To Do List: 2012

Late in 2011, I finished a first draft of a TEI-encoded transcription of the 1898 typescript of Such is Life, providing a foundation for comparison with the published works and the core of a future electronic edition of Furphy’s works. Using Juxta, I’ve collated the typescript with the published versions, but I hope to be able to do more with Desmond Schmidt and Anna Gerber to develop an environment that will serve the preparation for and publication of an electronic edition. Desmond has been working on Multi-Version Documents for a while and is on the cusp of providing a service that will greatly assist under-skilled

Screenshot of the MVD viewer with Furphy texts uploaded.

scholars to pursue electronic editions with greater confidence. Updates and information about the technical and conceptual foundations of MVD can be found on Desmond’s blog: http://multiversiondocs.blogspot.com/

At the UQ eResearch Lab, Anna Gerber has been exploring the potential of MVD to serve as a foundation for scholarly editors wishing to collaboratively annotate works with complex textual histories. As part of the Open Annotations Collaboration, Anna has been extending LORE (Literature Object Re-Use and Exchange), an extension to the Firefox browser developed by the Aus-e-Lit Project, to support collaborative editing and serve as a first step towards a work-site for scholarly editing.

First edition of Such is Life (1903)

While these two creative people continue to develop digital infrastructure, I’ll finalise the preparation of my texts as I work towards digital and book versions of a scholarly edition of Such is Life and related works. I’m fortunate that the Furphy Project serves as a test-case for the work of my two colleagues, bringing me closer to an electronic edition than I otherwise would be. In the centenary year of Furphy’s death, these new resources and analyses will add to our knowledge of the nineteenth century print culture that helped transform a typescript from rural New South Wales into a novel that maintains a prominent position in Australia’s literary history.

Mapping Tom Collins Update

I’ve made a few changes to the Google Map attached to this blog. The map attempts to plot

Conoble, the probable model for Furphy's Runnymede Station. Map NSW Parish and Historical Maps, http://www.lpi.nsw.gov.au/mapping_and_imagery/parish_maps

real and fictional places mentioned in Furphy’s novels. This has been helped by several new databases that have emerged since I first started the map in late 2010.But I’ve got a long way to go.

I made my first searches with the National Library’s digital map collection which contains a number of maps that locate nineteenth century boundaries and station names:

• Map of Riverina and the northern and northwestern pastoral districts New South Wales(1879)
• De Gruchy & Co.’s new squatting map of Riverina district of N.S.W. (1877)
• NSW Stock Routes (1888)
• NSW Parish and Historical Maps
• Bonzle Digital Atlas of Australia

Detail of De Gruchy & Co.'s new squatting map of Riverina district of N.S.W. (1877), http://nla.gov.au/nla.map-f277

Combined with the satellite images provided by Google Maps, a geographical view of Furphy’s world is starting to emerge. Over time (in my re-readings of Furphy’s work), I’ll continue to plot new places on the map and add as much information as I can in order to provide comprehensive contextual information.

After completing the first TEI-encoded transcription of the 1898 typescript at the end of 2011, it is not lost on me that there are a lot of similarities between such transcriptions and the mapping of places in the world. Just as a map is a representation of a particular place, created by a human being with all sorts of motives, barriers and prejudices, a transcription of a document (eg manuscript, typescript, serialisation, book) has similar influences.

More broadly, a scholarly edition provides a map of documents and the human interventions that affect those documents. Our knowledge and needs continue to change, requiring new representations (and new editions) to assist our understanding of works from the past. Mapping Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life will grow with the electronic edition of the typescript and its textual descendants, providing useful notes to understand the conception, composition, revision, publication and reception of Furphy’s works. All of these things are inexorably connected to material and temporal phenomena that can be reimagined in documentary traces that have been preserved for close scrutiny.

There is too much information for this independent researcher to collate and record and there is not enough time to gather contemporary images of the region for visual context. Please contact me if you have any images or information that you’d like to share and record for future readers of Furphy, his works and his world.

Furphy Typescript Discovered

I’ve now examined the typescript of The Buln Buln and the Brolga that is held in the Lloyd Ross Papers at the National Library of Australia and can confidently state that it was typed on Furphy’s Franklin typewriter and that Joseph Furphy struck the keys.

The Buln Buln and the Brolga Typescript

The typescript is hand-sewn with a stiff cardboard cover, but I’m not sure whether Furphy added the cover. I need to do some research on adhesive tape. Kate Baker’s signature appears on one of the pages, and so it was probably a gift to Robert Ross who was editor of the Barrier Truth when Rigby’s Romance was serialised and when The Buln Buln and the Brolga was also offered to the newspaper.

The type is definitely the same font and the typist used ‘I’ to represent 1 throughout – just like the Mitchell Library typescript. If that is not enough evidence, the absence of a space after commas clearly matches Furphy’s typing habits from the earlier typescript. That, I believe, is enough to argue that the typescript is Furphy’s and so can be included in the extant documents that were produced during his lifetime.

That means that I now have the following documents to inform my textual history of Such is Life:

• Such is Life manuscript (ca1890s – fragment)
• Such is Life typescript (1898 – two-thirds of novel, including early versions of Rigby’s Romance and Buln Buln and the Brolga)
• Such is Life (Bulletin Publishing Company, 1903)
• Rigby’s Romance (Serialised in Barrier Truth, 1905-1906)
• The Buln Buln and the Brolga (typescript, ca. 1906)

With these documents, Furphy’s correspondence and the published texts, I can determine whether there was any editorial intervention in the publications and establish a better understanding of the textual transmission in order to mount an argument for an inferred 1898 version of Such is Life. This will be best done in an electronic form and so watch this space for experiments with representations of the text as process and product.

