| [CHWP Titles] | |
[CHC 2004] |
richard.cunningham@acadiau.ca |||| http://plato.acadiau.ca/courses/engl/rcunningham/ |||| About the Author
CHWP A.47, publ. April 2009. © Editors of CHWP 2009.
KEYWORDS / MOTS-CLÉS: Incunabula, editing, publishing, image, hypertext / Incunable, édition, publication, image, hypertexte.
| section | Introduction |
| 1.Hypertext | |
| 1.0 Background | |
| 1.1 Sacrobosco's Tractatus de spheara | |
| 1.2 Peter Apian's Cosmographia | |
| 1.3 Richard Eden's The Arte of Navigation | |
| 2.0 Electronic Stills | |
| 2.1 Sacrobosco | |
| 2.2 Apian | |
| 2.3 Eden | |
| 3.0 Editorial Principles | |
| 4.0 A Digital Edition: Beyond the Electronic Still | |
| 5.0 Notes | |
| References |
The manner in which a work is presented assumes greater significance in some historical moments than in others. Two of the times when form has assumed greatest significance in the evolution of literate culture in the West have been during the typographical print revolution of the later fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, and the still evolving electronic print revolution of the later twentieth and the early twenty-first century. In this paper I will provide some background to the history of what have been variously called moveable books (Evers; Haining), books with moving parts (Gingerich), and books with mobiles in them (Lindberg) before using examples of such books to show that even in the first century of printing with moveable type the need for moving pictures was perceived. Next, I will describe the editorial principles I am using to guide creation of an electronic edition of one of the examples discussed in this paper, The Arte of Navigation, translated by Richard Eden from an existing Spanish text by Martín Cortés. The present paper will conclude with an invitation to follow a link to that electronic edition, with the caveat that it is, and will remain for some time, a work in progress.
The examples I provide are sixteenth century texts attributed to Johannes Sacrobosco (d.1256), Peter Apian (1495 - 1552), and Richard Eden (c.1520 - 1576). A copy of each of these texts is held in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, and the images to be found in this paper are reproduced either from Dibner texts, or from the Folger Shakespeare Library's copy of the 1584 edition of The Arte of Navigation, or they have been created using Macromedia software from Dibner reproductions. I spent two months in the Dibner Library in 2001 thanks to the generous support of a Smithsonian Instution Libraries / Dibner Library Resident Scholarship. Also in 2001, I was able to examine copies of Richard Eden's The Arte of Navigation held in the Folger Shakespeare Library and in the Lennox Collection of the New York Public Library thanks to the Izaak Walton Killam Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Since that time I have been able to develop the digital edition linked from section 4.0, below, through the assistance of the McConnell Family Foundation and Acadia University, and especially Acadia University's Institute for Teaching and Technology (AITT). The digital edition-in-progress of The Arte of Navigation to which readers can link from section 4.0 allows construction of moveable images in a manner meant to mimic, as closely as possible, the similar task demanded of readers of the original, sixteenth-century, texts. The graphical representation of the various parts of these images was done by Janice Hudson while she was an undergraduate in Acadia's Department of English, and by Katie Marshall, a student in the Biology Department. The images were animated by two Computing Science students, Trevor Dawe and Jamie Chang. I was put in contact with these exceptional students by the AITT.
Although they are not the only "mobile books" I have seen and plan
eventually to reproduce, the texts I am most likely to reproduce first
in digital format are a 1563 edition of Sacrobosco's Libellus de
sphaera (printed in Wittenberg, by Johannes Crato), a 1540 edition
of Peter Apian's Cosmographia (printed in Antwerp by Arnoldus
Berckmann), and a 1584 edition of Richard Eden's
Arte of Navigation (printed by "Richard Jugge's widow," Joan
Jugge).[1.0.1] These are the books for which I
will provide a brief context and description in the present work. What
makes these books from the incunabula period particularly special is
the fact that they contain images that had to be assembled after the
sheets that would become the book had left the press, after the sheets
had been folded to form the gatherings that would form the book, and
almost certainly after the gatherings had been stitched together to
form the book itself. While it is conceivable, or at least not
inconceivable, that commercial binders might have assembled these
images, based on my examination of copies of The Arte of Navigation
held in the Library of Congress, the Dibner, the Folger, and the New
York Public Library I find it more likely that the reader / owner of
the book assembled them. No two are assembled alike. This important
fact has dictated an aspect of my editorial policy for the development
of the digital edition of The Arte of Navigation, as I will
explain in section 3.0 below. The
implication of each surviving copy of a given text being assembled
differently--whether slightly or greatly--is that each was assembled by
someone different than all the others. According to my understanding of
the textual instructions that accompany each image in The Arte of
Navigation, the only properly assembled copy I have seen is one
that was owned by Henry Percy, the ninth Earl of Northumberland, also
known as the Wizard Earl because of his interest in
“scientific” experimentation. The Wizard Earl was
imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1605, where he joined Sir Walter
Ralegh, an experienced mariner who had outfitted entire expeditions in
addition to participating in one or two himself. During his
imprisonment, Percy hired the mathematicians Thomas Harriot, Walter
Warner, and Thomas Hues to further his instruction. Harriot had already
sailed to Virginia in the employ of Ralegh, and in 1588 published his Briefe
and true Report of the new found land of Virgina. Percy had access,
that is, to men more than competent in navigational matters to help him
correctly assemble the multi-layered images in The Arte of
Navigation.
