forward to working with Sarah and her team. Also, Eva Gooding, who has been the Journal's Production Editor for many years, has handed over to Alexandra McAuley. I wish to extend my thanks to Eva for managing the production of the Journal so well, and I have no doubts that the Journal is in good hands with Alexandra.

At the end of 2011 we said goodbye to Stéfan Sinclair and Femke Vandevelde who have both been instrumental in the transition of the Journal between Editors. Stéfan Sinclair was appointed Associate Editor of LLC in 2005 and has served the Journal for seven years. Unfortunately, his new appointment as Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at McGill University, for which I want to congratulate him, is incompatible with the work on the Journal. Stéfan will continue his involvement with the Journal as member of the Editorial Board, to which I welcome him. Femke Vandevelde has been with the Journal as Reviews Editor for only one year, but together with Ron Van den Branden, she has added a new dynamic to this ever-expanding task. Femke has left her position at the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature and is establishing herself as a food and lifestyle writer and editor. I'd like to thank Femke and Stéfan for the pleasant year(s) of collaboration on the Journal and wish them all the best in their further careers.

Marilyn Deegan, our Consulting Editor, is also to be thanked for helping me out in my first year of my editorship. Her experience with the Journal has been an invaluable source of information and her friendship means a lot to me.

I should also like to thank all of our book reviewers and paper referees, many of whom of course do their work anonymously and without whom peer-refereed journals could not survive. There has been a lot of debate over the last year about the investment academics make intellectually and time-wise to the peer-review of publications which are not Open Access. I believe LLC occupies an unique position in the Journal market because the copyright remains with authors who are entitled to (re)publish their contributions after publication in the Journal, as long as the original publication is referred to. This provides authors of LLC with the opportunity to publish in an established peer-reviewed Journal, with impact factor, ànd make their papers widely accessible in Open Access repositories. Also, in the coming year, LLC will be exploring a mixed model of conjoint publishing with DHQ wherein LLC publishes a peer reviewed article and DHQ simultaneously publishes an evenly peer reviewed piece making information and data available in Open Access. I hope that more authors will take up on this model and submit such mixed contributions to the Journal.

LLC remains to be the beating heart of the associations' activities and existence. The revenue of the Journal is substantial and goes directly to the participating associations. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI), and the recently joined centerNet, together with their umbrella organisation ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations) reinvest this money in the Digital Humanities community by funding a wide scala of activities such as the production and publication of DHQ (Digital Humanities Quarterly), support of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), the organisation and sponsoring of workshops and conferences, the funding of small projects, the award of bursaries, awards and prizes. I invite you to keep on subscribing to the Journal and urging your institutions to do so as well in order to support his inmportant work. At the end of 2011 LLC counted 378 individual subscriptions and the Journal was accessible from 3,018 institutional sites.

Looking back on a terrific year for LLC and with a promising year in front of us, I should excplicitly thank the readership for their support and feedback. We can only maintain to serve the community if we hear about your views and comments. You can do this by including the hashtag #LLCjournal in your tweets and you can stay informed by following @LLCjournal on Twitter, find us on Facebook, visit the journal's website regularly or sign up to be notified automatically whenever a new issue becomes available online. You can be involved in the organisation of the journal by creating an account in the Journal's online system and registering your areas of expertise or by contacting the Journal (llcjournal@kantl.be) if you want to become a referee or book reviewer.

Finally, my personal gratitude goes to Ron Van den Branden, our Reviews Editor, and to Wendy Anderson and Isabel Galina, our Associate Editors, for their hard work.

Edward Vanhoutte
Editor-in-Chief

So You Think You Can Edit? The Masterchef Edition

This is the text of my keynote address at the 2011 Annual Conference and Members' Meeting of the TEI Consortium (Wednesday, 12 October 2011) in the Toscana Saal of the prestigious Würzburg Rezidens. A revised article version of the text will be published in the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative. Both this blogpost and the journal article come without the chocolates.

