Peter Robinson | University of Saskatchewan (original) (raw)

Papers by Peter Robinson

The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers I, 1993

A statement of principles for the transcription of the manuscripts of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue... more A statement of principles for the transcription of the manuscripts of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. This is a discussion document, partly that we may explain to ourselves and to others what we are doing, and partly that the act of explanation may lead to debate about and refinement of our transcription of the manuscripts.
No transcription of these manuscripts into computer-readable form can ever be considered “final” or “definitive.” Transcription for the computer is a fundamentally interpretative activity, composed of a series of acts of translation from one system of signs (that of the manuscript) to another (that of the computer). Accordingly, our transcripts are best judged on how useful they will be for others, rather than as an attempt to achieve a definitive transcription of these manuscripts. Will the distinctions we make in these transcripts and the information we record provide a base for work by other scholars? How might our transcripts be improved, to meet the needs of schlars now and to come? At the same time, we ask scholars to consider that decisions which may seem somewhat arbitrary might have a long history of argument and counter-argument behind them.
These guidelines are based on our experience of transcription of the fifty-eight surviving manuscripts and pre-1500 printed editions of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. The first transcription of these was done partly by us, partly by other transcribers. There were many inconsistencies from manuscript to manuscript, and indeed within manuscripts, in these first transcripts. We realized that consistency would only be possible if we established guidelines, to be applied to all new manuscripts transcribed thereafter and in the three checks to be made of each transcript. In the course of a first check of these transcripts, carried out entirely by the authors, we set ourselves the task of developing guidelines which could be so applied. This document is the first statement of these guidelines. We expect that the revised guidelines which will issue from consideration of this document will serve as a base for completion of the transcription of all the witnesses of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and for the greater task of transcription of all the text in all the manuscripts and pre-1500 printed editions of the Canterbury Tales.
These guidelines are not proposed as any sort of standard system for transcription of medieval English manuscripts. Our task is the transcription of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and these guidelines have been devised for that end. Thus, we pay particular attention to transcription of characters at the ends of words,because of the bearing this may have on final -e and hence on Chaucer’s metre. Transcription of texts in non-syllabic metre or prose texts, where this is not of such importance, may be based on different principles. Thus, these guidelines may need modification when we come to transcribe the prose portions of the Canterbury Tales. For the sake of consistency within this Project, this modification should be slight and confined only to definition of new characters to cope with a possibly different range of abbreviation signs to those found in the manuscripts so far transcribed.

Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, Jan 1, 2002

An attempt to answer this question, along with an account of some other answers to the question

The Chaucer Review, 2003

Every year countless people throughout the world encounter the Canterbury Tales in editions, tran... more Every year countless people throughout the world encounter the Canterbury Tales in editions, translations, and adaptations. Ultimately, all these many different forms of Chaucer's work derive from a single source: the text he composed sometime between 1385 and his death in 1400. We have no direct knowledge of this text. We have no

Inkless Editions, Saskatoon; Fondazione Ezila Franceschini, Florence, 2021

This web site contains high-resolution full colour digital images and highly-detailed transcripti... more This web site contains high-resolution full colour digital images and highly-detailed transcriptions of seven key early manuscripts of Dante’s Commedia – some of the most precious and beautiful surviving copies of the poem. It contains the text of two landmark print editions, those of Giorgio Petrocchi (1966) and Federico Sanguineti (2001). It offers a full word-by-word collation of the text, showing all variants at every word, viewable in either the original manuscript spelling or in a standardised form.

Sophisticated software allows easy magnification and movement around the images. A drop-down menu at the right of the header allows the user to choose a particular manuscript; cantica-canto-line choices allow easy movement around the text. A metrical analysis of each line can be accessed from the collation. Specialized search tools enable new ways of exploring the relations between the versions: the unique VBase feature offers complex searches for variants by their distribution in the manuscripts.

A comprehensive introduction by the editor explains the methodology of the transcriptions, and gives detailed transcription notes, as well as descriptions, for each manuscript. It analyses the interrelationships between the manuscripts, testing the editorial hypothesis of manuscript relations which underlies the Sanguineti edition, for whom these seven manuscripts were both ‘necessary and sufficient’ to produce a scholarly critical edition of the poem. As well as providing all the primary evidence for scholars wishing to explore the Sanguineti edition and its relationship to the Petrocchi edition, and a detailed analysis of that evidence, the web site will be a valuable teaching tool for palaeographers, codicologists and textual critics.