The images that appear in the works under discussion here are often
called volvelles, although that term has more commonly come to describe
the moving parts themselves. While in The Arte of Navigation
the term “rundell” is used to apply to the moving parts
themselves, in the current discussion I will use the term
“volvelle” to refer to only those elements of an image that
actually rotate relative to the background printed on the leaf gathered
permanently within the book. To a twenty-first century reader these
images look like dials, and this is indeed how they were used. In 1593
Thomas Orwin printed a work by Thomas Fale entitled Horologiographia,
or The Art of Dialing. Although his text did not include any images
intended to be assembled to enable movement, it nonetheless offers
images of volvelles and backgrounds such that readers could build their
own dials based on Fale’s representations and instructions. As
Fale’s title suggests, the dials he describes are for calculating
time. The dial-images in Sacrobosco’s Libellus,
Apian’s
Cosmographia, and Eden’s Arte of Navigation serve
slightly different ends but like Fale’s dials they are intended
to aid calculation. As would be expected in a “Book on the
World” or on “Cosmography” or on the art of
navigating, the scale of calculation is cosmic, having to do with
earth’s place in the heavens and with the relationship of
celestial bodies to the surface of the globe such that a mariner could
calculate his position.
To achieve these calculations the Libellus de spaera, the Cosmographia,
and The Arte of Navigation had imprinted circular images on
leaves found throughout the text. Based on the evidence of surviving
copies of the Libellus de sphaera held at the Library of Congress and
the Cosmographia held at the Dibner, the parts of the images
that would be tied or glued-in later were themselves printed on pages
dedicated to the volvelles. This way, the reader who assembled the
images could cut the volvelles out without also removing any of the
book’s textual matter. In 1945, a facsimile edition was published
of Martín Cortés’s
Breve compendio de la sphera y de la art de navegar, the Spanish
original of Eden’s Arte of Navigation. This facsimile
edition also offered a separate page dedicated to the volvelles needed
to complete the images in the book, but in neither of the only two
original copies of Cortés’s work I have examined (both
held in the Lennox Collection at the NYPL) does such a page survive.
However, I am willing to surmise from the facsimile edition that
Cortés’s book was originally printed with a page dedicated
to the printing of volvelles intended to be cut out for the purpose of
being tied or glued to an appropriate background.
Because it is not obvious how the ability to move a volvelle relative to the background would be retained if the former part were glued to the latter, I should explain that the volvelles themselves were not actually glued in. Rather, the page on which the volvelles were printed would also have smaller, decorative circles designed to be used as glue caps. The volvelle itself would have a circle cut out in its centre, and the decorative cap would be glued through that cut-out to the leaf in the book. As a result the volvelle could be rotated while the cap was glued stationary on the background. Alternatively, the volvelles were often tied to the background image by being sewn through the centre of the image such that they could rotate around the centre formed by the string. In these cases the decorative caps were often glued directly to the uppermost volvelle, assumably to prevent the string from untying, or from wearing a hole in the leaf next the one on which the background was printed. I have seen texts in which the compositor left an empty space on the reverse side of the background image so that a protective cap could be glued over the string end for this purpose without covering proximate text. As will be seen in other sections of this article, some of the images I am trying to describe are very complex and multi-layered. I have seen movable images with as many as four layers of volvelles tied in above the background image, each volvelle free to rotate independently of the background and of all other volvelles in the image.