The slides of this keynote have been published on Slideshare

Read Toma Tasovac's comments on So meta

1. Introduction

1.1. Apologies

First, let me say how honoured I am to have been asked to be the opening keynote speaker at this 2011 Annual Conference and Members' Meeting of the TEI Consortium. I have to confess, however, that I was surprised at first, then I became seriously nervous and in the end a feeling of relief fulfilled me. I was surprised because my academic work on the topic of Philology in the Digital Age has only produced four published articles over the last five years. Moreover, of the seven scholarly editions I've published so far, only one is a digital edition and to digital standards it was published in the dark middle ages of SGML. Even worse, both scholarly editions I'm working on at the moment will be published as books. I know that many of you have been more actively involved with the theme of this conference, which makes me quite nervous. I also realised that many of you will probably tweet comments about what I'm saying, if you haven't already done so. If you do, be sure to include my twittername @evanhoutte and the hash-tag #tei2011 in your comments, so I can prolong my nervosity till after I've read it all tonight. But then I thought, what the hell. If the programme committee of this conference wants me to present the opening keynote, they must have had at least one good reason to think I'm fit for the job. Unless of course I was the only one left who hadn't declined their invitation. I was charmed by their implied conviction that what I could tell you would be interesting enough, even if it was said from a spectator's point of view. Because I feel that's the position I'm gradually moving into due to my huge involvement with the administrative side of my job. Whatever their motive was, the fact is that you're stuck with me for the following hour or so. So sit back and let me entertain you.

1.2. Me

For those who don't know me yet, I'm the director of research and publications of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature in Belgium, or should I say Flanders. The length of my job title is inversely proportional to its importance. Bygone are the days that the Royal Academy, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year, was of any political importance. The Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature was founded in 1886 with the explicit task to design a uniform spelling for Dutch and to promote and facilitate the use of Dutch as a language for literature, science, scholarship and higher education. Since all of these initial goals were reached ages ago, and since we have language laws in Belgium protecting the status of all three of the country's official languages, the Royal Academy lost its influence and prestige and only recently discovered new opportunities to act as a moderate player in the cultural and academic field in Flanders. As part of the action to set new challenges for the Academy, I was asked to set up the Royal Academy's research department in the year 2000 and to concentrate its activities around two main topics: the scholarly edition of important literary works and cultural documents from Flanders and the building of linguistic historical corpora. From its start, I have pushed humanities computing as the centre's methodology and TEI as the expressive language for its research. In the first two years, the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies or CTB is it is called, saw an explosive start and employed a staff of 15 researchers. Nowadays we have been rationalized down to 2.8 fte. In the past eleven years we managed to publish 20 scholarly editions of Flemish prose, poetry, and correspondence collections, about the same amount of essay collections, monographies, and theoretical studies and close to 200 articles, papers, and book chapters. Since we're zooming in on the 19th and the 20th century, only two online editions have been published so far, due to copyright restrictions. In the coming year or so, we plan to publish two online editions of 20th century novels and two online editions of correspondence collections containing two and a half thousand letters.

1.3. You

My outfit gives away that I'm also involved in the food business as Malte has pointed out, both as a food writer for different media and by running cookery courses which welcome about 500 people a year. I thought it would be fun to add another 130 to that number tonight, but the organisers couldn't afford a full blown cookery studio without at least quadrupling the registration fee. So I had to come up with something else instead. I asked my friend and top shock-o-latier Dominique Persoone of The Chocolate Line to create five exciting and unusual chocolates that would add an extra dimension and experience to the second half of my speech. If you follow the instructions on the screen and eat the right one when I ask you to do so, you'll not only hear and see, but also feel, smell, and taste what I'm talking about.

I beg you, however, not to hold them too close to your body, because chocolate is the only food product that melts at body temperature, and the fluid text is, after all, not the topic of my talk. And all this is of course one big fat excuse for me to wear my chef's jacket in front of an academic audience, something I always wanted to do.

1.4. Introduction proper

So what will I be talking about? The title of my lecture refers to two hugely popular television formats which have been adapted and broadcasted worldwide. The first programme So You Think You Can Dance is a hit dance competition and reality show which inspires and amazes viewers as dancers showcase their unique and eclectic style and talents. This programme not only boosted registration numbers in dance schools, it also generated a whole series of spin-off dance reality shows and line extensions. Through the programme, dance became a phenomenon in present day society and commerce. In nutshell: dance became an industry. Macade Brandl, the executive director of Dance New Jersey, even spoke of the 'So You Think You Can Dance Effect' (Brandl, 2011).

The other programme Masterchef is a cooking competition for amateur cooks who are challenged to perform at gourmet level. The programme format is adapted and broadcasted in over twenty-five countries and it has generated huge public interest in food-related activities. In a column in the Sydney Morning Herald, Thomas Hunter quotes a report from analysis group IBISWorld which claims that the programme has a huge impact on the Australia's food industry (Hunter, 2010). The intense focus on fine food and the unique ingredients used to create it, has developed a taste for specialist, gourmet foods with the audience. The report predicts an economic growth of more than 60 % in the restaurant and catering business in the coming 4 years and Coles, a major MasterChef partner which has advertised heavily within the series, has reported a 1,400 % raise in the sales of what it terms 'unusual' ingredients after they feature in a MasterChef recipe. The programme's cookery books and magazine sell out instantly, and the programme revives cookery courses and the sales of kitchenware. In his column, Hunter calls this 'the MasterChef effect'.

