Elisa Beshero-Bondar PRO
Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
A Digital Frankenstein Project for the Bicentennial
Dr. Elisa Beshero-Bondar: Director, Pitt-Greensburg Center for the Digital Text | Associate Professor of English Contact: ebb8 at pitt.edu | @epyllia 5 March 2018 Frankenstein Week at Missouri Southern State University These slides: http://bit.ly/MSSU-Frank
Frankenstein's Genesis
1814 Elopement of young radicals: 16-year old Mary Godwin and 22-year-old Percy Shelley (Chronology details)
Summer of 1816: "The year without a summer": The Shelleys and Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont go to Europe to visit Lord Byron. Scandalous, exiled radical writers and "libertines". In 1821, Robert Southey will brand Byron's work a "moral virus" infecting society.
Byron's 1816 challenge to his guests:
“We will each write a ghost story...”
They'd been reading German Fantasmagoria and Coleridge's more nightmarish poems...
1831 engraving: Villa Diodati, Byron's home in exile in 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Map of unusual cold temperatures in Europe during the summer of 1816. Credit: Creative Commons, authored by Giorgiogp2
‘Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion …’
Composition process, intervention, collaboration
Textual History (editions authorized by MWS):
1818 Edition (3 volumes)
"Thomas copy" (hand-written revisions by MWS in a copy of 1818)
1823 Edition (2 volumes)
1831 Edition (1/2 of a volume)
bound with Friedrich von Schiller's The Ghost Seer in Bentley's Standard Series of novels)
Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Director, Center for the Digital Text, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg
Jon Klancher, English Department, Carnegie Mellon University
Matt Lavin, Director, Digital Media Lab, University of Pittsburgh
Rikk Mulligan, University Libraries, Carnegie Mellon University
Can we make an edition that conveniently compares the manuscripts to the print publications?
Can we make a comprehensive collation to show changes to the novel over time, from 1816 to 1831?
How many versions? (5 and a bit?)
Which editorial interventions persist from 1816 to 1831?
MWS in the "Thomas" copy: how much of this persists into 1831?
PBS's additions: which/how many of these persist to 1831?
What parts of the novel were most mutable?
Rieger: inline collation of "Thomas" w/ 1818,
1831 variants in endnotes
Legend:
Curran and Lynch: PA Electronic Edition ( PAEE) , collation of 1818 and 1831: HTML
Crook crit. ed of 1818, variants of "Thomas", 1823, and 1831 in endnotes (P&C MWS collected works)
Romantic Circles TEI conversion of PAEE ; separates the texts of 1818 and 1831; collation via Juxta
1974
~mid-1990s
1996
C. Robinson, The Frankenstein Notebooks (Garland): print facsimile of 1816 ms drafts
2007
Shelley-Godwin Archive publishes diplomatic edition of 1816 ms drafts
print edition
digital edition
Legend:
2013
2017
Pittsburgh Bicentennial Frankenstein Project begins:
assembly/proof-correcting of PAEE files; OCR/proof-correcting 1823; "bridge" TEI edition of S-GA notebook files; automated collation; incorporating "Thomas" copy text
Accessing (reading, writing, editing) texts in nonlinear ways
Multiplying and individualizing points of access
Frankenstein's inspiration for hypertext experiment
hundreds of small html files, juxtaposed in frames
Digital Collation for a "Variorum" interface
The Creature of Collation?
We make newly formed text "bodies" from disparately formed source materials.
source: I programmer article on "Frankenstein" malware
provide a standard format for data interchange in humanities research.
Small pieces are optimal for collation.
There is no single "complete" edition.
Each output (plain text, XML, TEI collation) = viable edition on its own.
Interface invites the user to play: put the pieces together.
image source: a friend's Lego set
Reconcile multiple kinds of text encoding:
old '90s HTML (1818, 1831)
not-so-plain OCR-generated text (1823)
TEI XML for manuscripts: (S-GA diplomatic edition)
Pittsburgh's bridges (1963)
Source: NewsCastic.com
Automated: via CollateX
Algorithms for locating union and "delta" points in "streams" of text
Inputs in a variety of formats (XML/TEI, plain text, JSON)
Output / Visualization options:
Text table (above); SVG flow chart; XML
JuxtaCommons on the web
Develop a custom web interface (via XML output)
image source: S-GA
A running text stream...?
Or an architecture of bridges?
(collateX SVG output)
XML collation: flagging variants and Percy's hand
(not only pointing outside)
domestic affection
(Walton - Margaret Seville)
domestic affection
(DeLaceys and Safie)
domestic affection
(Frankenstein family)
travel/expedition: Walton
travel/expedition: Victor
travel/expedition: Clerva
l
travel/expedition: Creature
law / judicial system
(Justine)
law / judicial system
Felix DeLacey
law / judicial system
Victor/Kirwin
By Elisa Beshero-Bondar
presentation on the Pittsburgh-MITH Digital Frankenstein Project for Frankenstein Week at Missouri Southern State University, 5 March 2018
Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.