Around 1220, about the time he went to study in Paris, Johannes de Sacrobosco published an astronomical manuscript that would become, approximately 250 years later, one of the first published “scientific” books.[1.1.1] After its first printing on a press with movable type, this text would be reprinted in one style or another almost one hundred times up to the middle of the seventeenth century.[1.1.2] Sacrobosco’s Tractatus de sphaera (“Treatise on the Globe”) became, with its 1472 printing by Andreas Belfortis, in Ferrara, the Sphaera mundi (“Globe of the World”) even while retaining very nearly its original title when printed by Florentius de Argentina as the Tractatvm de Spera in Venice that same year.[1.1.3] Although the titles of numerous editions produced through the agency of printers with movable type retained the nominal archaism of Florentius’s Tractatum, increasingly during the sixteenth century the influence of movable type on the text was reflected in its title. Consider, for example, the transitional feel of the title Heinrich Quentell gave the edition he printed in 1501, in Cologne: Opus sphericum Johannis de sacro busto figuris et p[er] utili co[m]mento illustratu[m], which is to say “An illustrative commentary on the use and style of Johannes Sacrobosco’s work on the sphere.” While Quentell’s publication participates in the commentary tradition that arose almost immediately after the original reception of Sacrobosco’s Tractatus, with the penning of Michael Scot’s commentary sometime in the years between 1230 and 1235 (Thorndyke, 48), it also suggests Quentell’s reluctance to produce a work on his press with a title that would obscure Quentell’s role as printer. Rather than entitling his work a Tractatum, Quentell opts for the term Opus, “Work.” And by the time the Libellus de sphaera, cum praefatione P. Melanthonis (“The Book of the Sphere [or Globe], with a preface by P[hilip] Melancthon”) was printed in Wittenberg in 1531, Sacrobosco’s “manuscript” had turned the corner into the typographical world of the printed book. Whether presented as commentary or as an emended edition of Sacrobosco’s original work, it was by then manifestly the libellus rather than the tractatus, the book rather than the manuscript, on the sphere.
Peter Apian, perhaps better known by his Latin name Petrus Apianus,
published the first edition of what was to become one of the sixteenth
century’s most popular books in Landshut, Bavaria. This first
edition of the Cosmographia was printed in 1524 by Johann
Weyssenburger, a Catholic priest who seems to have learned the
printer’s trade in Nuremberg before moving to Landshut.
Weyssenburger’s skill as an illustrator in the medium of the
woodcut may help account for the successful printing history of the Cosmographia,
but it is just one part of a complex of features that attracted readers
to the book. The Cosmographia was re-published in 1529 by the
Louvain astronomer and professor of mathematics and medicine, Gemma
Frisius, who had it printed by Roeland Bollaert and Johannes Grapheus.
Frisius was also an instrument maker, and it may be that he saw in
Apian’s text an opportunity to popularize some of the instruments
he made for sale. The Cosmographia was “a layman’s
introduction to such subjects as astronomy, geography, cartography,
surveying, navigation and mathematical instruments”
(O’Connor & Robertson, “Regnier
Gemma Frisius”). It was published in “no fewer than
forty-five editions, . . . in four languages, [and] was manufactured in
seven cities, by at least eighteen publisher/ printers” (Cosmographia:
A Close Encounter). Like Sacrobosco’s
Libellus de sphaera, the Cosmographia was undeniably a
best seller in the first century of the typographical print revolution.
Although it seems the 1524 edition “was not very popular”
(O’Connor & Robertson, “Regnier”), upon being
revised by Frisius the Cosmographia, or a modified version of
it entitled Cosmographiae introductio, was published at least
every three years until 1564, and during the decades of the 1570s,
1580s, and 1590s it was published four times, four times, and twice,
respectively. The majority of editions of the Cosmographia were
printed in Antwerp, but there were also editions printed in Cologne,
Paris, and Venice. Given the content of the
Cosmographia (what one might anachronistically call its
interdisciplinary interests) the Renaissance harbour of Antwerp would
have been a likely place for its publication, and a receptive place for
its sales. Another of the book’s features that would have
attracted readers to it, after Frisius gained control of it, was its
inclusion of current information about the New World (Cosmographia:
A Close Encounter). But the feature with which I am most concerned
is its inclusion of volvelles.
In the 1524 original edition there were three images that made use of
the technology of the volvelle. Frisius added one more, to bring the
total to four, but what is most striking about the Cosmographia
is the aesthetic quality of these images. Whether or not the Cosmographia
was intended to provide instruction to laypeople, it was prepared with
an artistry that is unsurpassed in books of its kind, as can be seen in
section 2.2, below. However, for my purposes, the history of the
reception of the Cosmographia offers an important caution.
