Seminar with Nick Hayward

Nick Hayward (Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University) visits the Wittgenstein Archives in the period 27 November - 1 December, 2006. In this context, a seminar is organized:

Friday, 1 December, 10.30-12.00, Wittgenstein Archives, AKSIS (since 2009 "Uni Digital"), Allégt. 27, meeting room, 1st floor: "An Electronic Edition and Commentary on Virginia Woolf's Time Passes"

Hayward has given us the following introduction to his presentation:

Part 1: A presentation of the Leverhulme Trust funded project "An Electronic Edition and Commentary on Virginia Woolf's Time Passes", based at the Centre for Textual Scholarship at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. The project director is Professor Julia Briggs.

This project was begun in October 2006 with the aim to bring together the different stages of writing that went into the making of 'Time Passes', the central passage from Virginia Woolf's novel 'To the Lighthouse'. It is our central aim to create a record of its development in the form of a genetic edition of the text, and to embed that edition in a network of histories and contexts that reconfigure traditional annotation techniques as a system of linked but separate strands of thought, thus producing a new form of literary archaeology. This project addresses some fundamental questions about the making of literature:

- How does a literary text come into being?
- What kinds of influence are at work upon the writer during the process of initial composition, and thereafter?

The project investigates the ways in which the different recoverable histories of a particular text can be used to illuminate the process of its composition.

I will also be demonstrating the first iteration of a proposed online system for the presentation of this material. It currently focuses upon the use of transcriptions and contextual information relevant to the project, but I will demonstrate its potential long term benefits for the dissemination of other relevant material.

Part 2: Open discussion on the requirements of literary scholars for the future of digital tools and online archives.

If possible, I would like to engage fellow digital archivists and encoders, alongside literary scholars, to help establish possible directions and requests for digital tools used in the production of online digital projects. What do literary scholars require from digital tools? What do they require from online digital text archives, and how would they prefer to interact with these digital environments?

Any interested opinion or feedback welcome.