Looking at the spectacular impact these programmes have on society I wondered whether it isn't about time we create a 'Digital Edition Effect'? Imagine that programmes like So You Think You Can Edit and The Masterchef Edition are broadcasted worldwide and are adapted to local literatures: Programmes in which editorial talents compete against each other for the best edition, in which they are challenged to incorporate the latest insights and technologies and to demonstrate their skills and knowledge of scholarly editing judged by a jury of international specialists. These programmes would introduce digital editions in society and have a huge impact on the way we treat texts from the past. The public would develop a passionate interest in edition-related activities, summer schools and workshops would sell out, enrollments in our university courses would be going through the roof, readers would read our editions and publishers would beg us to publish with them, the TEI Guidelines would be consulted more often than the Bible, public libraries would stop selling off previous editions of books and advertise the amount of different versions they hold in their collection, facebook groups would like us, the twittersphere would be vibrant of comments on editorial decisions, and we would get So You Think You Can Edit-slippers for Christmas or a Masterchef Edition-watch on our retirement. Digital editing would become an industry and generate enough money to build the infrastructure we need and fund the research groups and projects we have been dreaming of. Digital editing would become rock' n roll and we would be stars!

OK, the chance that this will happen is rather small, because the audience is simply not there or doesn't understand what Digital Editing is all about. Today I'm going to talk about two moves towards that audience: one from the perspective of text encoding and one from the perspective of the social edition. I am starting off with a bit of reality talk on the problematic perception of the role of text encoding in digital editing. Next I'm going to talk about the emerging social edition. In the meantime I will let you eat your chocolates and rattle on about television programmes, culinary history and modern day cuisine, gastronomic technology and their effects on products and the food experience. And finally, I'm going to let you crave for more, and I even promise you fireworks.

2. The Common Perception of Digital Editing

2.1. Two editions

Let me introduce to you two digital editions which have been sumbitted as MA theses at a Flemish University. For privacy reasons I am going to be deliberately vague about the titles and creators of the editions.

The first one is a digital edition of a travel story from the twelfth century. The edition allows the user to compare any two of five elements, that is the transcriptions and the images of the two primary sources and a modern translation. The texts can also be searched by approximate string matching which generates a static result. A magnifying glass facilitates the reading of the images and clicking on an image presents the user with larger versions. The student didn't do any editorial work herself: she copied the transcriptions from the latest diplomatic editions available and she added the modern translation of the text from another edition. She managed to get hold of existing scans of one original manuscript and acquired images from the other manuscript by scanning the facsimiles of the diplomatic edition. She neither did any work on the digital presentation of the edition. The edition lacks a real introduction and says nothing about the used technology. The accompanying essay presents a historical overview of the previous editions of the work and discusses the advantages of the digital edition for New Philology. In her chapter on the digital edition, she mentions TEI twice: once when she claims that encoding the texts with TEI was not necessary for this edition and a second time when she mentions that TEI encoding can always be added later. Instead she proposes a client side model based on HTML and Ajax and points out that its main advantage is that full page reloads are avoided.

The second edition is a digital edition of a corpus of 63 letters between two Flemish poets from the twentieth century. The edition is generated from the DALF-encoding the student used for her transcriptions of the letters, the articulation of her critical and editorial decisions, and her annotations and commentaries on the texts. DALF is short for Digital Archive of Letters in Flanders and is a TEI extension for the description and encoding of modern correspondence materials developed by Ron Van den Branden and myself at the CTB, the Royal Academy's Research Department. By making detailed structural and semantic information explicit in the encoded letters, a powerful digital edition could be generated as a Cocoon (+eXist) web-application which runs on a server running Java via Tomcat. The user can browse through the collection and refine selections by faceted searching which generates interactive results on the fly. The user can also search the complete collection by combining search terms and address the underlying XML-encoding. The thus generated result links directly to the letter which can be consulted in a variety of formats: as generated HTML on the screen, as plain DALF-XML or as generated PDF. The annotations can be read and rearranged on the screen, and a zoomabled digital facsimile accompanies the transcription. Both the reading text and the diplomatic transcription can be visualized and the encoding can always be checked. The user can cruise through the corpus by trails defined by the underlying semantic encoding. Individual letters or subcorpora can be stored and exported in various formats for distribution or further research. Both the encoding and the rationale of the edition was developed at my research centre and documented in the DALF Guidelines for the description and encoding of modern correspondence material (Vanhoutte & Van den Branden, 2003) and in Bert Van Raemdonck's recent PhD dissertation on the digital edition of letters (Van Raemdonck, 2011). The student didn't design the system and interface herself, but Ron Van den Branden designed it on the basis of her detailed encoding. This digital edition is all about knowledge representation, and the knowledge it represents is the student's, not somone else's.

