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# Of Time and Space

Elena Pierazzo

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Elena Pierazzo. Of Time and Space: Unpacking the draft page: a new framework for digital editions of draft manuscripts. 2014. hal-01182133

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# Of Time and Space: a new framework for digital editions of draft manuscripts

Elena Pierazzo

The future of scholarly editing is digital, we hear from many sources (see Gabler 2010, for instance), but more often than not the expectation of simply transferring the text from the page to the screen appears elusive and perhaps ill conceived. The ambition of Digital Humanities in general, and of digital scholarly editing in particular, consists precisely then in proposing new and innovative pathways and models for the publication and representation of texts and documents. However, our cultural habit of thinking in terms of printed books has shaped not only our expectations of what a digital scholarly edition should deliver, but also the way we have been thinking of our editorial work in a digital framework. This tendency has been defined the “page paradigm” by Patrick Sahle (2008), or, more commonly, the “tyranny of the page”. Such an attitude is not surprising as the codex format, whether as scribal manuscript earlier or as printed book later on, has represented the most common way in which Western society has transmitted knowledge across cultures and time. However, this attitude has somewhat limited our exploitation of the capabilities offered by the digital medium (Sutherland 2009, 20), a limitation which is particularly relevant for cases where print culture has not been able to propose a convincing and helpful publication format to begin with, so that the application of the printed book model in digital format seems far from the substantial improvement which was promised by the new digital environment.
One such example of this is authorial draft manuscripts. These are working manuscripts that represent earlier stages of elaboration of literary (and other) works: the *avant-texte* (the “pre-text” or the “text-before-the-text”), according to the terminology used by the *critique génétique*. They are characterized in most cases by a wealth of authorial and other corrections which often can be grouped within so-called campaigns of revision; the layers of corrections and their private nature make them often very hard to read, even for scholars. Draft manuscripts are normally considered to be of interest to two distinct groups of people who approach these objects for very different reasons: the scholars of the particular author which produced the draft, and members of the general public who are fascinated by the sight of the handwriting of their favourite writer. The former tend to spend days, months, or years on a particular artefact, in order to disentangle the intricacies of the writing and authoring process. The latter tend to spend only a few seconds on a particular document before being put off by the difficulty of reading the handwriting (which is often obscure), or by the lack of insight into the cultural importance of the particular document.

The most prestigious theoretical framework for the understanding and editing of draft manuscripts has been provided by the French school of *Critique Génétique*, which is concentrated around the activities promoted by the ITEM (Institut des Textes et Manuscrits Modèrnes).<fnref n="1" /> Yet while the scholarly methodologies of the French school have generally been judged positively,

<footnote n="1">¹ More information about ITEM can be found at the Institute web site at <http://www.item.ens.fr/> (accessed 23/09/07).</footnote>
their outcomes, in the shape of printed genetic editions, have been criticized
as unreadable, unusable, time consuming and, in general, deceptive (Grésillon
1994, pp. 195-202). The obscure, intricate symbolism that necessarily
characterizes such editions is perhaps the principal reason for their cold
reception by the academic community;<fnref n="2" /> and indeed the need to represent the
intricate stratifications of textual manipulations on a printed page may lead to
an obscurity even greater than that recorded in the erasures and
interlineations of the source manuscript. More recently, the digital has
promised a possible solution to this difficulty. The advent of the computer and
of its extraordinary capability of representing objects in a direct, fuss-free way
has been seen by many as a way to offer advanced scholarship (including
genetic editions) to a larger audience, not least because many important
digital editions are now freely available on the web. However, we are now
facing the fact that access alone is not enough to make manuscripts interesting
and engaging. Transcriptions and diplomatic editions are often offered side by
side with the digital facsimile, a format that may be sufficient to make the
handwriting less obscure, but this new format still seems to fail in making a
real difference to the access and appreciation of the material. This seems to be
one of the possible readings of the results of a survey conducted on a

<footnote n="2">² A particularly good (or bad) example of this is represented by the genetic edition of *Hérodias* by Gustave Flaubert, edited by Giovanni Bonaccorso *et al.*, in 1991; this edition encompass nine different types of arrows to mark the location of interlinear and marginal insertions belonging to four different revision campaigns. But see also Hunter 2007, pp. 118-120, for complaints about similar issues in editions of early modern texts.</footnote>
substantial number of Medieval Studies scholars by Dot Porter (2013). Of all
the indicators considered of the usage of digital resources, the use of digital
scholarly editions is the only one that has failed to grow since a previous
survey in 2012; clearly digital editions have failed to show great advantages
with respect with their print counterparts, in spite of all the effort that have
been undertaken by their editors.

