The James Joyce Digital Archive

Abstract

The James Joyce Digital Archive Danis Rose (bio), John O'Hanlon (bio), and Stacey Herbert (bio) I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds. Samuel Johnson Launched out of the blue in June 2018, The James Joyce Digital Archive is the culmination of more than forty years of meticulous research into James Joyce's manuscripts for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The JJDA (jjda.ie) aspires to provide a detailed, accurate, interactive account of two of the most complex compositional histories in literary history. It also provides a dynamic model of the creative process of composition itself. As an advanced model for the study and presentation of literary works in general, it will hopefully serve as an extensible template for an almost limitless range of textual studies. The James Joyce Digital Archive presents in two volumes the (nearly) exhaustive compositional histories of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in an interactive format for scholars, students, and general readers. In each volume, the final text contains within it a representation of the penultimate level (the page proofs), within that a depiction of the preceding level (the galleys), and so on all the way down to an image of the earliest draft and notebook entries. It effectively provides an edition of each draft level (in itself an invaluable tool for textual studies) linked to the relevant sections of the notebooks and notesheets Joyce used to augment the text. Thus a user of the JJDA can watch the text compose itself out of the thousands of its constitutive notes. These materials, and the details of the variation between levels, allow readers to make informed judgments regarding the various printed editions of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in addition to providing them with the means to create editions based on new editorial approaches. A further use of the JJDA—which has come into prominence since its launch—is to provide a contextual reference, a second resting-place so to speak, for the substantial amount of work on the notebooks and notesheets published both in print and in digital format by other scholars. Work on the JJDA began in earnest in 1976.1 In the mid-1970s, the computer revolution was neonatal. We had no browsers nor the World Wide Web or HTML, and the application of digital technology to humanities studies was not yet common practice. Setting out in these relatively uncharted waters, and without the aid of a personal computer, we began preparing the text with an automated generation of individual draft stages in mind.2 Working alongside Hans Walter [End Page 158] Gabler, who had independently conceived a similar notation, we perfected the mark-up for rendering the successive drafts of the Joyce oeuvre. The coding we developed then still serves as the base markup for the JJDA today. Basically, we developed an abstract "program" (a kind of Turing machine) to read, character by character, a long, linear representation of the text (the "isotext") written in straight ASCII form, which we coded with a defined set of symbols that the "machine" would interpret as instructions. For example, consider this fragment from the isotext of Book III, Chapter 3, known as "Haveth Childers Everywhere": It is 8[truly most] ernst terooly 14a14* most moresome8* 5[amusin.] 13[immusin.] 14[amusin.] |a[entertenmont!] intartenmont!|a*14*13*5* 4Colt's tooth!4*3 The numbers above refer to draft levels, extant or missing individual documents revised by Joyce.4 Our machine, for example, can generate level 8 (the eighth revision of the episode, a large typescript dated December 1928-January 1929). The instructions are: "type out the individual characters until you come to a number. If the number is less than 8, skip past the material in the brackets and carry on. If greater than 8, type out the material in the brackets but skip everything else till you come to that number asterisked. If 8, include everything but mark the material in the brackets as crossed out." The result is this: It is |8truly most ernst terooly most moresome8| immusin. Colt's tooth! It indicates that, at...