Finding “Miss James”?: Approaches to Annotation in Digital Mitford: the Mary Russell Mitford Archive

--Mary Erica Zimmer, Boston University --Molly O’Donnell, University of Nevada, Las Vegas--Elisa Beshero-Bondar (Project Director), University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg

http://www.digitalmitford.org/

Earlier Editions…Henry

Ed. Rev. A. G. L’Estrange, 3 vols., 1870

2nd series, ed. Henry Chorley, 1872

Mitfordian “Connections”?

--Mitford to Sir William Elford, 3 April 1815 (ed. L’Estrange, vol. 1 [1870]), p. 306

“…her family connections must render her disagreeable to Miss Austen, since she is the sister-in-law of a gentleman who is at law with Miss A’s brother forthe greater part of his fortune.*”

“You must have remarked how much her stories hinge upon entailed estates;doubtless she has learned to dislike entails.”

Editor’s Note:“* Every other account of Jane Austen,from whatever quarter, represents her as handsome, graceful, amiable, and shy.”

Annotation: Creating Communities

• “The annotator, if [s]he's a good one, presents a reading that will create the acceptable range of conversation within the group [s]he supposedly serves.”

• “This leads me to suggest that questions of annotation always come back to issues of communities and institutions . . .”

--Hanna, “Annotation as Social Practice,” 184

About Digital Mitford

http://digitalmitford.org/about.html

Digital Mitford

• “That no such edition yet exists almost certainly reflects the challenging extent of a task that could not be completed without the assistance of a large and diversely specialized team of scholars.”

--Digital Mitford, “Methods and Practice” (mitford.pitt.edu)

“-ographies”: Digital Mitford’s site index

Site Index entry: Sir William Elford(sample: draft form)

Interpretive Grounds, via Granularity?

– Hanna notes “the fear that the annotator will in fact become an interpreter, impose his being, in a double attack, on the reader and on the text.”• Hence, “twentieth-century annotators . . . are

required to fragment their activities into tasks presented as rhetorically discrete, so they can never appear whole consciousnesses in touch with the text” (Hanna 180).• Yet “this rhetorical prescription seems . . . a way

of allowing annotation to proceed as a form of benignmeditation, a service profession, which it is not” (181).

Annotation->Aggregation-> Interpretation

--from The Digital Mitford Coding Guidelines, “Contextual Annotation”

“Known Unknowns”: finding “Miss James”

Are You Being Served?

• “The annotator, if [s]he's a good one, presents a reading that will create the acceptable range of conversation within the group [s]he supposedly serves.”

• “This leads me to suggest that questions of annotation always come back to issues of communities and institutions, and consequently questions of power.”

• “At least one question one should ponder at length . . . is precisely that of power: who or what is being served by this activity?”

--Hanna, “Annotation as Social Practice,” 184

Mobilizing Markup?

--from The Digital Mitford Codebook, “Contextual Annotation”

Supporting Principles and Praxis

Annotation Tool: XQuery

Editing “Miss James”

--”Miss James” site index entry, May 2015, Digital Mitford

For “Known Unknowns”: Initial Results

For “Unknown Knowns”: Annotation as Iteration

Byronic Influences?

“Oh! renowned committeemen! From all the selected fruits of all the poetical costermongers of Great Britain, Ireland, and Berwick-upon-Tweed, could ye choose nothing more promising than this green sour apple? I am really astonished that Lord Byron could write anything sostamped with the curse of mediocrity, that even the strong shadow of Dr. Busby fails to throw it out with anything like effect.”

--MRM to Sir William Elford, 18 October 1812

Seeking Out “Shakespeare”

A Mitfordian Model…

—MRM site index entry, May 2015, Digital Mitford project

…for managing “more.”

Recalibration, Redux

• Re: “what an annotator is doing”:– “My practice suggests to me that he is in fact

creating himself as reader—and thus creating the reader of his work.”

– “When my reading runs into blocks, I have to dissociate myself momentarily and become a researcher.”

– “But eventually, this split within myself is healed, since I return to write in the most helpful fashion my reading as note or gloss . . .”

--Hanna, “Annotation as Social Practice,” 181