So much for blogging more regularly; aside from the usual vagaries of life, I’ve been working on a couple of side projects. One is secret till completed. The other involves copy-editing part of a cool forthcoming game by Keith Nemitz called 7 Grand Steps.
Instead of inventing something interesting to write about, therefore, I’ll lay out the pieces of my project quondam futurusque, or more accurately, the current phase of my now wholly self-funded connected experiment concerning Li Rei de Engletere.
A little context: I submitted my doctoral dissertation in December 2006 (early January 2007 on a technicality). The original plan had been to submit in May 2005, but in January of that year, I decided to undertake a self-funded, ten-day research trip to England to see nine manuscripts, most of which I hadn’t been able to see during my month-long survey in 2001. I knew there was a risk that the trip would uncover evidence that’d disturb my dissertation’s arguments, and it did. Then I began a three-month contract with MTP in June 2005, which was followed by permanent employment there as of August; though my supervisor was very understanding of my too-full plate, writing a completely different fourth chapter and substantially changing two others couldn’t be made to fit within only one more semester while I learned and carried out the duties of a full-time job. Thus, I spent some of 2005–6 pruning scope ruthlessly. Equipped with the results of the 2005 research trip, I wanted to produce a better thesis write-up, but I needed to submit something, not to write a book.
It’s worth noting that whereas my dissertation in its several identifiable phases has only used Li Rei as an extended example to illuminate and discuss larger issues, the phase begun recently is Li Rei-centric. Get the details right before rebuilding the big picture that encompasses them….
Here are most of the pieces available to me, therefore:
- A signed and submitted dissertation
- Naive, superseded chapter drafts: not completely useless because they carry some of the scope excluded from the final submission
- Two diss appendices, one a set of descriptions and classifications that’s been reduced since to a skeleton, the other containing a few representative texts ± transcribed diplomatically
- Several stapled packets of US letter-sized paper, namely printouts of my transcriptions in six columns, with a dozen different colors of ink signaling features relevant to collation; the printouts are a work of art and arise directly from not wanting to impose Juxta-specific markup (as required then) or learn TACT
- Notes summarizing that quasi-collation endeavor, fortunately
- Diagrams I created, some with GraphViz and a few subsequently with OpenOffice Draw, to help myself visualize the relationships amongst my several dozen MS texts; two of those are included in the final submission
- A list of some of the manuscripts I had to exclude deliberately
- Transcriptions, encoded in TEI P4 according to my own conventions, of all relevant texts; I think the two earliest files use P3 SGML
- Microfilm reels for most of the MSS I included, and a few I didn’t
- Filing folders of photocopies of microfilm
- Filing folders of relevant dated/datable MS descriptions and of any whiff of a formal description of the MSS I included—mostly photocopied from the relevant books
- Notes and photocopies concerning the texts that occur in my MSS, not only Li Rei de Engletere (on which there isn’t much) but the heavy hitters, like Wace’s Roman de Brut and the Statuta Angliae
- Detritus of typed and handwritten notes on various other topics, the kind that any large undertaking accumulates
For several years I thought to myself, “Ach, so much to do to turn this thing into something serviceable.” Now the prospect of so much to do feels exciting and motivating, by which I understand that my contact allergy—too much time spent wrestling with this topic during nearly a decade—has dissipated.
Some things I have done already:
- Compile a more complete list of MSS containing Li Rei or one of its near relatives
- Transcribe bits of formerly excluded MSS
- Acquire some more surrogates, now generally digital images instead of microfilm
- Begin establishing P5 conventions and writing XSL to convert the extant transcriptions
- Read through my old notes once, and reorganize most of the salvageable material into Evernote notebooks/tags (text only)
Some things that need doing, not necessarily the immediate next steps and not a complete list:
- Finish the P5 conversion
- Scan remaining handwritten-in-pencil notebook from the 2001 research trip
- Use OCR (unlikely to succeed) or type out what’s worth keeping from the scanned notebooks; decide what to do about the sketches of mise en page which can’t be typed
- Acquire remaining surrogates
- Plan a research trip to correct readings and see MSS for which surrogates cannot be obtained, which is tricky because my toddler probably has to grow up a bit first
- Transcribe All the Things
- Describe all of them, too
- Determine which kind of edition makes the most sense now, and execute it
- Check whether I really did get my old Endnote 7 bibliography into Zotero, and sort out the references definitely in Zotero (including a bunch that have zero relevance here)
- Update my awareness of scholarship on relevant topics, which I haven’t been very good about these past six years
At my current rate—something like 5–8 hours per week, with some weeks at zero hours—that should hold me for awhile.