Three of the four movable images were printed in the original text, and
only one more added in 1529. It seems questionable, therefore, how
closely the movable image was connected to the Cosmographia’s
popularity. But I no sooner pose this question than I wonder if it is a
red herring? Is it reasonable to suppose that the movable image
attracted readers to the book? Is it not equally valid to suppose that
readers of the book developed an appreciation for the explanatory force
of the movable image as a result of exposure to the Cosmographia?
If this is true, then the printing of the
Cosmographia in one of the major seafaring crossroads of the
Renaissance, Antwerp, where it could get maximum exposure, might help
explain its own continuing success as well as possibly having suggested
to scholars and printers the value of using movable images to explain
complex ideas, movement, and instruments.
The Arte of Navigation was translated by Richard Eden from a
text originally written in Spanish by Martín Cortés.
Cortés’s text, entitled Breve compendio de la sphera y
de la art de navegar con nuevos instrumentos y reglas exemplificado con
muy subtiles demonstraciones, was first printed in 1551, and again
in 1556; both printings were issued in Seville. Eden’s
translation was first printed in London in 1561, where it was
re-printed ten times up to its final edition in 1630. [1.3.1]
It is in the demonstrations of the new instruments that
Cortés’s, and subsequently Eden’s, debt to earlier
editions of Sacrobosco is most immediately evident, and it is these
same demonstrations that make Eden’s text a particularly
appropriate one for translation from typographical to hypertextual
representation. As noted above, from section 4.0
of this paper readers can link to the electronic edition currently
under development at Acadia University.
When I first encountered The Arte of Navigation in the Folger
Shakespeare Library in the late 1990s, I was fascinated by the fact
that it contains images with moveable parts. I was so fascinated, in
fact, that I determined to share this remarkable text with as many
people as possible. Like all copies of books printed in the sixteenth
century which still survive in good condition 400 years later, the two
copies of The Arte of Navigation held by the Folger, a copy of
the 1584 edition printed by “Richard Jugge’s widow,”
Joan Jugge, and a copy of the 1596 edition printed by Edward Allde,
survive in good condition precisely because they are coddled and cared
for by professional librarians in a carefully monitored
environment. The Folger Shakespeare Library is “an
independent research library” whose stated mission is “to
preserve and enhance its collections; to render the collections
accessible to scholars for advanced research” (emphasis
added).[1.3.2] By design, the Folger’s
holdings are accessible only to a privileged few, viz. scholars doing
advanced research. Thanks to the good work of all levels of the
Folger’s staff, their copies of The Arte of Navigation
survive in relatively good condition. But due to the very rules that
ensure preservation, sharing the book with a wider public would be
impossible were it not for the advent of the electronic print
revolution.
The fact that Sacrobosco’s ideas came in the sixteenth century to
be represented via images with moving parts bears repeating. I do not
mean to suggest that early printers were the first to imagine
representing a complex thought by way of a multi-layered, manipulable
image. This technology, the technology of an image with moving parts
above (i.e. against) a static background, was also experimented with
during the manuscript period. But manuscript codexes were accessible
only to a small class of monks and professional scholars, as,
analogously, the Folger’s texts are now accessible, except under
rare and exceptional circumstances, only to professional scholars. It
took the printing press to make the movable image any thing like widely
available, and analogously only through the development of hypertextual
facsimiles will a wider public gain any access to early modern books
with moving parts.
As noted above, The Arte of Navigation is a translation into
English of a text originally written in Spanish. The original was
written to support the system of pilot and navigator training
established in the Casa de Contratación de las Indias (the House
of Contracts, or House of Trade) shortly after its founding in 1503.
Located in Seville, Spain, the Casa housed the most advanced
navigational school in Europe during the sixteenth century. In 1558
Stephen Borough, Chief Pilot of the Muscovy Company, was admitted to
the Casa where he was exposed to the Spanish system for training pilots
and navigators (Waters, 10). Upon leaving, Borough carried with him a
copy of Cortés’ book which with the financial help of the
Muscovy Company he had translated by Eden. As indicated by the number
of printings this book enjoyed, it met with a very receptive audience.