Part of the difficulty may be because this cultural dependency on the model of
the printed book extends well beyond the early editors and is also clearly
evident in the model for digital transcription and editing traditionally
proposed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). The TEI was born with the
explicit goal of providing a standardized format for text encoding, and today it
is the *de facto* standard for it, at least for researchers in the arts and
humanities. However, its abstract model is heavily shaped by the printed
book: in fact it states that the transcription/edition of the text has to be
provided within an element called *text*, and this is articulated in turn as
consisting of a *front*, a *body* and a *back*, a structure which depends heavily on
this older structure.<fnref n="3" /> When it comes to manuscripts, it is no surprise then to

<footnote n="3">³ The TEI Guidelines offer definitions for each of these components which also clearly reveal their connection to the printed book: “<front>: (front matter) contains any prefatory matter (headers, title page, prefaces, dedications, etc.) found at the start of a document, before the main body. <body>: (text body) contains the whole body of a single unitary text, excluding any front or back matter. <back>: (back matter) contains any appendixes, etc. following the main part of a text” (TEI Consortium, 2013).</footnote>
discover that, while TEI has historically offered robust encoding facilities for relatively “clean” scribal manuscripts, until very recently it was ill equipped for supporting the transcription of modern, draft, or authorial manuscripts, or, indeed, messy manuscripts of any period which do not fit the “normal” layout;<fnref n="4" /> in particular, the TEI proved to be unsuitable for the encoding of genetic editions and genetic editing at large. This weakness has been discussed in several occasions (see Pierazzo 2009; Crasson and Fekete 2004, for instance), and the fundamental steps to begin addressing have now been undertaken by the TEI’s Special Interest Group (SIG) on Manuscripts. The process started in 2008 when, during the TEI Annual Members’ Meeting, a group of people within the SIG organized themselves into the Genetic Editions Workgroup.<fnref n="5" /> From the very beginning the group became aware that it was not possible to propose an encoding model for genetic editions without substantial changes to the TEI’s underlying assumptions that one should primarily encode the semantic/linguistic structure of a document rather than its physical structure. It was also very clear that such an endeavour, which

<footnote n="4">⁴ The same layout that later shaped the format of the printed page.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ The Manuscripts SIG has been chaired by Elena Pierazzo together with Malte Rehbein from 2007 to early 2013 <http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/SIG/Manuscript/> [Accessed 14 March 2013]. The working group was chaired by Fotis Iannidis; other members were Malte Rehbein, Lou Burnard, and Elena Pierazzo. Fundamental contributions have been made also by Gregor Middell, Paolo D’Iorio, and Moritz Wissenbach. See <http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Manuscripts/genetic.html> [Accessed 14 March 2013].</footnote>
represents nothing short of a revolution of the TEI's abstract model, would
require the involvement of a large international community.

At another level, the group was keenly aware of the multitude of approaches to
editorial work, some of which are connected to ‘national schools’ of philology
such as the French school of *critique génétique*, while others are linked to
textual theory (copy-text, eclecticism, stemmatics, etc.). To avoid the risk of
embracing one approach and refusing another, the new encoding embraces
what could be defined as the ecumenical approach of the TEI: the TEI does
not establish *what* a scholar should do, but rather *how* to do it if the scholar
consider it relevant to her/his research. This is the key choice that has made
the TEI a viable option in the past (and present) for so many different scholars
who have different purposes and scholarly approaches: the Guidelines do not
enforce the encoding of specific phenomena, they simply explain how to
encode particular phenomena if one wishes to do so. Paradoxically, in spite of
such an agnostic approach, the Guidelines have succeeded in shaping the way
we speak and think about editing across countries and ideological positions.
Allen Renear (2004, 235) has written:

