Revision, Negation, and Incompleteness in Melville's Billy Budd Manuscript
Creators: name: Ohge, Christopher
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Nineteenth-century literature
Herman Melville
genetic editing
TEI
textual studies
text analysis
sentiment analysis

description: In 2019, John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, and I released a digital edition of Herman Melville's last work <em>Billy Budd, Sailor </em>(c. 1886–1891). This TEI-encoded edition required nearly 10 years to complete, mostly because this unfinished work survives in a complicated manuscript that demonstrates about 8 stages of composition. This born-digital ‘fluid text’ edition (Bryant 2002; Bryant et al 2019) consists of a diplomatic transcription of the manuscript, a 'base' (or clean) version of the manuscript, and a critical, annotated reading text generated from the base version. How could we effectively use all of the sophisticated descriptive markup of the manuscript transcription for critical purposes? What is missing is an analysis of this work’s genesis that demonstrates the critical potentials of the encoding (Ohge 2021). In this talk I will discuss my recent literary critical work based on text analyses of the TEI XML data of the <em>Billy Budd</em> manuscript. First I generated and visualised basic statistics of revision acts (counting additions, deletions, and substitutions) using XPath expressions and functions, and sorted the added and deleted words into separate lists. I then used the R programming language to perform analyses of the manuscript in comparison to Melville's oeuvre. With the XML2 library, I generated visualisations and statistical analyses of the XPath queries, including relative word frequencies of added and deleted words (Gries 2017; Jockers and Thalken 2020). With the TidyText library I turned all additions and deletions into a document term matrix and then into data frames in Hadley Wickham’s ‘tidy’ format (Silge and Robinson 2022). In this format I can produce sentiment analyses: because of the TEI encoding, I can also perform these analyses on different versions of the text (i.e. before and after stages of revision). Melville’s deletions, negation words, negative sentiments, and incompleteness are conceived as a cluster of related textual phenomena that the TEI XML encoding helps to pinpoint. There are sheer frequencies relating to negation: firstly, that <em>Billy Budd</em> has more deletions in manuscript than additions, implying that Melville’s tended to negate more than he added in composition, and secondly that frequencies of negation-words increased throughout his fictional work. (Negation-word results are generated through regular expression searches in the ‘base’ version of the text.) Although this trend drops off in the late poetry, <em>Billy Budd</em> has the highest number of negations in all of Melville’s oeuvre. That there are more deletions than additions in the <em>Billy Budd</em> manuscript reinforces its incompleteness. What the narrator called the ‘ragged edges’ of the story reflect not only Melville’s late tendency to rework words and ideas, but also to complicate the main characters of the novel (particularly Captain Vere) who represent justice in the story (Ohge 2021). I conclude by suggesting that this incompleteness is not only a metaphor in the text but a metaphor of the text of this tragic story. References Bryant, John. 2002. <em>The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen</em>. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bryant, John, Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge. 2019. <em>Versions of </em>Billy Budd, Sailor<em>: A Fluid Text Edition</em>. Melville Electronic Library. https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/versions-of-billy-budd. Gries, Stefan. 2017. <em>Quantitative Corpus Linguistics in R</em>. London: Routledge. Jockers, Matthew and Rosamond Thalken. 2020. <em>Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature</em>. 2<sup>nd</sup> edition. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Ohge, Christopher. 2021. <em>Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience</em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silge, Julia, and David Robinson. 2022. <em>Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach</em>. O’Reilly. https://www.tidytextmining.com/index.html. Christopher Ohge is Senior Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. His book <em>Publishing Scholarly Editions: Archives, Computing, and Experience</em> was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press, and in 2022 he co-edited a special issue of <em>Textual Cultures</em> on creative-critical editing with Mathelinda Nabugodi. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Herman Melville Electronic Library.