A new Preface (2021) explains how this second edition of the web site stands in relation to the first edition (2010). The first edition remains online at http://www.sd-editions.com/AnaAdditional/commediaonline/home.html as a historical record of a ground-breaking early digital edition of a medieval text.

Digital Studies in the Humanities, 2022

This article describes an approach to the treatment of texts in complex large textual traditions.... more This article describes an approach to the treatment of texts in complex large textual traditions. Editors are interested in the text as it appears line-by-line in each document, and in how the versions of the text differ from document to document. It is useful to define a text as the record of an act of communication, inscribed in a document: thus, the instance of the act of communication we identify as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, as it appears in the Hengwrt manuscript. In this view, every text has a dual aspect: it is both the words as they are inscribed in a particular document, and as they constitute an act of communication and its parts. This presents challenges for scholars who wish to record both aspects. In encoding implementations, these two aspects are commonly treated as ‘overlapping hierarchies’. However, the ‘overlapping hierarchy’ model does not deal with cases where text segments are not contiguous in either aspect and cannot overlap cleanly. To meet these cases, the Textual Communities project developed an architecture in which the two aspects are represented as distinct and independent hierarchies (trees), with text segments referenced to nodes on each tree. The linking of text segments to the two trees is managed by a JSON database, accessed through transcription and collation tools presented in a Web interface. Textual Communities does not implement the whole of this architecture in terms of validation, ingestion, and processing. Full exploration and implementation of the architecture here described are challenges for future scholars.

This article suggests an ontology of texts, documents and works of particular relevance to the ed... more This article suggests an ontology of texts, documents and works of particular relevance to the editing of complex large textual traditions, such as those of the Greek New Testament (c. 5000 witnesses), Dante's Commedia (c. 800) and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (88). The need for this ontology is reviewed through a brief history of the Canterbury Tales project's work over three decades, with references also to the Greek New Testament and Commedia editorial projects. The central definition of the ontology is that a text is an act of communication inscribed in a document. Further, both the document and the act of communication may be represented as independent and ordered hierarchies of content objects (hence, trees), with textual nodes appearing on both trees, in different orderings and structures across the two trees. The Textual Communities environment successfully implements parts of the ontology of texts, documents and works to enable data collection, management and publication according to the needs of its current users, demonstrating the considerable advantages of this model for textual processing. However, Textual Communities does not implement the whole of this model in terms of data validation, ingestion and processing. Full exploration and implementation of the model here offered are challenges for future scholars. Successful implementation, however, would have considerable benefits, both for scholars working with complex large traditions, and also for those working with smaller but highly complex document sets, such as authorial manuscripts. 1 As well as the acknowledgements noted at various points in this article, I owe a special debt to Michael Sperberg-McQueen, Desmond Schmidt, and other participants in the discussion on the Humanist bulletin board in June 2020 of many points raised in this article (Humanist postings 34.89 onwards).

Occasional Papers of the Canterbury Tales …, 1993

In this essay, we review the methods of computer-assisted stemmatic analysis available to the Can... more In this essay, we review the methods of computer-assisted stemmatic analysis available to the Canterbury TalesProject.1 Our belief that these techniques will permit us to arrive at a more exact reconstruction of the history of the Canterbury Talesthan could Manly and Rickert (1940) ...

Research in Humanities Computing, 1996

This text taken from https://rjohara.net/cv/1996-rhc.

Canterbury Tales Project Newsletter , 1994

This document has been reconstructed from the original Adobe Pagemaker (.pm5) and Microsoft Word ... more This document has been reconstructed from the original Adobe Pagemaker (.pm5) and Microsoft Word files used in making the newsletter. The original files are no longer readable, and this document has been created by retrieving the text from those files. Thus, there will be differences between this document and the original newsletter.