The student who submitted the HTML-based edition got a distinction for her work, the student who submitted the XML/DALF/TEI based-edition failed. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is our fault. We owe her a big apology.

2.2. Text Encoding

Since the first TEI chapters on the transcription of primary sources and critical apparatus appeared in the TEI P1 Guidelines, now 21 years ago, we have been very good in persevering to minimize the importance of text encoding as an academic activity. Instead, when talking about digital editions to the outside community of humanities scholars, academic administrators, and funding bodies, we still take a 1990s attitude and emphasize the advantages of the internet as a distribution medium and the possibility to include and present all the material that printed editions have to leave out. We do that because we want to avoid having to explain the what, why, and how of text encoding to people outside our community. The technical complexity of an encoding standard like the TEI and the apparent incomprehensibility of the TEI Guidelines are debit to this reaction. By focusing on the end-product we shift the emphasis to what is familiar and we try to make the digital edition a sexy or at least an acceptable investment of talent, time, and money. At the same time we reduce the digital edition to its interface. Think about how you explain what you do to your family and friends who are not your colleagues. Consequently, the evaluation of our work is based on the presentational features and qualities of the digital edition instead of on the theories of the text and textual criticism which are expressed in the encoding.

Apparently, text encoding is something we should hide from people because it scares the hell out of them. They can watch airplanes crash buildings, people being shot in riots, car crashes, medical operations, and children dying from starvation, but text encoding? Oh no.

I taught text-encoding as a university course for many years and ran workshops attended by a wide variety of people, some without any humanities or computing background, and some in their seventies. Within less than six hours, all of them could deal with XML-encoding both as a human readable language and as an activity. We don't serve ourselves well by investing time, energy, and funds in trying to get more people on board by hiding the encoding behind WYSIWYG interfaces which gives them the illusion that everyone can do it without any training and exercise. The fear for the angle bracket is a psychological condition which can be overcome by instruction and training. I have argued for years now that simplifying our profession for students, aspiring editors, and unwilling colleages is the worst strategy ever if we want full academic credit for what we do. By trivializing and hiding the intellectual and physical blood, sweat, and tears we invest in the encoding of our texts, and by failing to explain what it is that we do, we create an atmosphere in which text-encoding does not count towards academic credits.

According to her supervisor, the second student also failed because she didn't add an essay on the poetics of both poets involved in the correspondence. Next to the question since when such an essay has become an essential part of a digital edition of letters, a more important question pops up: why wasn't the encoding taken into full consideration by the examiners? Because we as a community failed to explain and show the importance and academic value of the activity of text encoding for scholarly editing. So we may ask ourselves if it is a good thing to try and shield humanities scholars outside the text encoding community from the technical particulars?

As you may have guessed by now, I am not a huge fan of the WYSIWIG editors and edition machines we design in order to attract the interest and collaboration of more scholars. They basically reduce the intellectual activity of knowledge modeling through text-encoding to layouting a word-processor's document. They can no doubt be useful in crowd-sourcing projects where the focus is on mass transcription or the identification of simple features of the text, but using them in order to gain a wider understanding and support for textual criticism and digital scholarly editing is hopeless. Let me remind you that text encoding already provides a human readable interface to text modeling and that SGML was issued as a much needed high functional alternative to less functional wordprocessors. If we want the editing machine of the future to be as powerful and expressive as its underlying encoding standard, it must cater for all options within this standard. Understanding its graphical interface to the linguistic interface of text-encoding is as complicated as understanding the linguistic interface proper. It seems that by promoting a wordprocessing interface for text-encoding we're back to square one. Or as Charles Goldfarb put it once: '[I]f you are going to mess around with something powerful that you do not fully understand – even something benign – you had better do it with your eyes open.' (Goldfarb, 1990, p. xiii)

2.3. TEI by Example

Apart from the huge social and economic impact, reality shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Masterchef have contributed to an understanding and appreciation of dancing and cooking as a profession. These programmes never claime that dancing or cooking is easy and they zoom in on the hardships of mastering advanced techniques. This, however, doesn't put the audience off to take dancing or cookery classes where they are being taught step by step how to achieve a certain level of expertise.