The principal goal of the TEI, developing an interchange language that
would allow scholars to exchange information, was ambitious enough.
But the TEI succeeded not only in this, but at a far more difficult
project, the development of a new data description language that
substantially *improves* our ability to describe textual features, not just
our ability to exchange descriptions based on current practice.
Renear concluded that the “TEI is now itself a research community”. This being the case, it follows that developing a new approach like the one the working group had in mind for genetic encoding must be undertaken with great care, treating its design as a research activity, and knowing that the end result will probably influence future scholarship for many, many years to come, just as the TEI has done – and presumably will continue to do – with the existing models.

In an attempt to enlarge the base of contributors, in 2009 the group organized a two-day workshop in Paris at the ITEM with participants from Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the USA.<fnref n="6" /> All the subsequent stages of the model’s elaboration were then made public for discussion and feedback by several means: via the TEI website and the TEI Wiki, by sharing the source files within the TEI repository, and by officially

<footnote n="6">⁶ The workshop has been sponsored by the Association for Computing in the Humanities, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, The University of Galway (Ireland), the *Digitale Faustedition* (University of Würzburg, Germany) and the TEI. The invited participants were: Anne Bohnenkamp, John Bryant, Aurèle Crasson, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Daniel Ferrer, Hans Walter Gabler, Axel Gellhaus, Almuth Grésillon, Claus Huitfeldt, Dirk van Hulle, Jean-Louis Lebrave, Wolfgang Lukas, Kenneth M. Price and Kathryn Sutherland.</footnote>
inviting testers and feedback. The process ultimately lasted two years and
resulted in a contribution to the TEI which consists of three sections:<fnref n="7" />

1. **Documentary view.** Thanks to this view it is now possible to transcribe the textual content of a document according to its physical structure – surface by surface, zone by zone and line by line – in addition to or instead of the TEI's normal semantic structure of the text (paragraph by paragraph or verse by verse). The module also allows the grouping of surfaces into folios, bifolios, or quires, and accommodates attached pieces of paper ("patches", or "paperoles" according to the terminology of the French school). The module adopts a very generic nomenclature such as surface and not page, or zone and not block, in order to allow for the encoding of different types of writing supports (such as unbounded or disbounded leaves) and different verbal and non-verbal content.

2. **Enhancing transcription.** This includes a set of new elements for encoding textual and paratextual features typical of working manuscripts. It includes, for instance, elements for rewriting, deleting, or transposing sections of texts, doing and undoing things on the page such as deleting then restoring the deleted text, or moving a section from one place to another, then moving it back where it was before moving it again, and so on. These elements acknowledge the fact that a draft manuscript

<footnote n="7">⁷ These proposals are now incorporated within Chapter 11 of the TEI Guidelines, “Representations of Primary Sources”, available from <http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/PH.html> [Accessed 14 March 2013].</footnote>
represents a sort of “writer’s laboratory”, where things are tested many
times before finding their final collocation and formulation. The module
also includes elements to encode functional annotations (e.g., “move the
paragraph here” or “remember to check this”) and any other “stage
directions” (*notes de régie*). For this feature the term “metalmark” was
invented; the name points to its meta-value (with respect to the main text)
and its possible non-verbal manifestation (an arrow or a connecting line
are also considered metamarks, for instance). This element makes
transparent the acknowledgement that draft manuscripts contain not only
a text, but also instructions, annotations, graphs and other features, all of
which constitute the elements of the protocol, of the recipe that will
eventually make the text (Ferrer 1998, 261).