Canterbury Tales Project Newsletter, 1993

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 1992

This announcement reports the results of attempts at the “Textual Criticism Challenge 1991” poste... more This announcement reports the results of attempts at the “Textual Criticism Challenge 1991” posted by Peter Robinson to various network bulletin boards in July 1991. The challenge, reproduced in part below, was to re-create by statistical or numerical means alone the table of relationships for some 44 manuscripts of the Old Norse narrative “Svipdagsmal” established by Robinson on the basis of external evidence and traditional stemmatic methods. Especially, we report the remarkable results obtained by Robert J. O’Hara, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. O’Hara used a technique known as cladistic analysis, developed over the last thirty years by evolutionary biologists for the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of organisms from study of their shared characteristics. Using cladistic analysis, specifically the computer program PAUP (Phylogenetic Analysis Using Parsimony, Swofford 1991), O’Hara was able to reproduce all the major manuscript groups hypothesized by Robinson. In all cases, the relationships between individual manuscripts suggested by cladistic analysis agreed with those known from external evidence. Most previous attempts at computer-assisted analysis of manuscript relations have used statistical clustering techniques. These methods have not been outstandingly effective. The success of cladistic analysis, based on a quite different intellectual model, may have considerable implications for scholars concerned with the exploration of large manuscript traditions.

Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers II, 1997

Presents the results of a stemmatic analyis of the fifty-eight fifteenth-century witnesses to The... more Presents the results of a stemmatic analyis of the fifty-eight fifteenth-century witnesses to The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. This analysis is based on the transcripts and collations of these witnesses published on Robinson's CD-ROM of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (Cambridge UP 1996), and uses the techniques outlined in his article (with Robert O’Hara) on computer-assisted stemmatic analysis published in the first volume of the Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers (Office for Humanities Communication, 1993). It details fully the fundamental witness groups established by the project, corresponding to Manly and Rickert's groups A B C D. Most significantly: it is the first publication to establish what is called the "O variants": readings present in around ten manuscripts which tend not to appear in any of the fundamental witness groups, and which are hypothesized as likely to have been present in the original for the whole tradition but which scribes typically replaced. The lectio difficilior character of these variants ("as a compendium of just what scribes found difficult in Chaucer’s poetic", p. 102) leads to the conclusion that "the authorial character of these variants confirms the hypothesis that the witnesses of group O are united only in their closeness to the ancestor of the whole tradition" (p. 103). Note that the use of the phrase "group O" could be mistakenly taken to imply that they are a genetic group: later publications speak of "O manuscripts" and "O variants", not of an O group. Note too that instead of the descriptors "cladistics" and "cladistic" the article should use the more general and comprehensive terms "phylogenetics" and "phylogenetic".

Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers I, 1993

Reviews the use made of computer-assisted stemmatic methods by the Canterbury Tales project from ... more Reviews the use made of computer-assisted stemmatic methods by the Canterbury Tales project from 1990 to 1993. The project uses two methods: phylogenetic analysis (here called "Cladistic analysis"), using Swofford's PAUP program, and database analysis, using an early form of the VBase program, still in use by the Project (as is too PAUP) in 2020. This article gives a fuller account of the work done by the authors on the Old Norse Svipdagsmal tradition, described in their ‘Report on the Textual Criticism Challenge 1991.’ Bryn Mawr Classical Review 3.4 (1992): 331-37. It also introduces and explains the concept of 'Fundamental Witness Groups" which remains central to the Project. This article should be read with Robinson's 1997 article on the use of these methods in stemmatic analysis of the Wife of Bath's Prologue.

sd-editions.com blogpost, 2014

Notes towards a successor to the Collate program, towards the creation of CollateX. Reflecting co... more Notes towards a successor to the Collate program, towards the creation of CollateX. Reflecting conversations with Joris van Zundert and Fotix Iannidis regarding the making of what became CollateX

The Literary Text in the Digital Age, 1996

Offers new answers to Bateson's classic question: if the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre in Paris, whe... more Offers new answers to Bateson's classic question: if the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre in Paris, where is Hamlet? The answer is to be found in acceptance and celebration of variance. An example is the Visio Pauli, found in many languages and many versions across the medieval period. Another is Hamlet itself, and many "texts" which are famous but actually are rooted in misquotation and error. Further, the "text" actually changes as we look at it, and one might compare this elasticity to the behaviour of quantum particles, which appear to change even as one examines them. The paper suggests that digital editions may represent, far better than any medium previously available, these infinities of change.

The Electronic Text: Investigations in the Method and Theory of Computerised Textuality, 1997

Argues that the common formulation: "the digital revolution is the greatest upheaval in our thoug... more Argues that the common formulation: "the digital revolution is the greatest upheaval in our thought since Gutenberg" is wrong. It is actually the greatest change since Aldus Manutius, at least as far as textual scholarship is concerned. It draws analogies between the making of digital editions and Aldus' making of editions of Greek texts between 1495 and 1515.

