Henrik Ibsen meets text encoding - again

Henrik Ibsen meets text encoding - again

Espen
Smith
Ore
HIT-Centre University of Bergen
Espen.Ore@hit.uib.no

Hilde
Bøe
Center for Ibsen Studies University of
Oslo
hilde.boe@ub.uio.no

Ingrid
Falkenberg
Center for Ibsen Studies University of
Oslo
i.l.falkenberg@ub.uio.no

Jon
Gunnar
Jørgensen
Center for Ibsen Studies University of
Oslo
j.g.jorgensen@inl.uio.no

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Henrik Ibsen's collected writings will be published in a new scholarly
edition in Norway. These writings consist of all that is written by Ibsen;
drama, poetry, letters, drafts etc. A group of national Norwegian
institutions collaborate on this project. The Norwegian Research Council is
the main founder. Approximately 90 people will work on the project over a
period of ten years, having started in 1998. Results and products from the
project will be made available as soon as they are completed for
publication.
The project will produce both a printed edition and an electronic version.
There will probably be more than one electronic version. Some versions may
be similar to the printed edition, while others might be different in
content and organisation. All material will be stored in an electronic
archive. This will make it possible to produce editions for different users,
by applying a selection and extraction mechanism and filters to the archive
- or by setting up windows into the data.

Data complexity
The project generates new texts based on source texts. Source texts include
all known manuscripts in Ibsen's own hand, all first editions of his works
and all untranslated editions published while Ibsen was still alive. In
addition to this manuscript-material is material from copywriters. All
variant readings between the source texts will be shown in a variant
apparatus in the main printed edition. The electronic archive should hold
enough infomation to allow any one of the source texts to be used as a basis
text where the other texts are variants and could be presented as such in an
apparatus.
Specialists in various fields make factual and historical annotations as well
as notes on vocabulary and language use not found in standard college
dictionaries. The annotations will inform today's international readers
without interpreting the author's writings from the distant years of
1848-1906.
The annotation in a traditional printed edition is sequential and not
repetitive. The first time a phenomenon requires a comment in a sequential
reading, it will be commented. The next time, and later, when this
phenomenon reappears, it will usually occur with reference to the earlier
note, and possibly not commented at all. Electronic presentation will be
different, annotation can be made with advanced cross-references in various
ways, as long as there is a suitable linking mechanism.
All (relevant) comments will be linked to the various existing versions
stored in the archive. Our project considers the first editions as main
texts, and it would be natural to connect comments to these. But we are not
blind to the fact that other projects follow other principles. When
constructing an electronic archive, wishing it to be of value to others, we
will therefore take care that the data are properly organized and with
sufficient inter-textual links to be of use also by editors following other
principles than those used in this project, including future scholars. For
our general digital Ibsen archive this means that we must be able to link
primary and secondary texts. This will be detailed, allowing any of the
stored versions of a work, or variants of a text, to be extracted with the
necessary apparatus and comments.

When are two texts the same?
The Ibsen project wishes to show the texts genetic: our aim is to show
variations from the first draft to the final printed text (Kynde, 98). As we
wish to build a general electronic Ibsen archive - "the total Ibsen" - we
must address some decisions and solve some problems, which we might not have
encountered if our aim had been limited to a printed edition alone. From the
project we have learned how theoretically difficult it may be, for instance,
to define exactly what makes a text an Ibsen-text, or when two
text-witnesses should be considered variants of the same text (work) versus
when they should be considered variants of different works. How different
can two texts be and still be considered to origin from the same work? At
the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) it has been
decided not to link versions from "the same" work
(Ore & Cripps, 98). Instead WAB leaves it to the individual scholar to
register similarity and equivalence between texts.
The aim to provide a genetic view of the texts excludes choosing the WAB
solution for the Ibsen project. On the other hand this kind of text linking
soon represents individual interpretation and claims about the texts. It is
important that electronic versions are made available for users outside the
project including tools allowing the users to store their own links and
networks around the texts.

When is a text a text?
For many years Allen Renear has researched the concept of text (Biggs &
Huitfeldt, 1997) (Renear & al., 1998). The Monist raised the question
"Does a text exist if we can not read it?" To this we may add: Does a
(written) text exist if it never has existed as a physical object?
For some of Ibsen's early plays the original manuscripts are lost. Copies by
copy-writers of some of these excist, copied for theatrical use, still
available in role books and prompt books. The role books are structured so
that the speech parts for one role are written in full, including parts of
surrounding text (from other roles and/or stage directions). (See <>)
In our particular case it is tempting to store the texts from the role books
with enough information to make it possible to create a virtual full text.
The text from the role books will have to be used in text critical comments
(and possibly the apparatus) so there are not any large labour costs
required to add the necessary linking information for "virtual full texts"
to be created. But is this something which should be done - or something we
should take care not to do? The role-books provide yet another difficult
practical and theoretical problem. If we do make a virtual complete text out
of the role books, we are not only transcribing an early witness; but we are
in fact creating it.
Making an electronic archive is one of the Ibsen-project's main goals. This
paper will discuss some of the problems we have encountered, and mainly the
difficulties in addressing the complexity of the text.

Bibliography

Michael
Biggs

Claus
Huitfeldt

Philosophy and Electronic Publishing. Theory and
Metatheory in the Development of Text Encoding

The Monist

80
3

1997

edited version of a network based discussion

Karsten
Kynde

Interconnecting Textual Layers

ALLC-ACH '98

Debrecen

1998

Espen
S.
Ore

Peter
Cripps

The Electronic Publication of Wittgenstein's
Nachlass

The Digital Demotic, Selected Papers from DRH97
Office for Humanities Communication Publication Number
10

Lou
Burnard

Marilyn
Deegan

Harold
Short

King's College London
1997

Allen
Renear

Claus
Huitfeldt

Dino
Buzzetti

Panel discussion at
Theory and Metatheory in the Development of Text
Encoding

at the conference
The Future of the Humanities in the Digital Age, Bergen
Sept. 1998

1998

panel papers are to be published on the WWW.