Dr Christopher Ohge (School of Advanced Study), online event.

Date: Monday 9 May, 4.00-7.00.

The session will focus on the Melville Electronic Library edition of Billy Budd, his final work that was left unfinished and survives in a complicated manuscript that reveals several stages of revision. The first part will outline the problems of creating scalable publishing solutions for digital editions, which is especially the case with complex genetic editions like Billy Budd. We will then consider alternative forms of engaging with genetic editions through data analysis tools. First we will experiment with Voyant tools and then the R programming language to see how different forms of analysis, querying and data visualisation can complement traditional publication formats.

To explore the research process of working with digital editions and analysing them with text analysis tools, we will also consider the critical implications of Melville’s creative process in his last work, which I am characterising as his testament to negation, incompleteness, and indeterminacy.

Suggested reading

Ohge, Christopher. 2021. Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience, especially Chapters 3 and 5. Cambridge University Press (a pdf is available to participants upon registration).

Required Software

R (https://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/cran/)

RStudio (https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/#download)