D. W. Waters, the editor of the 1992 Scholars’ Facsimile
reproduction of the original 1561 edition of The Arte of Navigation,
asserts that Eden’s translation was “the navigational
textbook above all others, the navigational bible in effect, of seven
generations, and was to be of an eighth, of English pilots and mariners
urgent to explore the world” (Waters, 22). If Waters' notion of
audience is correct, then it seems plausible that moving images were
incorporated in books such as the Libellus de sphaera, the Cosmographia,
and The Arte of Navigation at least in part to require their
readers to actively engage with the construction of paper models of the
instruments the images represented. Peter Apian’s Astronomicon
Caesarium demonstrates that this educational effort was not the
sole justification for incorporating moving images into early modern
books. However, the singularly spectacular quality of the Astronomicon
Caesarium further demonstrates that this was a book designed only
to ingratiate Apian to the Royal reader to whom it was presented: the
Emperor Charles V.[1.3.3] The much less
spectacular, and much more frequently printed,
Libellus de sphaera, Cosmographia, and Arte of
Navigation served a more utilitarian purpose, and addressed a more
pedestrian readership. Whether that purpose was intended to instruct
readers how to construct the instruments the images represented, how to
use the instruments the images represented, or simply to advertise the
existence of such instruments, there was a recognition of the value of
moving pictures to communicate adequately the concepts behind, and the
workings of, the instruments: even in the first century of moveable
type. The printing press was not invented to answer this need, but once
the technology of the printing press was available those who recognized
in it the opportunity to communicate complex principles of calculation
and motion used it for exactly that purpose. And a similar moment in
the history of literate culture has not presented itself so
advantageously again, until now.
The primary advantage of hypertext over print technology lies in the
dynamism of the former. Motion is comparatively easily achieved in an
electronic environment. Such is not the case in a print environment.
The images under discussion in the current article represent early
attempts to bring motion to the medium of the printed page, and they
were remarkably successful. Readers willing to make the effort to
assemble the images, and then to rotate the volvelles, relative to each
other or to the background over which they lay, could achieve a kind of
motion even in the limited environment of the early modern book. And it
is important to note that the activity demanded on the part of those
readers of early modern books with movable images was a kind of
educational exercise. By assembling the images the reader taught
himself how to assemble the instrument the image represented, and by
manipulating the images the reader learned how to use the instruments.
It would be a pity to lose this educational quality by reproducing the
books in a newer medium. Happily, hypertext–unlike
film–does not result in the loss of this quality.
Whereas filming an animation of the images before, during, and after
assembly would impede the educational process imparted by actual
assembly and manipulation, in a hypertextual environment the reader can
be required to both assemble and manipulate the object, or with only
the task of assembly, or with only the requirement of moving the parts
to demonstrate the instrument’s utility. In the digital edition
of The Arte of Navigation we are currently producing in the
Humanities HyperMedia Centre @ Acadia University, we have developed
Flash-enabled animations that require assembly and that require the
reader to manipulate the image after its assembly. For more on our
editorial procedures and a link to our edition, see sections 3.0 and 4.0,
below. But in order to enhance appreciation for the original
texts as much as for the work we are doing, in the next three
subsections I have provided still images reproduced from the original
copies of Sacrobosco's and Apian's texts held in the collection of the
Smithsonian’s
Dibner
Library of the History of Science and Technology, and from the
Folger
Shakespeare Library's copy of the 1584 edition of The Arte of
Navigation.