The Revolution in Scholarly Editing

This paper argues that the changes we may see in scholarly editing may amount to a revolution. Ho... more This paper argues that the changes we may see in scholarly editing may amount to a revolution. However, the reasons why this may be a revolution differ from those usually given. Further, the effects of this revolution may reach far further than is usually supposed. Indeed, this revolution may be “revolutionary”.
Please note: a prepublication version of this article is also at this site. Note that figure three is correctly rendered in the prepublication version, but not in this published version.

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016

There appears an obvious fit between the application of ‘social media’ technologies to the making... more There appears an obvious fit between the application of ‘social media’ technologies to the making of scholarly editions in digital form and the markedly collaborative nature of the typical digital humanities project. Accordingly, it may be argued that the model of the collaborative project-based edition need only to be extended, to become ‘social’. This article questions that thesis, demonstrating the problems that can arise with collaborative projects applying digital methodologies to scholarly work through analysis of the Shakespeare Quartos and the European Virtual Museum Transnational Network projects and arguing that the term ‘collaboration’ needs critical examination. Indeed, to the extent that ‘collaboration’ may be closed, and may serve narrow scholarly purposes, it can be the antithesis of ‘social’. In place of project-based collaboration, this essay proposes that we see ‘social’ editions as grounded in communities, not in collaboration, and that the principle upon which they should be built is (following Shirky) ‘design for generosity’. This implies a different role for the editors and scholars from the academy: rather than the leaders of collaborations, we may become key participants in, and enablers of, communities. In turn, this mandates a loss of control: generosity means allowing others to use what is given freely, including in ways not foreseen, and even opposed, by those who created the data. For academics who are used to identifying control with assurance of quality, this is a difficult step. Wide adoption of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (without the ‘non-commercial’ restriction) would take us far towards these aims.

The Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers I, 1993

Variants: The Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, Jan 1, 2002

An attempt to answer this question, along with an account of some other answers to the question

The Chaucer Review, 2003

Inkless Editions, Saskatoon; Fondazione Ezila Franceschini, Florence, 2021

Digital Studies in the Humanities, 2022

Occasional Papers of the Canterbury Tales …, 1993

Research in Humanities Computing, 1996

This text taken from https://rjohara.net/cv/1996-rhc.

Canterbury Tales Project Newsletter , 1994

Canterbury Tales Project Newsletter, 1993

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 1992

Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers II, 1997

Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers I, 1993

sd-editions.com blogpost, 2014

The Literary Text in the Digital Age, 1996

The Electronic Text: Investigations in the Method and Theory of Computerised Textuality, 1997

The Revolution in Scholarly Editing

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2016

Studies in Stemmatology, 2004

Co-authored with Matthew Spencer, Linne R. Mooney, Adrian C. Barbrook, Barbara Bordalejo, Christo... more Co-authored with Matthew Spencer, Linne R. Mooney, Adrian C. Barbrook,
Barbara Bordalejo, Christopher J. Howe. Pages 227-239

International Journal of English Studies, 2005

This article argues that one may use textual variation as a means of achieving a closer appreciat... more This article argues that one may use textual variation as a means of achieving a closer appreciation of the text studied, an understanding of the processes that shaped the textual tradition, and a discrimination of which variants are likely to be the author's own composition, rather than introduced by scribes. Central to this process is a determination of exactly which variants derive from the author. As well as traditional literary judgement, one may use analysis of the whole textual tradition (employing computer-assisted methods to gather and analyse all data of textual variation) to create a hypothesis of textual relations throughout the tradition, and hence a view of what manuscripts (and what combinations of manuscripts) are most likely to preserve readings archetypal to the whole tradition, and so most likely to be of the author's own composition.

Ecdotica, 2018

This article describes four textual traditions in which we find this phenomenon, and reflects on ... more This article describes four textual traditions in which we find this phenomenon,
and reflects on how editors have responded to it. Although it
appears that no previous scholar has isolated the case of manuscripts
with few significant shared introduced variants as a problem, our identification
of this as a cause of editorial difficulty in four unrelated manuscript
traditions (not to mention the exceptional importance of three of
those four) leads us to posit that this phenomenon, though previously
unacknowledged, may be widespread. Indeed, it is likely to be present in
every large manuscript tradition.