With the freely available online tutorials TEI by Example which also contains modules on primary sources and critical editing, Melissa Terras, Ron Van den Branden and myself have tried to offer a comprehensible alternative to the mastodont TEI Guidelines. The tutorials are designed for self-directed learning but can also be used by TEI instructors in classroom and workshop situations. We introduce the students to text encoding by taking them through the process of marking up real documents. Our didactic approach is explicitness and learning by trial and error. What you see is what you get. Each module is accompanied by real examples from real projects, quizzes, and exercises. We built feedback into the quizzes and the assignments can be performed interactively using the TEI By Example Validator, a great application that in real-time parses any XML you enter, and produces a report, telling you if it qualifies as valid TEI, or if there are any errors. We could have included footage of us encoding texts in real life, but we're confident that even without these clips, TBE is as close you can get to a reality show version of Encoding with the Stars.

Fifteen months after the launch of the tutorials, the site has attracted close to 30,000 unique page views with 1,900 unique views for the modules on primary sources and critical editing together. The statistics and logs show that users are finding their way to the tutorials directly, via Digital Humanities courses or via the TEI website and we see that there is high activity from the US, Germany, the UK, France, and Canada: not surprisingly countries with a high digital humanities and digital editing profile. And we're particularly proud of our single visit from Vatican City. 18% of the visitors stay for more than 15 minutes on the site, which suggests that they really do some work. We also see a decent amount of returning visitors.

2.4. Task

So in order to get full academic credits for the encoding work we're doing, we should be less social when we create encoding tools and offer training instead which shows the reality of the activity of text-encoding and emphasize its function as a modeling language for knowledge about texts.

3. Bridge

The other day I was reviewing a cookery book with portraits and recipes from the 30 most influential contemporary Belgian chefs, and it struck me that, although culinary technology has never been more advanced than now, and the finest ingrediënts from all over the world have never been more accessible, the 500 page book is one long argument in favour of traditional cooking techniques and local produce. Contemporary dishes are built around the pure flavour of one product. The essence of its flavour is supported and lifted by only a few other ingredients which complete the total food experience. The subtle balancing of the four basic tastes – sweet, sour, bitter, and salty – together with a perfect control over texture and temperature in innovative food creations refer more to traditional cooking than newcomers in the food trade generally acknowledge. Surely, technological research and development affects the clientele's food experience because it alters the way chefs cook and dress up their dishes but it hardly replaces the achievements and insights of traditional cooking. An inclusive approach towards tradition and innovation is therefore key.

One such exemplary dish is the Black pudding red beet oyster by the Flemish chef Kobe Desramaults who cooks in his Michelin star restaurant In De Wulf in Dranouter. This chef shocked the restaurant scene years ago with his avant garde cuisine full of molecular cooking techniques, but has now returned to a pure kitchen which tries to bring out the essence of locally produced food. He admits 'When I started cooking, I mainly wanted to impress. Technique took priority over the rest.' (Asaert & Declercq, 2011, p. 204) In this dish, Kobe highlights the four basic flavours by pairing the black pudding which already combines all four of them with the briny saltiness of the oyster, and the sweet and sour of the beetroot and elderberry. This modern and contemporary looking dish has many emotional references to the past. As the chef explains 'I like to listen to local farmers and the older generation. They tell me stories from the past and how they cooked with their own produce. This inspires me to create new dishes.' (Asaert & Declercq, 2011, p. 205) However, this seemingly simple dish has a quite complex palate.

I couldn't help seeing in this a metaphor for the future of scholarly editing and its practitioners. Just as the young chef I was just talking about, every young and ambitious scholarly editor is enthousiastic about new technology and feels the urge to generate paradigm shifts. This drive to impress, however, only finds its true balance when it is enriched by knowledge about the past.

One element which seems to survive any innovation in scholarly editing is the established reading text. In Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age, published in 1996, Peter Shillingsburg observed that '[i]n spite of the fact that in the 1980s editorial circles witnessed a paradigm shift in which the concept of a definitive end product was widely replaced by the concept of process in which multiple texts represent the work, nevertheless, the physical limitations of print editions and the linear reading habits of most readers have continued to force the predominance of clear-reading texts as a primary feature of new scholarly editions.' (Shillingsburg, 1996, p. 77) A bit further, when he's talking of the qualities of the hypertext edition, he predicts: 'So, even with hypertexts, the question of “a best text for some purpose” will remain very much with us.' However, he adds, 'the most important point arising from recent theoretical discussions and computer capabilities may be the inescapable recognition by the general reader that any reading text is merely a representative of a work, not “the work itself”; for there are other representations of it crowding in demanding attention as well.' (Shillingsburg, 1996, p. 77-78).