 |
An image of the title page of the Dibner's 1563 edition of Sacrobosco's Libellus de sphaera prefaced by the Humanist Philip Melancthon. |
 |
This image, reproduced from signature B7r of the 1563 edition of the Libellus de sphaera, consists of a circular volvelle with an image of the moon in the umbra of the earth's shadow attached closest to the background leaf, a more delicate volvelle cut to produce three pointers aiming at 0, 90, and 180 degrees, and finally above all a glue cap with an image of a town printed on it and a pointer oriented toward the top of the image. |
 |
The original of this image of "an instrument by which the roundness of the latitude of the world can be tested, and by which all other things are able to be shown, which the Creator delivered in the third part of the days of creation" is assembled on sig. B8r of the Dibner's copy. The frayed end of the string that holds the volvelle to the leaf is easily visible, even in the thumbnail image to the left. |
 |
This image of "An instrument by which all diverse things of the realm of the Poet [the heavens?] have been brought under [our] eyes" is assembled at Sig. D5v of the Dibner's copy of the 1563 edition of the Libellus de sphaera. |
 |
The title page from a 1540 Latin edition of Peter Apian's Cosmographia published by Gemma Frisia. |
 |
This image from Sig. C2v from the 1540 edition of the Cosmographia suggests Weyssenburger's skill as an illustrator. |
 |
This enlargement of the glue cap provided for the preceding image provides further evidence of the intricacy of some of the illustrations in the Cosmographia. |
 |
The beauty of this image is due in no small measure to the complexity and delicacy of its volvelles. The image is taken from Sig. C3v of the 1540 edition of Apian's Cosmographia. |
 |
The similarities between this image and the third in the series of Sacrobosco images above, and the fourth and fifth in the series of images from the Arte of Navigation below shows the indebtedness of later authors to Sacrobosco, and the interconnectedness of the printer's art during the sixteenth century. |
 |
This image of the title page of the Folger Shakespeare Library's copy of the 1584 edition Richard Eden's Arte of Navigation suggests the opportunity to use computer software to enhance an image such that an electronic version might more closely represent the appearance of the original document in a newly printed state than does the surviving paper copy. |
 |
The background of this image that Eden describes, on sig. D7v, as "an Instrument, by the which is founde the place and declination of the Sunne, with the dayes and place of the Moone" can be found on sig. D8v of the 1584 edition. When properly assembled it is a movable image with volvelles representing the revolutions of the sun and moon. |
 |
The background of this image of "an Instrument general for houres of the nyght" (sig. F5r) can be found on sig. F7v of the 1584 edition. This dial was offered as a means by which mariners could use celestial bodies to determine the time of night. There are three volvelles tied in to this Folger Library copy, but if it were correctly assembled two of them would not be there. |
 |
In the sixteenth-century print editions of The Arte of Navigation the image reproduced here served an explanatory rather than a participatory purpose. This image of the volvelles was positioned two leaves, i.e. one signature, prior to that on which the background for the assembled image appeared. Invariably, there is text printed on the opposite side of the leaf. |
 |
Here is an image of the assembled "demonstration" as such images are called in Eden's text, of "an Instrument generall to knowe the houres and quantities of the daye: and at what wynde the Sunne ryseth and falleth." Once again one cannot but see in this image a debt to Sacrobosco. |
“Electronic publishing is,” as Peter Shillingsburg has
asserted, “incunabular, energetic, and exciting” (161).
Traditionally, an incunabula is a book printed prior to 1500, or during
the first approximately half century after the development of the
printing press. Thus Shillingsburg’s description of the current
state of electronic publishing as incunabular remains as true in 2004
as it was when it appeared in the 1997 3rd edition of his Scholarly
Editing in the Computer Age.[3.0.1] The energy
and excitement of electronic publishing accounts for as much wasted as
productive effort, as Shillingsburg also notes (161 - 2). Perhaps it is
easier to distinguish between the two kinds of effort in 2004 than it
was during the 1990s. It should be, since more has been accomplished in
the realm of electronic publishing and more of the wasted efforts have
either been abandoned or have been recognized as such and their authors
have moved to address their shortcomings. This is not to say that all
electronic publications are now reliable and produced with the kind of
academic rigour scholars desire and indeed need if they are to make use
of these publications in their own work. But the evolution of
electronic publication over the past decade and a half has enabled
scholars to develop a set of minimum criteria that ought to be met in
order to demarcate a publication as one worthy of the adjective
“scholarly.”
Shillingsburg’s work itself provides an excellent starting point
for the compilation of a set of editorial principles to be followed by
anyone wishing to produce a reliable, scholarly, electronic text.
Additional criteria can be culled from Jerome McGann’s “The
Rationale of HyperText,” and his "Textual Scholarship,
Textual Theory, and the Uses of Electronic Tools," and from Wilhelm
Ott’s on-line article “Textual
Criticism / Scholarly Editing.” Ronald
Tetreault’s on-going work on an electronic edition of Wordsworth
and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads has given him a rare position
from which to comment on not only the technical and academic but also
the institutional needs of the scholarly community where electronic
publication is concerned. Tetrault has generously shared his experience
in papers given in scholarly conferences and in publications such as
“Editing in an Electronic World: The Lyrical Ballads
Project” and “New Models for Electronic
Publishing.” Rather than taking the hermeneutic route
through these and similar publications, or the experiential route that
would require examination of a wide array of both successful and
unsuccessful attempts at producing scholarly electronic texts, a
would-be author or editor might consult Shillingsburg’s “General
Principles for Electronic Scholarly Editions” or the more
recent MLA “Guidelines for
Electronic Scholarly Editions.” A paradigm that might
prove very effective in addressing the needs of editors of books not
born digital is the
“Just
in Time Markup for Electronic Editions” described by Phillip
William Berrie, although JITM strikes me as an unlikely option when the
goal is the production of a facsimile or a diplomatic
edition. While the rules for electronic scholarly publishing will
undoubtedly come to be as simultaneously codified and fluid as are the
MLA, APA, CBE, or Chicago styles for the publication in hardcopy of
academic work, during this incunabular period they are not yet so. And
therefore mere consultation of a set of guidelines does not strike me
as sufficient preparation for the production of a scholarly electronic
text.
