A paper by Daniel Powell, Constance Crompton, and Ray Siemens entitled “Building the Social Scholarly Edition: Results and Findings from A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript” was presented at the Digital Humanities 2013 conference, held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on July 17, 2013.
Abstract:
1. Introduction and Background
a. History and Context
Social media technologies can extend and enhance
scholarly conversation while challenging traditional notions
of textual authority and peer review. Twitter facilitates
resource and idea sharing with a speed and ease formerly
only possible at conferences; Facebook allows the formation
of communities of interest founded not on geography
but affinity; blogs disseminate research for widespread
discussion; and, most significantly, Wikipedia has become
the most popular and largest single reference resource in
history, with more than 14 million articles in over 250
languages produced by 1 million monthly contributors
(Wikimedia Report Card, 2012). This long paper reflects
on the construction of a social scholarly edition of the
Devonshire Manuscript that attempted to harness emerging
social media environments to produce a new type of
scholarly edition, one that allows multiple stakeholders to
access, contribute, and discuss its construction.1
In this paper we recount the incipient formation of
a new type of editing community, one that we argue is
defined by iterative publication of material, multiple
communities of interest contributing to a single project,
the use of technology to facilitate these contributions,
and the growing importance of self-directed learning to
scholarly editing. Our successes and, just as importantly,
our moments of failure, offer insight into best practices
for a type of “facilitative scholarship” that will likely
become increasingly common as comfort with social media
technologies grows within the academy. As outlined in a
DH2012 poster session (Crompton and Siemens, 2012), we
designed the public editing process for the social edition
from the start to encourage communication across editorial
communities while preserving the peer review process.
These communities included the Electronic Textual Cultures
Lab team, the project advisory board, the online Iter
Community ( http://www.itergateway.org/ ), early modern
critics and scholars operating in the blogosphere, Wikibook
and Wikipedia users, Tudor enthusiasts, and the general
public. 2
b. Materials of the Project
The Devonshire Manuscript (British Library Additional
MS 17,492) contains approximately 200 items (Southall,
1964: 143, Remley, 1994: 47), including poems, verse
fragments, excerpts from longer works, anagrams, jottings,
and doodles by a coterie of men and women centered on
the court of Queen Anne Boleyn. Inscribed in over a dozen
hands, the manuscript has long been valued as a source of
Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetry. In addition to 129 of his poems,
the volume contains other transcribed lyrics and original
work by numerous court figures, including Mary Shelton,
Lady Margaret Douglas, Mary (Howard) Fitzroy, and Lord
Thomas Howard (Southall, 1964: 143). These multiple
contributors often comment and evaluate each other’s
work through marginal notation and in-line interjection. In
addition to a consideration of the volume as “a medium of
social intercourse” (Love and Marotti, 2002: 63), the multilayered
and multi-authored composition of the Devonshire
Manuscript make it an ideal text for experimentation in
social editing.
The Social Edition of The Devonshire Manuscript
project manifests Ray Siemens’ earlier argument that social
media environments might enable new editing practices
(Siemens et al., 2012a). In building an edition of an early
modern text on the principles of open access and editorial
transparency in both production and dissemination, we have
integrated scholarly content into environments maintained
by the social-editorial communities that have sprung up on
the web; most notably, these include the Wikimedia suite
of projects (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource). We have
run an experiment to see how one might build an edition
which is scholarly in a traditional sense, but which extends
the editorial conversation into multiple pre-existing social
media platforms including blogs, wiki discussion pages,
dedicated Renaissance and early modern online community
spaces, Skype-enabled interviews with our advisory group,
and Twitter.
2. The Complexity of the New
Scholarly Editing Community
a. Iterative Publication
Perhaps more than any other editorial choice, the
iterative publication of the social edition of the Devonshire
Manuscript departed most clearly from traditional scholarly
editing practices. We have, in effect published (or are in
the perpetual process of publishing) two versions of the
edition in two mediums: a fixed PDF version, distributed
to the project’s advisory board, and a version housed on
the publicly-editable Wikibooks. We are currently working
with multiple publishing partners to produce a second online
edition, an e-reader edition, and a print edition to meet the
needs of a broad and varied readership. These versions were
planned to productively inform and influence each other’s
development, with cross-pollination of editorial input
across platforms. Although they did so, each medium also
engendered difficulties in communication, coordination,
and expectations to be overcome or accommodated—with
varying results.
