0.26 Underpinnings of the social edition  (Page 11/32)

The electronic base-text selected to act as the initial focal point for the prototype was drawn from Ray Siemens’ SSHRC-funded electronic scholarly edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL MS Add. 17492). Characterized as a “courtly anthology” (Southall 1964) and as an “informal volume” (Remley 1994: 48), the Devonshire Manuscript is a poetic miscellany consisting of 114 original leaves, housing some 185 items of verse (complete poems, fragments, extracts from larger extant works, and scribal annotations). Historically privileged in literary history as a key witness of Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, the manuscript has received new and significant attention of late, in large part because of the way in which its contents reflect the interactions of poetry and power in early Renaissance England and, more significantly, because it offers one of the earliest examples of the explicit and direct participation of women in the type of literary and political-poetic discourses found in the document. On the editing of the Devonshire Manuscript in terms of modeling and knowledge representation, see Siemens and Leitch (2008). See also the forthcoming Siemens et al, “Drawing Networks in the Devonshire Manuscript.”

While editing the Devonshire Manuscript as the base text was underway, work on REKn began by mapping the data structure in relation to the functional requirements of the project, selecting appropriate tools and platforms, and outlining three objectives: to gather and assemble a corpus of primary and secondary texts to make up the knowledgebase; to develop automated methods for data collection; and to develop software tools to facilitate dynamic interaction between the user(s) and the knowledgebase.

3.1. data structure and functional requirements

We felt that the database should include tables to store relations between documents; that is, if a document includes a reference to another document, whether explicitly (such as in a reference or citation) or implicitly (such as in keywords and metadata), the fact of that reference or relation should be stored. Thus, the document-to-document relationship will be a many-to-many relationship.

In addition to a web service for public access to the database, it was proposed that there should be a standalone data entry and maintenance application to allow the user(s) to create, update, and delete database records manually. This application should include tools for filtering markup tags and other formatting characters from documents; allow for automating the data entry of groups of documents; and allow for automating the data entry of documents where they are available from web services, or by querying electronic academic publication amalgamator services (such as EBSCOhost ).

Finally, a scholarly research application to query the database in read-only mode and display documents—along with metadata where available (such as author, title, publisher)—was to be developed. The appearance and operation of the application should model the processes of scholarly research, with many related documents visible at the same time, easily moved and grouped by the researcher. The application should display the document in as many different forms as are available—plain text, marked-up text, scanned images, audio streams, and so forth. Users should also be able to easily navigate between related documents; to easily search for documents that have similar words, phrases or word patterns; and to perform text analysis on the document(s)—word list, word frequency, word collocation, word concordance—and display the results.