Rebuilding a Digital Frankenstein by 2018

Abstract

Digital editions were young in the 1990s, and the expansive possibilities of hypertext in that decade sharply distinguish early digital editions from the productions of our moment. The accessibility and simplicity of early HTML code made for innovative experiments with the size of a “page” and the way one might handle displays of variants, before “diffing” tools like the Versioning Machine and Juxta came to define how we usually imagine the digital comparison of texts. This paper investigates the serious problems and vexing potentialities of “up-translation” when standards change, concentrating on work underway on a Bicentennial Frankenstein project. Our project is to produce a new, freshly collated digital edition in TEI based on the Frankenstein texts digitized by Romantic Circles, and incorporating a little-known publication of 1823 together with 1818 and 1831 versions currently represented. Readers in the past century are likely to have encountered either the 1818 or the 1831 edition but not the 1823, and we think that folding this text into our collation may help us to understand more about when and about how gradually some of the major alterations in the 1831 text (for example, to Victor Frankenstein's family members and the compression and reduction of a chapter in part I) occurred. The three print editions will be compared in parallel, and we will incorporate pointers to the Shelley-Godwin Archive’s edition of the MS Notebooks. To prepare the collation we returned to the simplest original form of the current edition, the Pennsylvania Electronic Edition prepared by Stuart Curran and Jack Lynch in the 1990s. Exploring that edition exposes the ambitious intellectual scope of early web editions and raises important questions about how we built editions then vs. now. We do not build a new edition to replace the earlier work, which yet “lives” and is available on the web. But our work is a fresh start, not a seamless integration. This particular project’s encounter with an impressive early hypertext edition raises more general questions worthy of reflection towards theorizing the up-transformation process: How do we understand the relationships among generations of digital editions? What aspects of the old hypertext editions (or editions in formats not consistent with our own) transcend or exceed the structures we currently consider sustainable? What perspective might a thorough review of the first still extant hypertext editions contribute to our scholarly editing practice now?