http://hdl.handle.net/10379/3423 2017-10-29T21:53:22Z 2017-10-29T21:53:22Z Barr, Rebecca Anne Tonra, Justin http://hdl.handle.net/10379/5225 2015-10-15T13:08:46Z 2015-01-01T00:00:00Z

Carefully Corrected / Mutilated Mess: Ossian's Textual Legacies Barr, Rebecca Anne; Tonra, Justin Controversies over legitimacy are an essential part of the literary reception and cultural meaning (Mulholland 394) of James Macpherson s Ossian poems. Many revisionist readings of Ossian attempt to preserve the text from contamination by its author, quarantining the cultural legacy of the first complete edition of the Ossian poems, The Works of Ossian (1765), by disregarding its successor, The Poems of Ossian (1773). Thus, Howard Gaskill, modern editor of Ossian (Edinburgh UP, 1996), characterised the 1773 Poems as a mess which has been bequeathed to us in edition after edition ever since (xxiv). Where Macpherson hopes to have brought the work to a state of correctness, which will preclude all future improvements (1:v), Gaskill laments the authorial vanity which is really behind so many of these revisions (xxiv) and selects the 1765 Works as his copy-text. Though Macpherson described the 1773 edition as [c]arefully corrected, and greatly improved literary criticism has treated it as an illegitimate offspring. In textual terms, then, the choice between these two options equates to a prioritising of the legacy of Ossian or the legacy of Macpherson, mirroring the central terms of the debate about the cultural authenticity of the work. This paper will examine the legacies of the Ossianic copy-texts, arguing that to favour any particular edition perpetuates a limited understanding of many elements--authority, originality, authenticity--which have fuelled interest in Ossian since its initial publication. To circumvent the reification of a singular Works or Poems text, the speakers will present the crowdsourced annotation tool and genetic critical edition of the new social edition (Siemens, et al.), Ossian Online, as a means of unearthing the plural textual shifts and the multiple legacies of this seminal work.   Conference paper

2015-01-01T00:00:00Z Aggarwal, Nitish Tonra, Justin Buitelaar, Paul http://hdl.handle.net/10379/4686 2015-10-15T12:51:00Z 2014-08-23T00:00:00Z

Using Distributional Semantics to Trace Influence and Imitation in Romantic Orientalist Poetry Aggarwal, Nitish; Tonra, Justin; Buitelaar, Paul Akbik, Alan; Visengeriyeva, Larysa In this paper, we investigate whether textual analysis can yield evidence of shared vocabulary orformal textual characteristics in the works of 19th century poets Lord Byron and Thomas Moorein the genre of Romantic Orientalism. In particular, we identify and trace Byron s influence onMoore s writings to query whether Moore imitated Byron, as many reviewers of the time suggested.We use a Distributional Semantic Model (DSM) to analyze if there is a shared vocabularyof Romantic Orientalism, or if it is possible to characterize a literary genre in terms of vocabulary,rather than in terms of the particular plots, characters and themes. We discuss the resultsthat DSM models are able to provide for an abstract overview of the influence of Lord Byron swork on Thomas Moore. Conference paper

2014-08-23T00:00:00Z Barr, Rebecca Anne Tonra, Justin http://hdl.handle.net/10379/4648 2015-10-15T12:45:41Z 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z

For the Sake of Argument: Crowdsourcing Annotation of Macpherson's Ossian Barr, Rebecca Anne; Tonra, Justin The argument presented by a scholarly edition can usually be traced to the vision of a single editor or a very small group of editors. But is it possible or even desirable for an edition to present multiple, perhaps competing, arguments? This paper emerges from a new project to create a social edition of James Macpherson s Ossian poems, and describes the practical and theoretical issues behind crowdsourcing annotation of the text.   The purpose of this project is to generate new knowledge about a key eighteenth-century literary text. Since its publication in 1760, Ossian s combination of spurious textual genetics and claims to cultural authenticity has provoked controversy and argument. In his lifetime Macpherson s editions incorporated responses to his antique poetry: producing a battery of paratext, as well as insertions, expansions, and alterations to bolster credibility and maximize on commercial success. From the outset, then, Macpherson used edition as argument.   This project aims to present a new online edition of Ossian, prepared according to strict principles of scholarly editing. The open-access project will re-present Macpherson s work to new audiences of scholars and will uncover the various textual choices made in the eighteenth-century editions. Most importantly, it will create an online knowledge community who will be actively involved in the collaborative creation of scholarly annotations. Users will collaborate, debate, and annotate this edition, synthesising for the first time a broad range of disciplinary perspectives to provide an evolving community of research and a truly social edition.   This paper will analyse the affordances of the web for the scholarly editor, with particular reference to presenting full texts, visualizing variation and genetic textual development, and creating an annotation collaboratory. Such possibilities open interpretive avenues that are closed to the printed edition, this paper argues, before considering whether other stages in the preparation of the scholarly edition (collating and establishing texts, creating the critical apparatus) might be achieved through similar crowdsourcing processes. Conference paper; PowerPoint presentation