The electronic edition of The Arte of Navigation is still a
work in progress, and much remains to be done. But in order to minimize
the wasted effort that might lead us down blind alleys or in the worst
case to the production of a work that fails to satisfy the demands of
academic rigour applied to scholarly texts, I have developed my own set
of editorial principles to guide our work as my student assistants and
I prepare this edition.
The first principle is one that leads to others, and it is the
recognition that in the realm of electronic publication one needs to
remain constantly aware of the distinction between the authorial /
editorial environment and the environment of the reader. From this
flows a concern for a variety of issues that can be collected under the
general heading of accessibility. The author or editor of a work must
always consider the possibility that the reader will attempt to access
the work from a platform or through an operating system different from
the one in which the work is composed or edited. The reader may want to
access the work from more than one platform or within the environment
of more than one operating system. Thus, in preparing the work, every
effort must be made to make the work as widely accessible as possible.
No specialized software ought to be required unless it is freely
available or easily and compactly attached to the work itself, and, in
the latter case, can be opened and used with no specialized knowledge.
Another issue of accessibility attaches only to works made available
on-line. Care should be taken to make on-line works as small as
possible in order that narrow band-width does not impede or, worse
still, prevent access. Two possible solutions to this problem come to
mind: first, the text might be made available as a downloadable zip
file the reader can open and read and make use of after the download is
complete; second, once we grow out of the incunabula era band-width may
no longer be an issue. The problem with the second suggestion is the
lack of control editors and authors have over this solution (to say
nothing of the possibility that such an ideal state may never be
reached). The first suggestion poses problems of copyright, and may
invite manipulation of the text in ways that on-line editions do not,
but at least such a solution puts the question of control back into the
hands of those who produce the texts. And if JITMarkup is
employed along with an authenticating mechanism such as is advocated at
I.C.4.a of the MLA “Guidelines for
Electronic Scholarly Editions” then the question of
manipulation by unauthorized persons may not be an insuperable problem.
The impact of size on accessibility is a problem with which we continue
to grapple as we move our electronic edition of The Arte of
Navigation forward. An accessibility issue with which we have
already come to terms is the nature of the images themselves. Rather
than using bitmap images that would suffer pixelation when resized to
fit the reader’s screen we have composed the majority of our
images–and all of our movable images–as vector graphics.
This ensures the survival of their proportions and even their very
recognizability when they are resized.
Aside from issues of accessibility, other editorial principles guiding
production of The Arte of Navigation include some fairly
standard principles of scholarly editing. Currently, we are working
toward production of a near-facsimile of the 1584 edition held at the
Folger Shakespeare Library, and, according to the editorial hierarchy
schematized by G. Thomas Tanselle, this goal can best be answered
through the production of a diplomatic edition, i.e. an edition that
seeks not to correct but to re-create the original.[3.0.2]
Subsequently, I hope to produce an archive of electronic editions of The
Arte of Navigation in which readers will be able to access
diplomatic editions based on each of the book’s original
printings, as well as filmed facsimiles of those editions, as well as a
scholarly edition in the traditional sense: one in which the
book’s images are correctly assembled and printing accidents are
corrected. Before such an archive can be assembled, it will be
necessary to create a single, diplomatic edition, and it is toward that
end that my current efforts are directed.
In order to ensure that our electronic text is as accurate as possible
two students, Katie Marshall and Anna Galway, are currently working in
tandem to proofread the text Katie typed in over the summer. They are
using the system for proofreading recommended in the
Chicago Manual Of Style (3.9 "Typographical Errors"), according
to which one of them reads aloud from a microfilm purchased from the
Folger Shakespeare Library of that institution's copy of the 1584
edition. In addition to vocalizing punctuation and paragraph breaks
along with the text, Anna and Katie are also sounding out variant
spellings, changes in font, the production of irregular characters,
etc. The office of Research and Graduate Studies at Acadia University
has furnished me with funding for travel to the Folger in order to
check those aspects of the text we cannot conclusively determine from
the microfilm. And in order to ensure that we have more than merely our
energy and excitement to offer the scholarly community, The Arte of
Navigation will be subjected to the peer review process when it is
submitted for publication.
