Editorial Statement

Editors and Contributors: Antje Anderson, Robert Bolin, Andrew Del Mastro

This is a class project in ENGL 478, Digital Archives and Editions, taught by Dr. Amanda Gailey, in the Spring of 2019 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

In creating this digital edition, we had a number of versions of Romola from which to choose including:

  1. The first serial installment from Cornhill Magazine (July 1862), with the first of Frederic Leighton's 23 illustrations.
  2. The slightly revised text from Volume 1 of the first book edition, in three volumes, printed by Smith, Elder and Co in 1863, without the illustration.
  3. The text from Volume 1 of the Cabinet Edition of Eliot's Collected Works, published by Blackwood and Sons, 1878, which is the basis for most modern editions.
Both print and online versions of Cornhill Magazineare accessible through the University of Nebraska Libraries and the first edition of Romola is in the collection of UNL Libraries Archives and Special Collections. Because of concerns about the print quality and the two-column format of the Cornhill serialization, digital scans were produced from the 1863 first edition.

The illustrations from Cornhill Magazine were added because Romola was Eliot's only novel to be illustrated when first published, and because Frederic Leighton was chosen because of his affinity for Renaissance themes and motifs.

The text produced as we performed OCR (optical character recognition) on our scans became the basis of our xml file, in which we tagged the text according to the most current TEI guidelines (Version 3.5.0, January 2019) with the Oxygen XML Editor. This tagged text is the basis of the html file that is the main content page of our edition, which we created with the help of XSLT in Oxygen (Saxon-PE 9.6.0.7) and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS 3) formatting. Our map was created with MyMaps on the GoogleMaps platform.

Our main principles in editing our text file and creating TEI tags were twofold:

  1. We wanted to create an aesthetically pleasant and easy-to-read text that accurately matched the text of the page scans, including the standard paragraph and quotation formatting as well as italics and all-caps. We made two changes in comparison to the facsimile of the pages: we did not hyphenate before a page break but instead incorporated the first half of the hyphenated word on the next page, and we did not preserve footnotes as such, but incorporated them as authorial footnotes, which "hover" over the footnoted term.
  2. We wanted to create and display reader-friendly, clickable annotations to readily-recognizable, color-coded terms, namely to personal names,locations and works of art or architecture, and expressions in Italian and in Latin. A further behind-the-scenes goal for these tags was to create a list in the TEI Header (with TEI's "ListPlace" function) of locations mentioned in the novel that could serve as a built-in geographical dictionary for the text of Romola and thus simplify the way we would annotate repeat location. Likewise, we created a list of historical characters (with TEI's "ListPerson" function) that simplified annotating characters and can also be expanded.

    3. Future Steps

    As we extend the tagging of locations, historical characters, and artworks (possibly adding the "ListObject" function) to the entire novel, the "ListPlace" entries in our TEI Header can later be extended to include geolocation information and thus be used for future stages of this project. For example, we can create a machine-readable database of all locations with geographic coordinates that can be:

    Beyond applying our editing principles to the entire novel and creating a complete edition, we also want to create an expanded and enhanced map with Leaflet as our open-source and open-access tool. It will include additional sites (with annotations) that George Eliot visited in Florence (and in Italy in general) in 1860 and 1861 as she got ready to write Romola.

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