Rome: Carocci, 2019

The academic discussion about "digital scholarly editions" can count on almost twenty years of au... more The academic discussion about "digital scholarly editions" can count on almost twenty years of authoritative contributions, and on good practices of innovative solutions fuelled by a closer cooperation with computer scientists. In the contemporary world, however, the majority of digital texts have a different and somewhat more elusive nature: since the 1990s, many digital libraries and archives have been populated with "digitised" texts, resulting from OCR scanning (with a varying degree of post-production proofreading): almost 30 years on, these are the most widely downloaded and read digital texts on the Web, but the analysis and discussion on their quality is far from established. A similar point can be made about "born digital" literature: a recent book by M. Kirschenbaum has highlighted how it is now almost 50 years that authors have started using word processing softwares to write: yet, research on the "forensic" recovery and analysis of the digital record is not as developed and practiced as it should be. Digital obsolescence, people's indifference and a general lack of institutional structures for digital librarianship (preservation and management of electronic documents such as floppy disks, CDs and hard disks) are threatening our not-so-recent "born digital" literature. Authors themselves seem unaware of (or uninterested in) the importance of the preservation and curation of their original draft files. Translating some of the most important and innovative authors of Anglo-American textual studies and editorial theory, this book aims to favor the international discussion and exchange on the above topics.

L'avvento del mezzo digitale ha profondamente trasformato tanto le dinamiche di produzione e diffusione del testo letterario, quanto la relativa prassi editoriale. Nonostante ciò, le questioni di fondo che pone la filologia conservano tutta la loro importanza: la volontà d'autore, la conservazione dei documenti, le modalità di pubblicazione sono sempre al centro di un dibattito che si è rivelato particolarmente vivace Oltreoceano. Il volume, che raccoglie saggi pubblicati dagli autori più influenti in materia, introduce alle principali questioni poste dalle varie forme della testualità digitale e dalla circolazione dei testi letterari nel mondo attuale. La digitalizzazione di massa, le nuove dinamiche di lettura, l'obsolescenza dei supporti digitali e le nuove forme di didattica e ricerca collaborativa sono solo alcuni dei temi qui affrontati.

Michelangelo Zaccarello è professore ordinario di Filologia della letteratura italiana all'Università degli Studi di Pisa. È autore di saggi e volumi pubblicati in Italia e all'estero, tra cui varie edizioni critiche e il manuale di filologia italiana L'edizione critica del testo letterario (Mondadori, 2017).

Ecdotica, 2019

The literature of stemmatics is rich in discussions of two phenomena which, it is commonly held, ... more The literature of stemmatics is rich in discussions of two phenomena which, it is commonly held, render the orderly assignation of manuscripts into families problematic, even impossible. These two phenomena are coincident agreement (where unrelated manuscripts share the same reading, apparently by simple coincidence) and contamination (where a manuscript combines readings from two or more manuscripts). In this article, we suggest that there is a third area of difficulty which causes considerable problems to the stemmatic project. This third area is the phenomenon of multiple manuscripts within a tradition which cannot be assigned to any family because there is no consistent pattern of agreement in introduced variants between them and other manuscripts. This phenomenon can be seen in four different textual traditions: those of the Old Norse Svipdagsmal (46 witnesses, 1650-1900); the Canterbury Tales (88 witnesses, 1400-1600); the Commedia of Dante (c. 800 witnesses, c. 1330-); the Greek New Testament (c. 5000 witnesses, 150 c.e.-). The likely occurrence of this phenomenon in textual traditions requires attention from editors.

Ecdotica, 2019

Compare the published version of this article on this site. Figure three is correct in this version.

ADHO, 2018

Explains and presents the three-part ontology of documents, acts of communication and texts devel... more Explains and presents the three-part ontology of documents, acts of communication and texts developed by the author, proposing that a text is an instance of an act of communication inscribed in a document. Accordingly, all texts have a double aspect: they are acts of communication, and they are present in documents. Each aspect may be represented as a tree, with each tree independent of the the other. Text may therefore be conceived as a collection of leaves, with each leaf present on both the document and act of communication trees. The talk describes briefly how this is model is implemented in the textual communities system.