What are we talking about?

I’ve been reading some of the scholarship on Such is Life, specifically the descriptions of the transformation of a single work into three. There, I’ve said it … ‘work.’ This is one of those slippery terms that anybody studying literature will have to face sooner or later, but few consider the ramifications of its meaning it for too long. To help deal with the concept, Peter Shillingsburg’s ”How Literary Works Exist: Implied, Represented, Interpreted” provides a useful definition:

[first,] the work is implied by its material instantiations, not coeval with them; second, each representation of the work, material or electronic, is particular and partial; and third, the only access we have to the work is through acts of interpretation of representations that imply the work.

This is good, but the ‘material representations’ of Such is Life, Rigby’s Romance, and The Buln Buln and the Brolga test these terms by converging on a common ‘material representation,’ the typescript held at the Mitchell Library.

To visualise the convergence, I’ve been working with a hand-drawn sketch of the relationships between the material at hand.

A rough diagram of the material and textual situation.

The typescript of Such is Life (1898) ‘implies’ three works because chapters II and V were extracted in 1901 during the shortening for publication and most of the remaining text from the typescript was transmitted to the first edition of Such is Life (1903) after the new chapters II and V were added. The extracted chapters were subsequently recycled as Rigby’s Romance and The Buln Buln and the Brolga. The ‘material representations’ of these not only imply each work, but also the work Such is Life because of their origin in the 1898 typescript.

So, as an editor, or, indeed, as a reader, if I am to talk about or ‘represent’ any of these ‘works’, I have to take all of the ‘material instantiations’ into account. If any literary work/s call for digital representation, this is it. With TEI-encoded representations of Such is Life and The Buln Buln and the Brolga kindly provided by SETIS, completion of the transcription of the 1898 typescript and the serialisation of Rigby’s Romance is still required. When these are done, I hope to experiment with Desmond Schmidt’s MVD to represent that work through the transcriptions and the variation between each ‘material instantiation’. This structure promises to animate the processes of each work, allowing more readers to better understand how Furphy’s works were written, revised and published.

The Perils of Gutenberg

After comparing the Project Gutenberg text of Rigby’s Romance with my transcription of the typescript I gave up and started afresh. The 1921 de Garis edition was not only shortened but was heavily edited. Its worth a comparison with the Palmers’ edition of Such is Life to see what editors can do to make a text suitable for a particular audience.

I’ve now scanned the 1946 Angus and Robertson edition and run the PDFs through the  ABBYY OCR with great results. The text needs correction and TEI encoding, but I am able to generate a better comparison with Juxta to finish a preliminary assessment of Furphy’s revisions before moving onto The Buln Buln and the Brolga. A preliminary report on the two novels will be posted here in a few months.

Now to Compare

Transcription of the Typescript continues, but I now have the original Rigby’s Romance completely transcribed and ready for comparison. This I will do while my assistants and I continue to correct the transcriptions that my OCR program loyally produces (along with plenty of errors to correct).

With a transcript of the original Rigby’s Romance, I can now collate it with the text of the published version to see the extent of the change and to see whether Furphy’s revisions on

Comparing the Original Rigby's Romance with the Published Version

the typescript were all incorporated or whether he made other revisions on documents now lost. This will enable me to make some preliminary assessments about Furphy’s revisions and to test some of Julian Croft’s arguments about the textual history. When the time comes, all of the texts will be uploaded into a better system for comparative analysis, but for now, this is good enough for me to see what can be said about Furphy and whether the 1898 version of Such is Life can be reconstructed … or not.

Establishing a Text

19C Bush Carpentry

One of the more mundane tasks in this project is to transcribe the Typescript in order to have text files that I can use to compare different versions and, ultimately, to provide a reading text for any electronic or print scholarly edition of Such is Life.

I’m using an OCR (optical character recognition) program that can turn the digital images of each page of the Typescript into useable text.

This is not a perfect solution, but for my small-scale project it’s saving me some time. The first phase of the project consists of running the OCR program on an image of each page and then following this up with corrections. With Furphy’s handwritten revisions on many pages, the OCR program sometimes has trouble and delivers a text that is nowhere near what Furphy typed on the page. This requires a lot of correction or re-transcription. At other times, the program delivers a perfect representation of what is on the page and there is little work to do.

With a little help from friends and family, I hope to have the text of the original Rigby’s Romance completely transcribed by early July. The pressure’s on because I’ll be talking about the text at the ASAL conference. Preliminary comparison using the JUXTA collation program shows a lot of variation between the Typescript and published versions of Rigby’s Romance. Many of the changes can be seen in Furphy’s hand on the typescript, but others must have happened later … on another typescript, perhaps.

There is a typescript of Rigby’s Romance in the Bernard O’Dowd collection of the State Library of Victoria. An early John Barnes essay suggests that Furphy had nothing to do with the typescript, but I’ll have to see for myself when I’m in Melbourne in July. Whatever happens, phase one of the project – establishing the text of the ‘first’ Rigby’s Romance – should be complete by July 2011.