In compliance with the TEI's "ecumenical" approach, this new section also
includes a generic element for encoding any type of phenomenon that
alters the normal flow of writing, independent of interpretational surplus.
For instance, when an editor sees that a word has been struck through in a
given document, the editor can choose to look at the manuscript page in
two ways: she/he can say either that the word has been deleted
(interpretation) or that there is a line through it (record), depending on the
theoretical framework within which the transcription takes place.<fnref n="8" />

3. **Genetic criticism.** A group of tools for documenting the evolution across time within the same document and across the different stages that a work

<footnote n="8">⁸ This terminology is based on Zeller 1995; Huitfeldt 2006, 194 uses instead “representation and interpretation”.</footnote>
has had, from its first documented elaboration to the “finished” product
(usually, but not necessarily, the published book).

This new model for encoding documents has been included as part of the TEI
standard since December 2011, becoming the main feature of version 2.0 of
the current release (P5).

Since its inception, the model has been used as a “proof of concept” for the
encoding of a few pages of one of Proust’s notebooks and the development of a
prototype web edition. The work has been conducted in collaboration with
Julie André and was funded by the ANR Program CAHIERS-PROUST;<fnref n="9" /> the
digital development has been conducted in collaboration with Raffaele
Viglianti and Peter Stokes (André and Pierazzo, 2013).<fnref n="10" />

Fundamental to this proof of concept was consideration of the implicit
dynamicity of authorial draft pages: writing is always a process that develops

<footnote n="9">⁹ The CAHIERS-PROUST project is directed by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer (ITEM) <http://www.item.ens.fr/index.php?id=75919> [Accessed 14 March 2013].</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ The prototype is available online at <http://research.cch.kcl.ac.uk/proust_prototype/index.html>. The interface has been built by generating SVG files embedded within an HTML 5 framework via a set of XSLT 2 stylesheets. More information and a freely downloadable version of the interface can be found in the *About* section of the prototype's website.</footnote>
in time, and this is even more true for authoring (as opposed to copying),
which includes not simply linear writing but also rewriting, adding, deleting,
moving etc., (Pierazzo 2009, 169). A printed or even printable transcription
can only present this process as a static object, and even the provision of
diacritics to mark the so-called “revision campaigns” fails to make such a
process really evident and accessible: on the contrary, they overload the
transcribed texts with unfamiliar signs that deprive the text of any reading
appeal. Even ultra-diplomatic editions present limitations when it comes to
taking the process of authoring into account: such editions aim to reproduce
the textual and paratextual material in a manner that is as close as possible to
their appearance in the original manuscript, as if they were a sort of
“normalized photograph”. The advantages of this compared to facsimile
editions lie mainly in the deciphering of the handwriting: in many cases this is
not trivial, but providing only this may prove a little limiting when so many
more things could be said of and analysed in the draft page. In the rare cases
that these things are analysed and said, they are provided to the reader in the
format of a hefty monograph, where the editor explains verbally the authoring
process and the different layers of corrections that can be observed on the
page. Some attempts have been made to represent these dynamic processes in
print: one example is the diagrams at the back of the editions of the *Chaiers of
Proust* published by Brepols Publishers-BnF and edited by Nathalie Muriac,
but these diagrams lack usability and accessibility. They are printed at the
back of the volume, thereby forcing the reader to flip back and forth within the
book, and they show the zoned pages only at a thumbnail size making them
impossible to read.
Computers, on the other hand, can provide a very suitable environment for presenting this dynamic aspect of the authorial process, as they easily support animation and interactivity. In the analysis of the pages of Proust that have constituted the sample for the prototype, Julie André has delineated two different types of sequences: those according to which the pages were (presumably) progressively filled, and those according to which we should read the content if we wish to follow the storyline. The pages have then been subdivided into zones which were filled at the same time, according to these sequences, and each portion of the text has been transcribed within each zone (i.e. the <zone> element of the new TEI). For this work, the authorial process has been reconstructed at the macro-stages of writing (the zone), but the encoding could cope perfectly well with a more granular level, at word and even letter level.

