Vertically Integrated Project
Digital Scholarship: Folklore and Booklore
Goals
This VIP is a digital editing and scholarly publication project with emphasis in the History of the Book and Digital Publication. Participants will encode and edit the text manuscripts from the Wiiliam Townsend and Son print firm, search primary sources from the Bernard C. Middleton Collection of Books on the History and Practice of Bookbinding in RIT’s Cary Special Collections Library, and/or research the scholarship about Yorkshire and Sheffield’s medieval folk legends and local history.
Issues Involved or Addressed
History of the Book:
When William Townsend arrived in Sheffield UK in 1817 hoping to enter the book trade, he met a Mr. Unwin, who exclaimed: “Come you shall make me a book!” Throughout the 19th century the firm bound “fine” books, including Medieval manuscripts and antiquities. The firm also manufactured ledgers in the little-known book trade of Account Book Manufacturing. By the late 1800s, “specimens of [Townsend’s] work were to be seen in the libraries of royalty and neighboring nobility.” The Townsend Manuscript collection has been digitized and is available in RIT Llibray’s digital collections.
Yorkshire Medieval Folk Lore:
This project’s title, “Folklore and Booklore,” is inspired by medieval folk-land (common kinship) and book-land (legally recorded). After the Normandy conquest, “William the Conqueror" commissioned a survey of landholdings, recorded in a Doomsday Book. Foklorists used the Book to locate the Castellum de Seldfeld and to imagine the geography between the Don and Sheaf rivers–populated by giants, hobgoblins, and mermaids, home to "The Dragon of Wantley," the Hall of Waltheof, and Robin of Loxley (i.e. Robinhood). William A. Townsend’s firm published several popular books of Sheffield folklore and “antiquities.” These books are available in print form.
Digital Scholarly Editing and Publication:
The project is a digital editing and scholarship, building a digital design to animate the facsimile of the original manuscripts. Those who work in this project will extend this digital editing and publication process by encoding text from the nonlinear original manuscript, craft short-form narrative annotations, create multimodal content with interactive maps and models, and/or link project data to external resources using linked open data. Because this publication develops in iterative steps, students may disseminate their work in various ways; for example, students have been credited in the open source file metadata, contributed short-form form narratives to be included in an adjacent print publication, provided content for an academic conference presentation, and exhibited at Imagine RIT.
Methods and Technologies
Participants may work in these scholarly areas–or propose an aligned contribution:
- book publishing, binding, selling, and collecting in a 19th century England;
- folklore and literature from Medieval Yorkshire, published in the 19th-century;
- digital editing and encoding using TEI-XML (the standard for representation of texts in digital form in the humanities),
- data visualization/art and linked open data;
- georeferenced and/or historical overlay mapping;
- inked ledgers, mechanical counting machines, and computational accounting, now with AI;
- history of corporate law, wage-labor theories, property rights, land management;
- literary, game, GIS, 3D modeling and/or new media approaches to all of the above!
What is digital editing?
Digital editing for this project uses guidelines from the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI-XML) to transcribe and encode the original manuscript. Extensiuble Markup Language (XML) is used to describe, structure, and preserve texts and data in a language that is compatible, enabling a seamless exchange, across different operating systems and platform environments. While some users consider XML to be obsolete, XML still works best for document-heavy systems. It is used in archives, publishing pipelines, and humanities computing. It is also used in: governmental institutions, financial transactions, medical data, scientific measurements, and news information. That is, XML remains a good choice in some ecosystems.
Academic Majors / Major Area of Interest
- All English Majors
- All computing majors (e.g. computer science, game design and development, data science, new media design)
- Anyone curious about book history, bibliographic or textual studies, or socio-cultural approaches to authorship, readership, and publication
- Anyone interested in exploring the use and publication of linked open data
Throughout the project we will consult with our off-site team particulry our long-time consultant Sarah Connell, the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science at Northeastern University. The William Townsend project has been ongoing for nearly five years with support from outstanding undergraduate research assistants. We have presented the project at national and international conferences, often with student contributors.