Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Publication Carefully Corrected / Mutilated Mess: Ossian's Textual Legacies(2015) Barr, Rebecca Anne; Tonra, Justin; |~|IRC|~|Controversies over legitimacy are an essential part of the literary reception and cultural meaning (Mulholland 394) of James Macpherson s Ossian poems. Many revisionist readings of Ossian attempt to preserve the text from contamination by its author, quarantining the cultural legacy of the first complete edition of the Ossian poems, The Works of Ossian (1765), by disregarding its successor, The Poems of Ossian (1773). Thus, Howard Gaskill, modern editor of Ossian (Edinburgh UP, 1996), characterised the 1773 Poems as a mess which has been bequeathed to us in edition after edition ever since (xxiv). Where Macpherson hopes to have brought the work to a state of correctness, which will preclude all future improvements (1:v), Gaskill laments the authorial vanity which is really behind so many of these revisions (xxiv) and selects the 1765 Works as his copy-text. Though Macpherson described the 1773 edition as [c]arefully corrected, and greatly improved literary criticism has treated it as an illegitimate offspring. In textual terms, then, the choice between these two options equates to a prioritising of the legacy of Ossian or the legacy of Macpherson, mirroring the central terms of the debate about the cultural authenticity of the work. This paper will examine the legacies of the Ossianic copy-texts, arguing that to favour any particular edition perpetuates a limited understanding of many elements--authority, originality, authenticity--which have fuelled interest in Ossian since its initial publication. To circumvent the reification of a singular Works or Poems text, the speakers will present the crowdsourced annotation tool and genetic critical edition of the new social edition (Siemens, et al.), Ossian Online, as a means of unearthing the plural textual shifts and the multiple legacies of this seminal work.Publication Using Distributional Semantics to Trace Influence and Imitation in Romantic Orientalist Poetry(ACL, 2014-08-23) Aggarwal, Nitish; Tonra, Justin; Buitelaar, Paul; Akbik, Alan; Visengeriyeva, Larysa; |~|In this paper, we investigate whether textual analysis can yield evidence of shared vocabulary orformal textual characteristics in the works of 19th century poets Lord Byron and Thomas Moorein the genre of Romantic Orientalism. In particular, we identify and trace Byron s influence onMoore s writings to query whether Moore imitated Byron, as many reviewers of the time suggested.We use a Distributional Semantic Model (DSM) to analyze if there is a shared vocabularyof Romantic Orientalism, or if it is possible to characterize a literary genre in terms of vocabulary,rather than in terms of the particular plots, characters and themes. We discuss the resultsthat DSM models are able to provide for an abstract overview of the influence of Lord Byron swork on Thomas Moore.Publication For the Sake of Argument: Crowdsourcing Annotation of Macpherson's Ossian(2014) Barr, Rebecca Anne; Tonra, Justin; |~|The argument presented by a scholarly edition can usually be traced to the vision of a single editor or a very small group of editors. But is it possible or even desirable for an edition to present multiple, perhaps competing, arguments? This paper emerges from a new project to create a social edition of James Macpherson s Ossian poems, and describes the practical and theoretical issues behind crowdsourcing annotation of the text. The purpose of this project is to generate new knowledge about a key eighteenth-century literary text. Since its publication in 1760, Ossian s combination of spurious textual genetics and claims to cultural authenticity has provoked controversy and argument. In his lifetime Macpherson s editions incorporated responses to his antique poetry: producing a battery of paratext, as well as insertions, expansions, and alterations to bolster credibility and maximize on commercial success. From the outset, then, Macpherson used edition as argument. This project aims to present a new online edition of Ossian, prepared according to strict principles of scholarly editing. The open-access project will re-present Macpherson s work to new audiences of scholars and will uncover the various textual choices made in the eighteenth-century editions. Most importantly, it will create an online knowledge community who will be actively involved in the collaborative creation of scholarly annotations. Users will collaborate, debate, and annotate this edition, synthesising for the first time a broad range of disciplinary perspectives to provide an evolving community of research and a truly social edition. This paper will analyse the affordances of the web for the scholarly editor, with particular reference to presenting full texts, visualizing variation and genetic textual development, and creating an annotation collaboratory. Such possibilities open interpretive avenues that are closed to the printed edition, this paper argues, before considering whether other stages in the preparation of the scholarly edition (collating and establishing texts, creating the critical apparatus) might be achieved through similar crowdsourcing processes.Publication Crowdsourcing Annotation and the Social Edition : Ossian Online(2014) Barr, Rebecca Anne; Tonra, Justin; |~|James Macpherson s Ossian poems were the international sensation of the eighteenth-century. First published in 1760, Macpherson s work caused a literary furore. Ostensibly translations from Gaelic manuscripts, the poems were published as fragments of a lost Celtic epic, salvaged from a dying oral culture and translated for the edification of a modern readership. Despite the controversial provenance of the Ossian poems, they transformed European literature; their impact was profound, international and long lasting, initiating the Romantic movement in Ireland, Britain, Europe, and beyond. Ossian Online is a new initiative to freshly edit and make available this profoundly influential work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European culture. It will work on the principle of the collaboratory : providing an online infrastructure for scholarly collaboration. As a platform in which participants can annotate, debate, and engage, this project will create an innovative space