The AustESE Project was at the University of Sydney on 4 and 5 April for a workshop to facilitate discussion about electronic scholarly editing and to introduce the AustESE Workbench to participants. Participants travelled from Brisbane, Newcastle, Wollongong, Sydney, and Perth, bringing with them the needs of scholarship for Early Modern Women’s Writing, nineteenth century publishing, nineteenth and twentieth century fiction and poetry in manuscript and print, annotated editions, the serialisation of Australian novels, and twentieth century writer’s notebooks.
A symposium on the practice and theory of scholarly editing introduced participants to the problems faced by members of the AustESE Steering Committee (Paul Eggert, Tim Dolin, Mark Byron, and Roger Osborne). Roger spoke about his experience editing Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes for print publication, and compared that with the prospect of an electronic edition of Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life. Mark Byron spoke about the challenges of editing Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts. Tim Dolin spoke about his entry into scholarly editing from the perspective of a literary critic. And Paul Eggert summarised the discussion with an account of his long experience with scholarly editing, including his participation in foundational work in electronic scholarly editing in the 1990s.
Following afternoon tea, Paul Eggert continued the discussion with reference to his own work in Securing the Past, and recent writing on editorial theory from Peter Robinson, Hans Walter Gabler, Peter Shillingsburg.
These discussions primed participants for the hands-on component of the workshop on the following day.
Led by Roger Osborne and Anna Gerber, the workshop introduced participants to the AustESE Workbench, specifically the Repository and its ontology, MVD, and Annotations. Using the workbench, the participants entered bibliographical descriptions related to their own work and uploaded material where possible. They then looked at various examples of textual comparison generated by MVD, and considered how these activities satisfied the archival needs of their projects.
AustESE Workshop Participants
After lunch, participants were introduced to the newly integrated annotation tool, and participated in a session of collaborative annotation and discussion on the role of annotation in their own projects. This session concluded with a summary of the workshop and symposium and an agreement to meet for a further workshop in conjunction with the book:logic symposium to be held in Brisbane on 4 October. By that time, the AustESE Workbench will include a workflow engine and export facilities, enabling users to step through the tasks required to complete an edition. The second workshop will aim to complete the introduction for new users and showcase some of the projects that are are using the workbench.
Tagged: AustESE, NeCTAR RT038, The University of Queensland