Since Peter Robinson admitted that he was mistaken to abandon the single (edited) text in the edition of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (Robinson, 1996c) in favour of a set of different views of the text, he has moved from advocating the reader’s freedom of choice among many texts, to recognizing the function of the one text, to looking for the ideal model of an electronic edition and its functions. Currently he advocates ‘fluid, co-operative and distributed editions’ (Robinson, 2003a, p. 125) that are truly actively interactive through their instinctive interface design and incorporation of social media. This concept is indebted to Peter Shillingsburg’s ‘knowledge sites’ which are built by and around active on-line communities. At the same time, Robinson’s ideas of ‘electronic editions for everyone’ (Robinson, 2007b; 2009) correspond with Shillingsburg’s concepts of the convenient and the practical edition (Shillingsburg, 2005) that must bridge both the theoretical and practical differences between textual and literary critics. This concept recalls Fredson Bowers’ idea of the ‘practical edition’ from 1969 (Bowers, 1969). Fredson Bowers used the term ‘practical edition’ as opposed to ‘scholarly definitive edition’ to name commercially inspired products that ‘present to a broad audience as sound a text (usually modernized and at a minimum price) as is consistent with information that may be procurable through normal scholarly channels and thus without more special research than is economically feasible.’ (Bowers, 1969, p. 26) In a way, this was Bower's attempt at socializing the scholarly edition by making it possible for literary and textual scholars as well as for the common reader to profit from the results of textual scholarship.

Just as traditional cooking techniques, terroir cuisine, and local produce have survived many gastronomic innovations in the past five decades, different elements of the traditional scholarly edition, such as the reading text, has survived five decades of technological and theoretical innovation in textual scholarship. Therefore, our thinking about the digital scholarly edition should take an inclusive approach towards the accomplishments of the past. Whichever new technology is applied to the scholarly edition, every new model it generates is indebted to the tradition of textual scholarship.

In the time left, I am going to zoom in on the social edition and comment on its flavours. In passing, I am going to reiterate the importance of the 'four traditional basic tastes' of a scholarly edition – the constituted reading text, the apparatus variorum, the genetic and transmissional history, and the commentary – and add social technologies as savoriness or umami to the editorial dish. I'll do that through a brief discussion of the sweet promise of the social edition, the sour reality of sustainability, the bitter destiny of the record of variants, and the salty need for referentiality. Time to dig up your chocolates

4. The Flavours of The Social Edition

4.1. The Sweet Promise of Social Media

What do you need to know about the social edition?

1. The social edition is a proposal to remodel the scholarly edition with the use of social media and extend digital editorial traditions well into the age of Web 2.0.
2. The social edition is a proposal for modeling professional reading.
3. The social edition wants to provide a timely alternative to the current types of digital editions which were mostly conceptualized before the ubiquity of the web.
4. The model for the social edition is built on the achievements of theories such as New Historicism which blurs the distinction between text and context, and The sociology of text which considers the text as a result of a social process rather than an authorial product.
5. The social edition is not a static end product but a continuously changing knowledge space that generates meaning through collaboration.

A forthcoming paper in LLC written by a research team around Ray Siemens summarizes it nicely: 'with the tools of social media at its centre, the social edition is process-driven, privileging interpretative changes based on the input of many readers; text is fluid, agency is collective, and many readers/editors, rather than single editor, shape what is important and, thus, broaden the editorial lens as well as the breadth, depth, and scope of any edition produced in this way.' (Siemens et al., forthcoming)

Sweet Caramel Ganache Fleur de sel de Camargue

The sweet promise of social media is thus the redefinition and acknowledgement of digital editing as a digital humanities' activity where collaboration is key. Social media empowers the critical reader, destabilizes traditional scholarly editing both as a theory and as an activity, and questions the scholarly edition as a product. Social media also suggests the extension of community membership beyond academics and into the interested and general public.

But how social is the social edition, really? One of the main advantages of traditional textual scholarship is that its research produces a maximal edition which includes a minimal edition. The maximal edition is an academic product in which scholarly editors present their research data, demonstrate their scholarly accuracy and scrutiny, and articulate their attitute towards problems and theories of the text. The maximal edition is a knowledge space where the history of the text is examined 'for all their clues in order to get a solid view of how they were created, deployed, manipulated, and appropriated so that we can better understand the history and significances of books.' (Shillingsburg, 2006, p. 77 n. 27) The target user is clearly the expert reader.