b. Communities of Interest and
Technologies of Communication
As outlined above, a central aim of the project was
to facilitate knowledge transfer and creation between
multiple editorial communities, all of whom were invested
differently in the project. These ranged from individual
academics giving feedback as advisors to interested
members of the public in contact with project staff via
Twitter. These groups adopted, considered, and, at times,
rejected different types of communication technologies
in fascinating ways. Wikibook discussion pages were
considered by established academics to be spaces meant
for peer review; wiki editors explained that they were in
fact where confrontations over edits usually occurred. Wiki
editors were very helpful with questions of coding and
technical production of content, while other communities
felt deeply uncomfortable editing posted content. Sustained
discussions in the Iter Community space proved difficult,
while members of the public interested in Tudor culture
followed our work avidly and often interacted with us on
Twitter. Bloggers focused on the early modern period helped
to generate discussion and disseminate reports as our edition
building progress, but chose to limit their direct involvement
with producing the edition. In often surprising ways, the
technologies of communication each group used came to
define, in some cases, the communities of interest and their
respective investments. Considered as a whole, our project
suggests that social media technologies can be harnessed
for productive interaction and discussion by those scholars
invested in a content area or project, but that they require
comprehensive oversight by dedicated staff to develop
and maintain participation in knowledge construction and
dissemination.
c. Self-Directed Learning
Wikimedia content is openly editable by any individual.
Project staff quickly reconsidered this theoretically
nonexistent barrier to entry, though, when coding of the
edition began in Wikibooks. Resembling a cross between
HTML, XML, and CSS, Wikitext language is idiosyncratic
and required a great deal of time and experimentation on
the part of project staff to use effectively. Given the central
importance of lab staff to the production of this edition, we
have realized that this ad-hoc program of self-directed study
produced a new community: young scholars, mostly masters
level and younger doctoral students, who have shown
interest in digital scholarly production. In other words, those
usually construed as “assisting” in large projects here took
on increasingly centralized roles in coordinating community
input, coding the social edition in Wikibooks, discussing
the project with various communities, and writing and
disseminating critical research on the project as a whole.
3. Conclusion
a. The Open Source Edition?
The basic structures of the social edition are completely
open for manipulation and repurposing. The formation,
maintenance, and oversight of multiple communities,
however, is central the success of any such open edition.
Community investment provides a foundation for a
technologically facilitated, process-driven approach. As
our full paper will discuss in more detail, developing such
communities is often difficult, with success depending
on intensive and regular engagement and oversight.
It is difficult for disparate communities, even when
facilitated by social media technologies, to effectively
come together for intellectual production. As even the wellregarded
Transcribe Bentham project has widely discussed,
crowdsourcing textual transcription—much less scholarly
editing and production—is fraught with difficulties we are
only beginning to navigate (Cause et al., 2012a; Causer
et al., 2012b). In this reconfigured landscape of scholarly
production, where we are likely “witnessing the nascent
stages of a new ‘social’ edition existing at the intersection
of social media and digital editing” (Siemens et al., 2012a:
446), however, we are not without models: the open source
community, especially those groups devoted to general
tool building and knowledge construction (OpenOffice,
Wikimedia, Linux, Mozilla) is a powerful articulation
of possible ways the technologically facilitated social
production of intellectual content may fruitfully develop—
given a robust and vibrant community of interest.
b. Ways Forward
The past two years of work suggests that some blend
of intensive oversight and engagement with defined
communities, along with a receptivity to spontaneously
formed communities of affinity—as supported by both
the Transcribe Bentham project (Causer, 2012b) and
our own observations—is necessary to effectively
implement social scholarly production. Only by becoming
effective promoters, facilitators, and instigators can digital
humanists provide an effective locus around which multiple
communities can cohere. Although we encountered certain
difficulties in facilitating knowledge exchange among
various communities, on the whole we learned how to
effectively facilitate community interaction across and
between mediums and communities to produce scholarly
knowledge in new ways.
References
Causer, T., J. Tonra, and V. Wallace (2012a).
Transcription maximized; expense minimized?
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Causer, T., and V. Wallace (2012b). Building
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Crompton, C., R. Siemens, and the ETCL and
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Notes
1. For an overview of pertinent critical contexts surrounding
the modeling of the social edition, see Siemens et al.,
“Understanding the Electronic Scholarly Edition in the
Context of New and Emerging Social Media.”
2. These efforts are in keeping with the aims of the
Implementing New Knowledge Environment (INKE)
Project, a $2.5 million, 7-year Major Collaborative Research
Initiative (MCRI) grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada devoted
to “exploring the future of the book from the perspective
of its history.” See the INKE website http://inke.ca/ and
Siemens et al., “Codex Ultor: Toward a Conceptual and
Theoretical Foundation for New Research on Books and
Knowledge Environments.”