for interdisciplinary dialogue, where scholarly debate and exchange can occur in real-time. The past five years have witnessed an exponential growth in the use of social media for scholarship and communication in eighteenth-century studies (Eighteenth-Century Questions, The 18th-Century Common, 18thConnect, Mapping the Republic of Letters). Ossian Online harnesses this critical mass and directs its potential towards the online scholarly edition. By creating a new online edition of the poems which visualises textual variation, evolution, and genetic relations, and altering the medium in which the text is presented, this project will bring Ossian to a global audience. Ossian Online will also act as a test case for new approaches to humanities research, bringing greater immediacy and interdisciplinarity to the fundamental practices of academic communication than are afforded by traditional models of scholarly publication. The rewards of this endeavour will be apparent not just in the synthesis of different disciplinary insights, but in the challenges it poses to established disciplinary conventions. Ossian Online uses social media technologies to crowdsource annotations to a new edition of the Ossian poems. The project closely follows many of the recent articulations of the possibilities of the social edition, (Siemens, et al., DHQ; Siemens, et al., LLC). It also provides a practical example of an edition which enacts one of the many potential affordances of social media for scholarly editing and annotation. Ossian Online aims to contribute to the description of an active typology of the emergent social edition, which remains more theorised than practiced. More broadly, this paper will seek to extend our understanding of the scholarly edition in light of new models of edition production that embrace social networking and its commensurate tools (Siemens, et al., LLC 447). The multidisciplinary appeal of Ossian makes it an ideal candidate to test a set of technologies which promise to use participatory experience to reorient the role of the scholarly editor away from that of ultimate authority and more toward that of facilitator of reader involvement (Siemens, et al., LLC 446). Scholars from the range of disciplines that study Ossian (literature, history, Irish studies, Scottish studies, Celtic studies, romanticism, textual studies, book history) are a crowd as McGann has put it who have yet to be sourced (2). To date, crowdsourcing has been used for different scholarly ends (including transcription, correction, and identification of data), but this represents one of the first occasions on which the wisdom of the crowd will be leveraged to critically annotate a literary work. Building on the principles of existing crowdsourcing software (Transcribe Bentham, Candide 2.0, Prism, CommentPress, Digress.it), Ossian Online will develop an interface for the collaborative research environment that will satisfy the particular needs of the literary text and reinvigorate related scholarship. Moving Ossian online preserves the core-values of the humanities while articulating them through new opportunities offered by the digital revolution. It will facilitate a forum in which multiple scholarly perspectives can be synthesised, through an interdisciplinary research environment. Interest in the social edition is growing within scholarly editing and digital humanities communities. In a similar manner to the recent Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing conference at the University of Saskatchewan, this paper will address the theoretical, practical, and social effects of the collaborative editorial possibilities enabled by the development of digital platforms. This paper will have two particular focuses: first, to provide a critique of social media platforms and technologies used by Ossian Online, and suggest which are best suited to fulfilling the needs of social edition developers. Second, it will articulate the current possibilities and challenges of constructing a social edition, outlining future directions for the organization of digital text [ . . . ] to promote social interaction within and around it (Fitzpatrick).Publication Reading Nations, Debating Identities: New Approaches to Macpherson's Ossian(2014) Barr, Rebecca Anne; Tonra, Justin; |~|Ossian Online is a project which will harness social media and new reading technologies to crowdsource annotations to the sequence of eighteenth-century works known collectively as the Ossian poems. The project will provide free access to accurate online texts of this seminal work, and enable users to contribute perspectives from their reading to an ongoing virtual discussion. First published in 1760, when Scottish identity was undergoing a crisis in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, Fragments of Ancient Poetry was James Macpherson s first publication in a series of volumes that purported to be the remains of a third-century epic poem. Questions of Scottish, British, and Irish national and cultural identities are investigated within this and subsequent Ossian texts, and have been debated by readers since their publication. Beyond questions of national and cultural identity, Ossian has attracted interest from a range of different academic disciplines and reading communities (Romanticism, Celticism, Antiquarianism, etc.), who have variously seen it as an articulation of their particular interests. Ossian Online endeavours to bring together these discrete and often competing perspectives into fruitful dialogue around the original texts to create a new reading community and engage fresh knowledge and insight on this important work. Ossian is a work which various groups have used to investigate, shape, and define their identities since its initial publication. This talk will address the question of how digital technologies can contribute to new forms of reading, and how Ossian Online provides a new model for readers to debate and annotate texts within a shared virtual space.Publication Ossian Online: Crowdsourcing Annotation and the Social Edition(2014) Barr, Rebecca Anne; Kelly, David; Tonra, Justin; |~|This Digital Demo will present Ossian Online, a social edition of the sequence of eighteenth-century works known collectively as the Ossian poems. Initially presented by Scottish writer James Macpherson as fragments of original manuscripts he had