This form of transcription and encoding does not proceed from top-right to bottom-left for each page and does not attempt to say “what is text, really” (De Rose et al. 1990). Instead, it can follow any order (or orders) that is (or are) considered relevant or useful by the editor, working his/her way from layer to layer of writing and of revision campaigns. A transcription conducted according to these principles is able not only to faithfully represent the final state of the document as well as all its intermediate stages, but also to avoid the notorious problem connected to XML-related transcription of overlapping hierarchies: because each zone is considered independently of the others, the fact that they may overlap on the document is completely irrelevant for the transcription. This new approach breaks all bounds with the TEI’s former OHCO model (*ibid*.) and its accompanying claim that a manuscript “is, really”
only a support for the “linguistic code”; the TEI now embraces the rules and semantics of the “bibliographical code” for the first time. Indeed it goes further: this terminology of “linguistic” and “bibliographical code” is borrowed from Jerome McGann’s famous depiction of the “social text” theory, according to which “meaning is transmitted through bibliographical as well as linguistic codes” (McGann 1991:57). However, his choice of wording and his theoretical framework have been conceived with print publications in mind, and so they are not really suitable for draft manuscripts; for him, in fact, “the literary ‘text’ is not solely the product of authorial intention, but the result of interventions by many agents (such as copyists, printers, publishers) and material processes (such as revision, adaptation, publication)” (Siemens et al. 2010). Perhaps then, instead of “bibliographical code” we could talk here of the “codicological code”, which is a more generic and comprehensive term;<fnref n="11" /> this codicological code includes issues like the layout, the crafting of the writing support, the direction of writing, the conception of the space, the manipulation of the documents, etc., the semantics of which represent the main concerns of this type of digital representation.

However, the biggest innovation in this prototype was the research of new ways in which the encoded text could be delivered to the reader.

Paradoxically, while this edition attempts to represents the codex and its semantics, it is also independent from what has been previously called the “printed book model” as its delivery has not been conceived according to the “page paradigm” and is not designed to be printed. In order to test the

<footnote n="11">¹¹ See also, on a related topic, Pierazzo and Stokes 2011.</footnote>
potential of the new approach and to stretch our understanding of authorial
manuscripts, innovative forms of output have been explored which in turn
have been enabled by the topological encoding where each zone can be
provided by a set of spatial coordinates. As mentioned above, the normal
publication format adopted for draft manuscripts, both in print and on the
web, is the (ultra-)diplomatic edition, which presents the transcribed text in a
format that tries to mimic the layout of the manuscript page as much as the
publishing medium allows.<fnref n="12" /> While this type of edition presents many
advantages, it lacks the fundamental aspect mentioned above: the dynamicity
of the writing process. Ultra-diplomatic editions on the web are also normally
presented side by side with the digital facsimile of the page,<fnref n="13" /> but again this
representation has been considered unsatisfactory for more than one reason:
first, it creates an alternative new space which tries to mimic the original
without ever being able to reproduce it in full, giving rise to all manner of
frustration in attempting the unachievable goal of reproducing the exact
layout, spacing and ‘feeling’ of the draft page (Sutherland and Pierazzo 2011,
207-208). Second, it leaves to the user/reader the task of establishing the

<footnote n="12">¹² But see Pierazzo 2011, 466-472, for a call to use scholarly criteria to define
the type of edition.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ See, for instance, Sutherland 2010 and the and the genetic edition of the
manuscripts of Flaubert's *Madame Bovary*, published by the University of
Rouen in collaboration with the Library of Rouen and the Centre Flaubert (see
in particular
<http://www.bovary.fr/folio visu.php?mode=sequence&org=3&seq=2>
[accessed 15 March 2013]).</footnote>
relationship between the transcribed and the inscribed text, a task which is
tiring and uncomfortable, relying as it does on the rapid movement of the eyes
from one area of the screen to another.<fnref n="14" /> Finally, the side-by-side view is
limited to presenting pages (and not, for instance, openings), given the
constraint in width of the screen, an approach that, if applied to Proust’s
*Chaiers*, will indeed falsify the documentary evidence which shows how
Proust considered his writing space to be the opening as a whole. In fact, the
constraints of the screen have not yet been fully assessed in this context: most
debates surrounding digital editions have revolved around the new and
improved expressive capabilities of digital representations and how these are
about to overcome the limits of the printed page, but very little attention has
been the paid so far to the new constraints presented, for instance, by the
unforgiving sizes of screens which cannot be stretched and which can vary
enormously by user and circumstance (Sutherland and Pierazzo 2011, 198-
200). So, in the case of Proust (who used to write only on the right side of the
opening of his own notebooks and used the left side for additions, corrections
and rewriting) the page-by-page visualisation that has become the standard
for digital editions was not an option; nor was it an option to present the
facsimile of the opening alongside the transcription if either was to be at a
readable size: the codicological codes forced us to look for a new solution,
namely migrating the transcription *within* the facsimile.

