“Is Digital Editing really Editing? The Canterbury Tales Project and other adventures” Professor Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan)

Date: Monday 19 October
Time: 3:00-5:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room N397, John Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
Registration: For further information please contact mark.byron@sydney.edu.au

Please join us for a discussion by Peter Robinson, centred on a demonstration of the new system for collaborative online editing: textual communities (http://textualcommunities.usask.ca/). This project, developed out of the University of Saskatchewan, establishes a new model of partnership between scholars and readers everywhere in exploring texts. Increasingly, the base materials for research into texts are available on the internet: especially, as images of manuscripts, books and other documents. The huge volume of material now available, even for just one work (such as the 84 manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales) requires many people to research them to identify the documents, to make copies of them, to annotate them, to make transcripts of them, to compare and analyze them. This project provides an infrastructure and tools to allow anyone, anywhere interested in a text to contribute to its study, as part of a community working together.

Peter draws on decades of experience in developing digital tools for scholarly editing and has produced a number of landmark digital scholarly editions, including the Canterbury Tales Project.

Peter Robinson is Bateman Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. He has developed several computer-based tools for the preparation and publication of scholarly editions, and is active in the development of standards for digital resources. He has published and lectured on matters relating to computing and textual editing, on text encoding, digitization, and electronic publishing, and on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. As well as his own editions of Old Norse and Middle English texts, he has collaborated with other scholars on the publication of editions of collections of historical documents, Armenian texts, the Greek New Testament and Dante’s Monarchia and Commedia. His current major interest is in the creation of online “textual communities.”