The minimal edition, on the other hand, is a cultural product that is produced by the scholarly editor acting as a curator or guardian of the text. In other words, it is a reading edition which presents the established text in a no-frills format. The minimal edition is aimed at the common reader who just wants to have access to a text and read it for fun. This inclusive, or social, approach of traditional textual scholarship is central to its primary aim which should be the transmission, preservation, and presentation of texts to future and present-day readers. All readers. That's why, at the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies, we built the minimal edition into our model of the maximal digital edition by providing the user with the option to build their own representations of the material in the edition and generate distributable PDF files which are formatted as print editions. This way, the user of our digital editions can choose to read the established reading text with our without annotations, print it out or have it printed on demand as a practical paperback. With a share of 0.3 % of the book market, the e-book is no real alternative to print books in Flanders.

The social edition, however, is a maximal edition which does not include a minimal edition and does not respond to the communicative function of textual scholarship. It is targeted at expert readers who participate in collaborative activities of various kinds and form a knowledge building community. The incorporation of social media would make it possible to extend this community to the interested and engaged general public who are practicing socalled citizen scholarship (Greenberg, 2010). But even the most succesfull crowd-sourcing projects which call on the general public for the transcription of the Bentham papers, for instance, has to admit that over half of the transcriptions is being produced by one and the same person, as Melissa Terras recently admitted (Terras, 2011).

Despite the inclusion of social media, the social edition leaves out the common reader as well as the general public and thus narrows down the main function of textual scholarship to its academic focus. In this respect, the social edition is asocial.

4.2. The Sour Reality of Sustainability

Perhaps the first social edition, both in its collaborative approach and in its socialization of text, is Jerome McGann's iconic Rossetti's Archive. This archive 'comprises some 70,000 digital files and 42,000 hyperlinks organizing a critical space for the study of Rossetti’s complete poetry, prose, pictures, and designs in their immediate historical context.' (McGann, 2010) The Archive has high-resolution digital images of every known manuscript, proof, and print publication of Rossetti's textual works, and every known or accessible painting, drawing, or art object he designed. It also has a substantial body of contextual materials that are related in important ways to Rossetti’s work. All of this is imbedded in a robust environment of editorial and critical commentary and it is encoded in TEI based XML. It took McGann and his team about 18 years to finish the project and it involved some 40 graduate students plus a dozen or more skilled technical experts, not to speak of the cooperation of funding agencies and scores of persons around the world in many libraries, museums, and other depositories. Apart from the digital edition itself, the project generated a series of lectures, essays, papers, and books by McGann himself, and perhaps thousands of comments and references in print and online by others. Since the mid-1990s, this project also transformed editorial theory and confronted it with the digital paradigm.

The Rossetti Archive has functioned for years as a research environment grouping scholars from a variety of disciplines around Rossetti's works. In this respect, but of course lacking today's Web 2.0 technology, The Rossetti Archive is a social edition.

Sour Caramel Ganache Cabernet-sauvignon Pine nut

In a recent paper on sustainability, Jerome McGann concludes the following about the Rossetti Archive, and here comes the sour reality: 'In order to preserve what I have come to see as the permanent core of its scholarly materials, I shall have to print it out.' (McGann, 2010)

As no collaborative efforts are ever lasting, the social edition as a research environment will gradually transform from an engine of scholarship to an object of scholarly interest. 'They will not be sustained' McGann predicts. 'They will be – we hope their most significant parts will be – preserved'. (McGann, 2010) At that moment, and if the collaborative research environment would make its findings accessible to future scholarship, which is the academic function of textual scholarship, the social edition will have to transform itself into the self-contained editorial object it criticizes.

4.3. The Bitter Destiny of the Record of Variants

At the DH2011 conference in Stanford, Meagan Timney, Cara Leitch and Ray Siemens presented the social edition as a new model for edition production in a time of collaboration (Timney et al., 2011). Their thought provoking paper was one of the inspirations for my speech today because they sketched an exciting future for the digital edition but were quite negative about the achievements of the past. Their claims about the 'anonymous' apparatus variorum, the failure of 'self-contained' editions and the role of the editor as 'progenitor of knowledge creation' in print and digital editions so far, for instance, signal some misunderstandings of traditional bibliography from the perspective of the social web. Historically, the record of variants serves four purposes. First, it is a documentation of the variation between all of the extant versions of a text which allows for the reconstruction of these versions. In pre-digital times this was the only affordable way to represent the genetic and transmissional history of texts. Second, it provides the account of the emendation of the base text and the constitution of the reading text. Third, it provides the user with control data which allows for the repeatability of the criticism performed on the text. Four, it functions as a research data base. It is in the record of variants that scholarly editors expose themselves and are explicit about their choices. The apparatus variorum is the place to prove editors wrong and to falsify their textual criticism. Saying that the editor of a self-contained edition is hiding in the anonymous record of variants, as the presenters of the paper did, is a total misconception which grew out of the supposed explicitness of the social edition.