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Usability tests have demonstrated that users prefer concentrating on the left hand side of the screen only, a fact that, together with personal experience, suggests that the side-by-side layout may not be very effective (Nielsen 2010).</footnote>
This possibility has already been partially explored by a few editions which have experimented with integrating the transcription with the facsimile. Using the *Hypernietsche* framework, for example, Hans Walter Gabler in 2005 presented a facsimile page of *Ulysses* where a virtual magnifying glass reveals the transcription of a portion of that page as it passes over (see fig. 1). Gabler declares:

> Just seeing the screen effect of the magnifying glass over the image suggests sufficiently the potential of the electronic medium to convey the close interdependence of visualising and reading the document. In the ultra-diplomatic transcription, the interpenetration of image and text becomes truly essential (p. 205)

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1, screen shot of a detail of VA-19,62[1]<fnref n="15" /></figcaption></figure>

Similar to this is the “Zoom Topographic” view offered by the edition of *Stirrings Still* contained within the *Samuel Becket Digital Manuscript*

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Available from <http://www.compositiongenetics.org/bksailehwgabler-33>
[accessed 15 March 2013].</footnote>
*Project's* website, where a拖ggable box reveals an ultra-diplomatic
transcription as it is laid over the facsimile<fnref n="16" />.

Both visualisations represents a good attempt to integrate (“interpenetrate”,
to use Gabler’s 2005 terminology) the edition and the facsimile, trying as they
do to take advantage of some of the potential of the digital environment in an
attempt to break free from the printed book model. But they both present
limitations: the integration is only partial and unstable, as it relies on the
movement (or steadiness) of the mouse; the two layers are not aligned making
the deciphering of the handwriting cumbersome; and finally they are not
suitable for extended reading, any more than watching a movie from a keyhole
would be.

The question, then, is how the edited texts can be presented in a more
interesting and innovative way which is suitable for reading and exploring at
the same time. To respond to this and other questions, the prototype-edition
has been based on and embedded within the facsimile in a way similar to the
ones seen above, but avoiding the “keyhole effect” (as illustrated in Figure 3).
Additionally, the prototype attempts to go a step further than the examples
seen before, as it is built around the idea of process, meaning that the zones
that have been outlined and encoded have been assigned a relative order with

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Available from <http://www.beckettarchive.org/demo/MS-UoR-2934.htm?page=06&trans=basic&type=linear&text=documentfacsimileszoto&notes=on&metamarks=&facs=2934-4r> [accessed 14 March 2013].</footnote>
respect to their presumed sequence of writing and reading;<fnref n="17" /> this information
has then been used to create an interactive, accessible interface which tries to
present the user with a representation of the writing process, not just the end
product.

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Although possible in principle, we have not attempted to record the absolute
timing of authoring but only the relative sequence of writing campaigns. This
is due to both practical and theoretical reasons: the former because it is not
yet clear exactly when Proust wrote in this specific notebook, and the latter
because, in the impossibility of assigning all variants to a specific absolute
time and therefore to clearly distinguish all layers of writing, this could lead to
the reconstructions of texts that never existed (Pierazzo 2009, 185-186).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3: Cahier 46, ff. 46v-47r</figcaption></figure>

