Issues in Electronic Scholarly Editions

Electronic texts and the Internet have been variously credited with inducing a revolution as great as that of moveable type in the fifteenth century, a new form of democracy and egalitarianism, and a cognitive liberation from the constraints of linear reading and writing. At the same time they have led users into some unexpected pitfalls: incompatible platforms, limiting and eventually abandoned proprietary systems, and orphaned storage formats. The increasing strength of standardizing movements including meta-markup schemes offers a way forward, although even their deliberately open systems are in recurrent danger of being reinscribed in proprietary formats. A subset of electronic publishing is concerned with the storage, circulation and display of significant existing texts which often have complex publishing histories. The electronic mode offers rich possibilities for the presentation of these texts and in doing so throws light on ways in which texts exist and are used. The complexity of the TEI DTD, for example, shows how much information about a text and its history can be deemed to be important and therefore necessary to record. Perhaps as important as the preservation and display of electronic texts is the facility with which they can be analyzed and manipulated. This manipulability contains its own problems, however, especially that of maintaining the integrity of a text which may have been prepared with great care and exactitude. The JITM system, which my colleagues will describe, safeguards the integrity of the edited text while providing high levels of manipulability and collaborative access.Hosted by the Scholarly Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), the University of Sydney Library, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney

Early Queensland public poets

Nineteenth-century poetry often presented national and social aspiration and a strong sense of occasion. Chris Tiffin explores the public rhetoric in Fryer's collection of early Queensland verse

Father Hayes' literature collection

Father Hayes was a collector of material in many different fields of knowledge from minerals to Aboriginal artefacts to postage stamps, but there is no more importatnt part of his collection than his literary materials - both printed books and manuscripts. For forty years these materials have buttressed research in Australian literature at The University of Queensland

Issues in electronic scholarly editions: has hypertext made an honest woman of us at last?

There have been at least three significant attempts in the last fifty years to comprehend what exactly is this text thing that we scholarly editors and textual critics work with. The initial wave was the Greg-Bowers New Bibliography which tried conscientiously to use all surviving witnesses as forensic evidence to reconstruct the author\u27s intention. The text according to this view was ultimately a product of volition, and the task of the textual critic was a recuperative psycho-historico-linguistic one. The second attempt was marked by Continental inclusiveness and semiotic despair at identifying a single stable authoritative version. This despair produced the view that text was constituted by all recoverable manifestations of it. The third attempt came with the wide accessibility of digital recording of texts and has had two branches. The first, spawned by poststructuralist literary theory (and perhaps partly by childhood Lego-deprivation) has seen electronic text as a field of liberationist politics in which readers of the interactive documents emerge at last from their slavery to author(itarianism), while the second (which, paradoxically, is disciplinarian rather than liberationist) has seen text as a conceptual structure, an ordered hierarchy of content objects or OHCO What these two apparently disparate views have in common is an approach to the nature of text which focuses on the potential of the expressive medium. The views are driven not by what an author might have tried to say (New Bibliography), nor what all the witnesses record (théorie de texte), but rather what the medium makes it possible to say

The challenges of using satellite data sets to assess historical land use change and associated greenhouse gas emissions: a case study of three Indonesian provinces

Advances in satellite remote sensing and the wealth of earth observation (EO) data now available have improved efforts toward determining and quantifying historical land use and land cover (LULC) change. Satellite imagery can overcome the absence of accurate records of historical land use; however, the variability observed in the case study regions demonstrates a number of current challenges. Differences in spatial coverage, resolution and land cover classification can lead to challenges in analyzing historical data sets to estimate LULC change and associated GHG emissions. This paper demonstrates the calculation of LULC change from three existing, open-source data sets to show how this can lead to significant variation in estimates of GHG emissions related to differences in land classification methodologies, EO input data and period of investigation. This article focuses on selected regions of Indonesia, where quantifying land use change is important for GHG assessments of agricultural commodities and for evidencing progress against corporate and government deforestation commitments. Given the significance of GHG emissions arising from LULC change and the increasing need for emissions monitoring, this research highlights a need for consensus building to develop consistency in historical and future LULC change estimates. This paper concludes with a set of recommendations for improvements to ensure consistent LULC mapping

Authenticating electronic editions

A book is generally seen as a trustworthy carrier of text because, once printed, text cannot be changed without leaving obvious physical evidence. This stability is accompanied by a corresponding inflexibility. Apart from handwritten marginal annotation, there is little augmentation or manipulation available to the user of a printed text. Electronic texts are far more malleable. They can be modified with great ease and speed. This modification may be careful and deliberate (e.g., editing, adding markup for a new scholarly purpose), it may be whimsical or mendacious (e.g., forgery), or it may be accidental (e.g., mistakes made while editing, or minor mistranslations by a software system). The nature of the medium makes the potential effect of these modifications greater because the different versions of the text can be quickly duplicated and distributed, beyond recall by the editor. Does the electronic future, then, hold in store something akin to medieval scribal culture? If this lack of control is the risk, will scholars be willing to put several years of their lives into the painstaking creation of electronic editions of important historical documents or works of literature and philosophy