found on journeys around the Highlands of Scotland, the Ossian poems grew into a body of work that inspired readers, courted controversy, and profoundly influenced the literature of the Romantic period. The demonstration will showcase the project s use of digital echnologies to present accurate texts of original print sources and crowdsource annotations to those texts. Ossian is a work which various academic disciplines and reading communities have used to investigate, shape, and define their identities since its initial publication in 1760. Ossian Online endeavours to bring together these discrete and often competing perspectives into fruitful dialogue around the original texts to create a new readingcommunity and generate fresh knowledge and insight on this seminal work. The project presents TEI-encoded texts of eighteenth-century print sources, and uses the Annotator JavaScript library to facilitate user annotation. The project provides a practical example of a social edition (Siemens, et al., DHQ; Siemens, et al., LLC) which enacts one of the many potential affordances of social media for scholarly editing and annotation. Ossian Online aims to contribute to the description of an active typology of the emergent social edition, which remains more theorised than practiced. More broadly, this Digital Demo of Ossian Online aims to extend our understanding of the scholarly edition in light of new models of edition production that embrace social networking and its commensurate tools (Siemens, et al., LLC 447).Publication The Contraband of Hibernia(2013) Tonra, Justin; |~|IRCHSS|~|In the early 1980s, Anthony Cronin identified Thomas Moore as "the necessary national bard" suggesting that his work was crucial to the coherent articulation of Irish national identity in the early nineteenth century. In his time, Moore was embraced as the unofficial national poet, thanks largely to the success of his Irish Melodies (1808-34). The strength of this national association overshadowed major aspects of his vast and diverse oeuvre, however, and contributed to a swift decline in his posthumous reputation.This paper argues that scholarly focus on Moore s Irishness and Irish writings does not adequately represent his relevance and importance in nineteenth century literature and culture. It draw attention to the early phase of Moore s writing career (from 1800-06) in order to illustrate that this neglected period was formative in shaping his authorial persona, his literary reputation, and his approach to communicating meaning in his work. Because Moore's developing views on these subjects are evident in the writings and events of his early career, the period is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of his mature work. However, the early writings have suffered from scholarly neglect partly because of the absence of Irish issues and perspectives that dominate later works such as the Irish Melodies and Captain Rock. In order to argue that greater attention be devoted to this period, this paper examines the polyonymity and multiple personae in Moore's first three books*, and the influence of critical responses to these writings on shaping the author s subsequent aesthetic strategies. Understanding these topics enables both a broader recognition of the importance of Moore to the literary world of the nineteenth century, and a more nuanced appreciation of his legacy to Irish literature and culture.Publication Poetry by the Book, Poetry by Numbers(2013) Tonra, Justin; |~|IRCHSS|~|The mass digitisation of our literary heritage has resulted in both possibilities and problems for the literary scholar. With the availability large-scale literary corpora comes the implicit perception that digital surrogates yield the same information as the physical object from which they were produced. But this is not the case. Scholars stand to lose a great deal, including accuracy and credibility, by turning our backs on the physical book. At the same time, however, increased access to masses of literary data enables scholars to make computer-assisted queries that are otherwise impossible. Computers can read (for example) the literature of the eighteenth century and with scholarly guidance and interpretation provoke fresh insights into our understanding of literary history. This talk describes examples of two apparently contradictory approaches to literary study represented by the computer and the book, and suggests that they are more similar than they appear. Both are at heart inspired by a philological imperative to preserve our cultural heritage and provide a means for its investigation.Publication Of Little Consequence: the Early Career of Thomas Moore(2013) Tonra, Justin; |~|IRCHSS|~|This paper argues that a narrow focus on Moore's Irishness and Irish writings does not adequately represent his relevance and importance in nineteenth-century literature and culture. It draws attention to the early phase of Moore s writing career (from 1800-06) in order to illustrate that this neglected period was formative in shaping his authorial persona, his literary reputation, and his approach to communicating meaning in his work. Because Moore s developing views on these subjects are evident in the writings and events of his early career, the period is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of his mature work. However, the early writings have suffered from scholarly neglect partly because of the absence of Irish issues and perspectives that dominate later works such as the Irish Melodies and Captain Rock.In order to argue that greater attention be devoted to this period, this paper examines the heteroglossia and multiple personae in Moore s first three books, and the influence of critical responses to these writings on shaping the author s subsequent aesthetic strategies. Understanding these topics enables both a broader recognition of the importance of Moore to the literary world of the nineteenth century, and a more nuanced appreciation of his legacy to Irish literature and culture.Publication Manuscript Transcription: the Habits of Crowds(2013) Tonra, Justin; |~|Paper describes author's involvement in Transcribe Bentham, a project established to crowdsource transcriptions of the manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham, and reflects more generally on the issues at stake in crowdsourcing projects in the Humanities.