The Chester 2010 symposium will offer some unique new perspectives on place and identity in Chester. As well as presentations from a wide range of scholars, the symposium includes a staging of the complete Chester cycle, with each pageant produced and performed by a group from a different North American university or college. We hope to bring back lots of new ideas about the interactions between the plays, their physical environment, and their audiences in the late-medieval / early modern city.

Those of you who joined us at the colloquium in Swansea have heard some discussion of what we aimed to achieve in these digital resources and the kind of functionality we’ve tried to develop. I wanted to include some reflections here on the methods and processes which we brought to the website.

In terms of innovation and new approaches, the key challenge for this website was the integration of GIS mapping and hypertext editing – both familiar research tools and digital publication formats individually, but not yet normally combined. This presented challenges both technical and conceptual. Behind the scenes of the website, a system of ‘Authority Lists’ provide the pivotal point which links the different texts and the digital maps, giving every place (and person) a distinct identification. This raised some interesting questions. Literary scholars are used to dealing in ambiguity and ambivalence – but the Authority Lists system put pressure on us to make definitive equations between references to places in the texts (often metaphorical or allusive) and locations on the map. These processes of linking medieval spatial imaginaries with a modern mapping system raise a range of issues which we hope will be the focus of further discussion and reflection.

In terms of the texts themselves, challenges included the wide range of different materials involved: verse, prose; English, Welsh, Latin; texts with full translations and a text with a parallel gloss. Each text, therefore, demanded its own format, XML structure and encoding conventions. We also wanted the site to be accessible to a range of different audiences, so needed to devise a number of different views suitable for different readers. You’ll notice that for each text you can also download it in TEI XML version. If you’ve never seen this kind of mark-up language before, have a look at what goes on behind the scenes! This option also fulfils an important purpose in terms of our editorial practice: we wanted to be as transparent as possible about the encoding decisions which we have made – which, inevitably, affect the ways in which you encounter the published text.

 The Lucian presented some particularly interesting issues. The manuscript includes a large number of marginal annotations, and we wanted to show these in context. This meant developing a new way of displaying the text, which we feel goes some way towards replicating the experience of reading the medieval book itself. By the way, if you’re interested in what went in to making the Latin original and English translation scroll side by side together – Mark had to encode every single clause of the text as a separate unit, so that the two versions would stay in synch. Rather him than me!

 Our project Technical Director, Paul Vetch, was particularly keen that the website should offer a smooth, immersive experience for reading the texts. The digital publication format provided options here which wouldn’t be available in print. Most importantly, the use of pop-up boxes for notes, Index links, and map details ensures that a reader can refer to other data without losing context within the text. (In traditional print format, I might be jumping between text and footnotes, flicking through to the Index, or juggling text and maps alongside each other on the desk.) Apparently, Paul got the idea for some of these features from the pop-up adverts he regularly encounters on the internet. I think they work really well.

 As Mark noted in his post on the colloquium, the crucial thing about the digital media used in this project is that they’ve forced us all to think about our sources – and how we use them – in new ways. This isn’t just bells and whistles, but a challenging new way of analysing our medieval materials and their relationships with modern methods and approaches. I’m not the technical expert here, though I’ve learned a huge amount over the course of this project (and think I got pretty close to dreaming in XML…). If you have detailed questions, then I’m sure other members of the team will be happy to answer them. But I’ve found these processes extremely challenging and rewarding.

This feels like a major milestone: over the past four months I’ve been working hard on the text itself, as well as getting to grips with the encoding language. In fact, the XML has proved rather satisfying in the end. Whilst I suspect I’ve been using parts of my brain I’ve never exercised before, it’s very pleasing to get a feel for the protocols and patterns and watch the lines of code grow – a bit like knitting a scarf.

Henry Bradshaw’s Life of St Werburge has presented its own particular demands at the encoding stage. The text is extremely ambitious in its historical range and scope – almost like a vast encyclopaedia of medieval Chester – and so there are a huge number of places, people and events which need marking up. All this information encoded within the text – searchable, linked to the other project texts and map, as well as other traditional print and digital materials – should mean that it’s a really rich resource. There’s still much more to do, finalising subject taxonomies and hierarchies, to ensure that all the project data is interlinked and organised in meaningful ways.

As a poet, Bradshaw hasn’t received a good press from critics in the past. But after my close work with the Life of St Werburge I’ve found some interesting stylistic features which I think are worthy of more discussion. I hope to share my thoughts on some of them via the blog in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, I have a decision to make tonight: pizza, Chinese, or Indian?

One thing that really excited me is that the website will be able to replicate some aspects of a medieval reader’s encounter with manuscript books far more closely than a printed edition can. Medieval authors frequently cite the bible and secular texts from classical antiquity. They rarely give any precise details about what they are citing – a reference to Job 11:21 would be described as ‘In Iob’, while a reference to Augustine’s City of God  could simply be attributed to ‘Augustinus’ (and sometimes to someone else entirely). But medieval authors would have expected their readers to know the source; largely because they took it for granted that their readers had undergone the same education in the classics they had, and would be daily involved in the study of the bible, the lectio divina.

Few modern readers have the same intense familiarity with these texts, knowledge which medieval authors took for granted. Printed editions have to rely on the rather heavy-handed method of revealling the identity of an author’s sources in an apparatus fontium at the bottom of each and every page. However, readers of the e-edition of Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie will be able to hover the cursor over the italicised text of a quotation to reveal a box which divulges the source of that quotation. I think this imitates rather nicely the way a medieval reader would have scanned his mind to recall where he had heard those words before.

This is just one small way in which electronic editions can harness the possibilities of xml coding to present texts in new and innovative ways which replicate medieval modes of reading.