In this interface the user is initially prompted with the “clean” image of one
opening of Cahier 46 (folios 46v-47r); then, by clicking on the image, the
zones containing the transcribed text appear in the order in which they are
presumed to have been written. Different colours have been used as
background for the zones according to the different level of certainty and
confidence that the editor had in ordering the sequences: the darker the
colour, the greater the uncertainty. In this way, a visual semiotic codification
conveys the doubts and decisions of scholars in an intuitive way. A brief
explanation, outlining the rationale of the sequencing, appears with each zone,
making the whole reconstruction more easily understandable. The user can
also switch from the writing sequence to the reading one at any given
moment: the order in which the zones display will change accordingly. A
timeline bar marks the passing of time for both the writing and the reading
sequences, allowing the user to go back in time, so to speak, and re-enact the
process of authoring as many time as is wished. The zones of transcription can
also be moved around at will to reveal the underlying facsimile, using the
toolkit provided on the right hand side of the window. Zones can also be
hidden and then restored, following an order which differs from the one which
provided by the editor, enabling users and scholars to test new hypotheses.

This digital representation of draft manuscripts does not move away from the
facsimile, but it is strongly bound with it, acknowledging the importance of
the codicological codes and therefore emphasizing that these codes carry as
much meaning as the linguistic codes do. The prototype is also very simple
and simplified: for instance, it is not currently able to represent the ordered
sequence across openings, and offers only a limited set of tools to the user; it
also does not present any animation for inline corrections but only for blocks
of text. Nevertheless, it is able to open new exciting perspectives in the
representation and delivery of digital editions of manuscripts, for both
scholars and the general public.

Draft manuscripts are complex, data-rich objects which require the long
patient work of scholars to be made ‘consumable’ by people other than the
specialist. Because of the complexity offered by these materials, they have
rarely taken a central role in scholarship beyond that of their editors. The
documents' complexity, combined with the inaccessibility of editions, has
often discouraged even the bravest of readers. The problem is that draft
manuscripts present texts before they become readable: the non-linear,
fragmented, paradigmatic textuality of most drafts proves to be opaque, tiring
and only rewarding if one commits a substantial amount of time to the task;
they often are overlooked as a result, in spite of representing a mine of
information on the work of authors. The printed book model has proven to be
unsuitable for the task of presenting such material in an accessible way to
scholars other than editors, let alone for members of the general public. In
this historic moment, providing public engagement and measuring the impact
of research on society (particularly research in the Humanities) is becoming
more and more the responsibility of researchers who have to find how best to
present their scholarship in ways that can be understood and appreciated by
the largest number of people. In this cultural framework, the intrinsic
dynamicity and interactivity of computers can offer a lot to the dissemination
and democratisation of knowledge. The Proust prototype, even at this very
limited stage, represents a step forward in that direction, borrowing as it does
some ideas from computer games. The easy, intuitive interactivity makes the
user experience enjoyable and fun, and suggests that even the most complex
of cultural objects can be made easy without compromising the level of
scholarship. The idea of using game mechanics in a non-game context for
solving problems is called "gamification" and is a well-known approach in
interface design, eLearning and advertising (Zichermann and Cunningham
2011). The idea is to take the user experience or problem to be solved and
break it down into small tasks; once these are achieved then users are
rewarded somehow and are invited to proceed to the next, more complex
level. Most gamified environments appeal to competitiveness, building
communities of users and making them “play” against each other. A “light”
version of these principles has already been implemented successfully in
academic projects, particularly in crowdsourcing such as the *Old Weather*
project which use the crowd to transcribe ships logs in order to study the
weather,<fnref n="18" /> or *What's on the Menu*, which aims to enable the study of food
prices and eating habits by inviting people to transcribe old menus of
restaurants.<fnref n="19" /> Can (or should) a scholarly digital edition do the same? The idea
behind the digital representation embodied by the Proust prototype offers two
aspects of this: on the one hand it presents scholars with the possibility of
exploring draft manuscripts in a much deeper and more accessible way, by
representing the draft manuscript as the custodian of the authoring process,
by exploring the codicological codes of the material object; on the other hand,
the end result could also be enjoyable for people with non-specialist
knowledge, opening new perspectives on the access of advanced cultural
content to the wider public, a consideration that has increasingly to find a
place in the agenda of textual scholars.

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<footnote n="19">¹⁹ *What’s on the Menu* is a project of the New York Public Library.</footnote>
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