2014-01-01T00:00:00Z Barr, Rebecca Anne Tonra, Justin http://hdl.handle.net/10379/4647 2015-10-15T12:45:40Z 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z

Crowdsourcing Annotation and the Social Edition : Ossian Online Barr, Rebecca Anne; Tonra, Justin James Macpherson s Ossian poems were the international sensation of the eighteenth-century. First published in 1760, Macpherson s work caused a literary furore. Ostensibly translations from Gaelic manuscripts, the poems were published as fragments of a lost Celtic epic, salvaged from a dying oral culture and translated for the edification of a modern readership. Despite the controversial provenance of the Ossian poems, they transformed European literature; their impact was profound, international and long lasting, initiating the Romantic movement in Ireland, Britain, Europe, and beyond.   Ossian Online is a new initiative to freshly edit and make available this profoundly influential work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European culture. It will work on the principle of the collaboratory : providing an online infrastructure for scholarly collaboration. As a platform in which participants can annotate, debate, and engage, this project will create an innovative space for interdisciplinary dialogue, where scholarly debate and exchange can occur in real-time.   The past five years have witnessed an exponential growth in the use of social media for scholarship and communication in eighteenth-century studies (Eighteenth-Century Questions, The 18th-Century Common, 18thConnect, Mapping the Republic of Letters). Ossian Online harnesses this critical mass and directs its potential towards the online scholarly edition. By creating a new online edition of the poems which visualises textual variation, evolution, and genetic relations, and altering the medium in which the text is presented, this project will bring Ossian to a global audience.   Ossian Online will also act as a test case for new approaches to humanities research, bringing greater immediacy and interdisciplinarity to the fundamental practices of academic communication than are afforded by traditional models of scholarly publication. The rewards of this endeavour will be apparent not just in the synthesis of different disciplinary insights, but in the challenges it poses to established disciplinary conventions. Ossian Online uses social media technologies to crowdsource annotations to a new edition of the Ossian poems. The project closely follows many of the recent articulations of the possibilities of the social edition, (Siemens, et al., DHQ; Siemens, et al., LLC). It also provides a practical example of an edition which enacts one of the many potential affordances of social media for scholarly editing and annotation. Ossian Online aims to contribute to the description of an active typology of the emergent social edition, which remains more theorised than practiced. More broadly, this paper will seek to extend our understanding of the scholarly edition in light of new models of edition production that embrace social networking and its commensurate tools (Siemens, et al., LLC 447).   The multidisciplinary appeal of Ossian makes it an ideal candidate to test a set of technologies which promise to use participatory experience to reorient the role of the scholarly editor away from that of ultimate authority and more toward that of facilitator of reader involvement (Siemens, et al., LLC 446). Scholars from the range of disciplines that study Ossian (literature, history, Irish studies, Scottish studies, Celtic studies, romanticism, textual studies, book history) are a crowd as McGann has put it who have yet to be sourced (2). To date, crowdsourcing has been used for different scholarly ends (including transcription, correction, and identification of data), but this represents one of the first occasions on which the wisdom of the crowd will be leveraged to critically annotate a literary work. Building on the principles of existing crowdsourcing software (Transcribe Bentham, Candide 2.0, Prism, CommentPress, Digress.it), Ossian Online will develop an interface for the collaborative research environment that will satisfy the particular needs of the literary text and reinvigorate related scholarship. Moving Ossian online preserves the core-values of the humanities while articulating them through new opportunities offered by the digital revolution. It will facilitate a forum in which multiple scholarly perspectives can be synthesised, through an interdisciplinary research environment.   Interest in the social edition is growing within scholarly editing and digital humanities communities. In a similar manner to the recent Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing conference at the University of Saskatchewan, this paper will address the theoretical, practical, and social effects of the collaborative editorial possibilities enabled by the development of digital platforms.   This paper will have two particular focuses: first, to provide a critique of social media platforms and technologies used by Ossian Online, and suggest which are best suited to fulfilling the needs of social edition developers. Second, it will articulate the current possibilities and challenges of constructing a social edition, outlining future directions for the organization of digital text [ . . . ] to promote social interaction within and around it (Fitzpatrick). Conference paper

2014-01-01T00:00:00Z