Bitter Bitter Ganache Arabica coffee

It's in the social edition that the record of variants meets its bitter destiny. Their model of the social edition proposes the inclusion of collation software which could generate a record of variants which, funilly enough, anonymizes the apparatus. Because the social edition does not contain a fixed and established reading text – it does not accept the authority of the editor –, because the inclusion of all of the versions of the text in the edition makes a reconstructive representation redundant, and because the social edition includes software for the analysis of the date, the generated record of variants is nothing else but an anonymous database with no real function.

4.4. The Salty need for Referentiality

In the discussion following the paper I just mentioned, Michael Sperberg-McQueen and myself drew the attention to what's possibly the greatest challenge of the social edition. If the social edition is a 'living edition', as Greg Crane (2010) put it, that is constantly evolving and is being improved by its knowledge building community, its 'current state is only a single datapoint'. (Crane, 2010) This single datapoint, however, is the basis for scholarly debate and forms the foundation of knowledge creation about the text. To guarantee the scholarly integrity of this debate, we need mechanisms to register these data points, archive them as snapshots, and refer to them when needed.

As Emerson Marks reminds us 'No cognition, whether scientific or “aesthetic,” is conceivable without referentiality.' (Marks, 2001) It only takes one to read Roman Jakobson's model of the function of language (1960) to understand the importance of referentiality for scholarship. If the context of our argument is changed following our argument, our argument loses its scholarly value. Moreover, the true or false status of our argument can never again be affirmed or questioned and the argument cannot generate any new arguments. In other words, if the data on which to perform scholarship is in constant change, we cannot know what we know, which leads to an epistemological crisis. Just as salt is a basic mineral for the body to function properly, referentiality is a basic quality of scholarship.

Salty Mild Chocolate Almond praliné Smoked bacon

In the academic debate, referentiality is commonly facilitated by footnotes and references pointing to retractable 'datapoints' such as essays, articles, books, blogs, websites, tweets etc. If the social edition wants to function properly and live up to its mission, we need agreed referencing schemes to facilitate academic debate of the primary materials as well as of the collaborative annotation, tagging and analysis the social edition promotes by the inclusion of social software.

I don't know how we can solve this problem in a manageable way, but I do hope that the TEI steps in and proposes ways to do this, because it hugely involves the text-encoding community which in the social edition finds a laboratory for finding out what we know and don't know about the modeling of knowledge.

5. Wrapping It Up - Umami

To conclude this keynote, let me tell you one last story taken from the history of food. It is the story of the fifth basic taste which completely changed the way chefs design their dishes, the way we experience food, and the way the industry generates huge profits. And it all started in 1908, when the Japanese scientist Kikunae Ikeda identified a taste which was distinct from the four basic tastes sweet, sour, bitter, and salty and named it umami. Umami has no translation but means something like 'pleasant, savory taste'. Although umami has no taste of its own, Ikeda found that the combination of glutamates with any of the four basic tastes resulted in an intensity which is higher than the sum of the ingredients. Umami has the ability to balance the taste and round the total flavour of the dish. The effect of umami is difficult to describe but it induces salivation and fills the mouth with a sensation that makes you crave for more (Yamaguchi, 1998). However, it needed an international symposium to recognize umami as the fifth basic taste in 1985.

Maybe the social edition is the fifth basic taste of textual scholarship. Although it is distinct from the kinds of editions we know already, it is hugely dependant on the accomplishments of the past and it can only be valued from the context of traditional textual scholarship. If we reocgnize this, the social edition has the ability to balance the theories and practices of textual scholarship and generate an impact which is higher than the sum of its ingredients. It has the potential to change the ways we think about scholarly editing, to change the ways we create scholarly editions, and to change the ways we use scholarly editions in a collaborative environment. The social promise of the social edition lets us crave for more. Maybe, the social edition will generate the Digital Edition Effect I have been adressing at the beginning of my talk. The future will show whether that will happen or not.

I have tried entertain you about what I think are the challenges textual scholarship is facing, and I somewhat regret I haven't been able to talk more about the specific challenges of the TEI in this project. You may agree or disagree with what I've been saying and you can do this because I put this speech up on my blog and a revised version will be published in the Journal of the TEI.

But before you comment on my thoughts, remember that I gave you gastronomic designer chocolates.

And there's still one left. Since the organisers couldn't arrange any fireworks at the end of my lecture in this room, I did enquire about it, Dominique Persoone put your very personal fireworks in this umami chocolate. Thank your for listening and enjoy!

Umami Rice vinegar caramel Soy Sauce Sesame praliné Sansho-pepper Fireworks

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