Any electronic text, from a simple webpage to an electronic archive, should include the date on which it was last modified, and it should include the name or names of those responsible for the page or the individual elements of the archive. General responsibility should appear on the site as part of the data, while specific responsibility for individual elements can be attributed as part of the meta-data. In this, TEI looks likely to be sufficient for our purposes.
With an electronic text such as The Arte of Navigation, a
text intended to fulfill an educational function through the provision
of movable parts to be assembled and manipulated by the reader, I think
it is important to refrain from providing too assertive a default
mechanism in the programming of the movable images. That is, as
the surviving copies of the original books demonstrate, there was no
guarantee in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries that the assembly
choices the reader made were correct. The opportunity for error
should be retained. However, I also want people to be able to
confirm that their assembly is correct, even if this does move the
electronic edition away from the ideal of the facsimile. This is
a fine line, between providing a default setting that actively corrects
the reader's mistakes and one that simply, more passively, confirms
their assembly, but it is a line that I am confident we can navigate.
Finally, one of the great advantages of any electronic text is its
searchability. A reader’s ability to search a text, beyond the
superficial level of the simple word search, is determined by the
mark-up added to the text during its production phase, either by an
editor or, less typically, by the author. In the case of The Arte
of Navigation we plan to use, for the most part,
TEI conformant SGML for the text. I anticipate encoding problems if
we restrict ourselves too tightly to only TEI, and whenever necessary
our mark-up will be supplemented with the
Renaissance
Text Encoding system developed by Ian Lancashire. Since TEI stands
for Text Encoding Initiative it is not surprising that it promises
comparatively little help for us as we plan to mark-up the many images
and rubrications in The Arte of Navigation. For guidance in
this aspect of our project, we will look to the Comic Book Mark-up
Language, or CBML, developed by John Walsh, an example of which can be
seen on the
2002
XML Conference & Exposition website.
I want to reiterate the fact that our electronic edition of The Arte of Navigation is still in development. As noted in the preceding section, we are still grappling with issues of accessibility, and as implied there if not stated explicitly we have yet to mark-up the text, much less the images. However, I am confident ours is a good start, and that from this beginning we will be positioned to produce a scholarly archive of early modern books with movable parts.
I welcome readers to take the time to visit an electronic edition of the 1584 edition of
Richard Eden's
1.0.1. The printer’s imprint for the 1584 editions ascribes the printing to “Richard Iugge’s widow.” British Book Trade Index provides this woman’s name.
1.1.1. I realize it is anachronistic to apply the term “science” and its derivatives to work done prior to at least the seventeenth-century advent of the Royal Society. Nonetheless I agree with Jim Bennett that “natural philosophy [is] the conglomerate anachronistically labelled ‘science’” (1), and Sacrobosco’s work certainly formed part of the institutional study of natural philosophy during the incunabula period of the first print revolution.
1.1.2. The most common form of reproduction was the Commentary, as would be expected with a text the Scholastics considered important. This style survived the Scholastic era, when new commentaries were being written, to adorn the print era when new commentaries were still being written or extant commentaries were translated into new languages, or were edited or “corrected.”
1.1.3. Roberto de Andrade Martins of the University of Campinas, Brazil has published an exceptional resource on the web, entitled “Johannes de Sacrobosco: Editions of the Tractatus de Sphaera.”
1.3.1. According to D. W. Waters, The Arte of Navigation was printed in 1561, 1572, 1576, 1579, 1584, 1589, 1596, 1609, 1615, and 1630. I have encountered no other references to the 1576 edition.
1.3.2. The description of the library is taken from the “About the Folger” page on the Folger’s website, and the excerpt from its mission is taken from its “Mission” page. Accessed November 4, 2004.
1.3.3. Apian was successful. The Astronomicon Caesarium secured him a position as court mathematician.
3.0.1. I have not seen the second edition, but the third edition contains a chapter on “Electronic Editions” that is not present in the first edition. The statement quoted above is taken from this chapter.
3.0.2 For a graphic representation of this editorial hierarchy, see p. 11 of Tanselle.
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