book history – Foxglove

Another Fine Mess…

As previously mentioned, I have been trying to mangle Allardyce Nicoll’s Handlists into a tractable database for what seems like forever. Here’s the latest and hopefully last update.

Some of the entries are just disambiguating cross references: these are (or should be) marked as eType=’note’. Some of them are partial entries including a reference to another entry which may or may not contain the same data: these are (or should be) marked as eType=’ref’. This classification of entries was carried out by the addAtts script early on in the pipeline; the same script also added a magic key for each entry to facilitate matching up Lacy and Nicoll entries, but ignored entries with eType=’ref’ for some reason. I did not notice this gaffe till later, much later, after I had spent weeks on the next stage of the pipeline, (the clever bit of matching up Lacy and Nicoll entries, which involved a lot of manual intervention)

Here’s what I did to fix that blunder…

saxon -xi entries.xml addAttsAgain.xsl > oops.xml (run a corrected version of addAtts script (renamed addAttsAgain) to generate a file of corrected entry elements for the entries of eType ref, now renamed as eType=part).
saxon oops.xml addWhen.xsl > oops2.xml (run the existing addWhen script to add a @when for these new entries)
saxon allEntries.xml attributePatch.xsl > temp.xml (run attributePatch script to produce an improved version of allEntries.xml. )

The text is now quite intelligently tagged, and there is a (non TEI) schema to describe its markup. I need to do more on its documentation, but there is an ODD.

Dates

Round about now, I realised that @when values were missing for many titles, and were mostly not in ISO format, which matters, partly because I can now use my ODD-defined schema to validate the file but mainly because it would be nice to sort entries correctly by date. So I embarked on the long tedious process of dating the entries a bit more consistently.

Nicoll represents dates in one of three different ways.

Where the full date of a performance or a license is known, it is given as DD/MM/YY or (occasionally) DD/MM/YYYY. This is easy to identify and extract to the @when attribute for the entry
Where the date is only partial, it may appear in the form MM/YYYY. This is more problematic.
Where the only date available is that of a publication, it will usually be in the form YYYY, possibly in brackets. I wrote a script to extract these to the @when attribute too.

There are quite a lot of OCR errors to correct (I instead of 1, u instead of 11, s instead of 5, redundant blanks or nonexistent punctuation, and so on). Many of these could be fixed with regexp search and replace. I also found cases where the end of a printed line had simply been ignored, which were more difficult to detect.

Eventually, I have plausible dates for as many as possible of the datable entries, in one or other of the three formats specified. I run another script to convert them all to a kosher iso format i.e. YYYY, YYYY-MM, or YYYY-MM-DD, and then validate. A surprisingly large number trip at this last hurdle, mostly because of a previously unspotted OCR error, but this does throw up five cases which can only be attributed to lax proof reading at Cambridge University Press. These five include obvious nonsense like “32/2/1822” given as the date for the Drury Lane performance of Edward P. Knight’s “The Veteran Soldier”, and more tangled cases such as “29/2/1823” given as the date for a performance at the Adelphi of Moncrieff’s “The Secret”. Sorry, Allardyce, but 1823 was not a leap year, so this cannot be true. Moreover, according to the Adelphi Calendar (https://www.umass.edu/AdelphiTheatreCalendar/auth.htm) , on 28 Feb 1823, the theatre was dark for Lent… and the same source is stubbornly silent on the existence of a play of this title and authorship anywhere. So someone is mistaken.

Just to put those peccadillos into perspective : by my reckoning, there are now 24,351 distinct entries in the Nicoll database, of which 24,301 are apparently now correctly dated . Fifty are genuinely undated; five have impossible datings. A pretty good error rate.

Multiple authorship

As I may have remarked before, the entries in Nicoll’s Handlists are of quite a few different types. Some of them are just cross references, supplying the name under which a pseudonym has been indexed but not documenting any particular performance; others (quite a few) are partial entries, associating a performance or publication for one author with an entry for the same performance or publication listed under the name of the “main” author in a collaboration. Nicoll supplies the following definition: “I have adopted the principle of placing the main entry of any particular play under the name of that author whose name appeared first in the play-bill, newspaper advertisement or review from which information regarding authorship was obtained”. For my purposes however, all these additional entries simply inflate the number of performances etc. (by a factor of nearly 10%) and are unnecessary for a resource in digital form. I therefore tag them differently, and process the multi-author entries so that all the authorship information is accessible in the same place. For example, here is the “main” entry for a play with multiple authorship:

<entry when="1897-09-06" xml:id="N08816" eType="multi" n="ohsusannah_AMBIENT">
  <class group="FARCE">F.C.</class>
  <author>AMBIENT, MARK </author>
  <title>Oh! Susannah! </title>
  <perf>Eden, Brighton, 6/9/97; Roy. 5/10/97.</perf>
  <lic>L.C. </lic>
  <bib>French </bib>
  <note type="auth">[Written in collaboration with A. ATWOOD and R. VAUN .]</note>
 </entry>

The Handlist also contains two fragmentary entries, one for each of the two co-authors:

<entryFrag when="1897-09-06" xml:id="N08946" eType="part" n="ohsusannah_ATWOOD">
<author>ATWOOD, ALBAN </author>
<title>Oh! Susannah! </title>
<perf>Eden, Brighton, 6/9/97.</perf>
<note>See M. AMBIENT.</note>
</entryFrag>

<entryFrag when="1897-09-06" xml:id="N19381" eType="part" n="ohsusannah1_VAUN">
<author>VAUN, RUSSELL </author>
<title>Oh! Susannah 1 </title>
<perf>Eden, Brighton, 6/9/97.</perf>
<note>See M. AMBIENT.</note>
</entryFrag>

I wrote a script to combine all these to produce a new multi-author entry, like this:

<entry when="1897-09-06" xml:id="N08816" eType="multi" n="ohsusannah_AMBIENT">
  <class group="FARCE">F.C.</class>
  <author>AMBIENT, MARK </author>
  <author type="also">ATWOOD, ALBAN </author>
  <author type="also">VAUN, RUSSELL </author>
  <title>Oh! Susannah! </title>
  <perf>Eden, Brighton, 6/9/97; Roy. 5/10/97.</perf>
  <lic>L.C. </lic>
  <bib>French </bib>
  <note type="auth">[Written in collaboration with A. ATWOOD and R. VAUN .]</note>
 </entry>

Note that e.g. “R. VAUN” now appears as “VAUN, RUSSELL”. Achieving that particular coup de main involved quite a lot of XSLT juggling before I found a 99% successful solution.

In the process, I found only the following five cases where the author name referenced by Nicoll was hard to find in the Handlists.

“TAIT” (but I found him in the errata list for vol 4)
“PINCROFT” Confusingly, this exists as a pseudonym for BANERO J.M. , which is also the name of the main author. Something wrong there: Nicoll nodded.
“MOUNTJOY” No other sign of this pseudonym.
“Corri” must be Clarence Collingwood Corri, who supplied the music for George Sims’ 1899 farce In Gay Piccadilly. Dan Leno was in it.
“CARGILL, G.B.” I have not yet found any other sign of this co-author.

The next challenge

It is definitely time to revisit the Lacy catalogue. What’s to do with the 196 catalogue entries for which no corresponding entry has shown up in either of Nicoll’s Handlists? Are they all old stuff, first published or performed long before 1800, and therefore reasonably omitted from the Handlists? Or are there some rogue components amongst them? Time will tell. Meanwhile, here’s the current state of affairs, according to my reportCounts script.

Today there are 24351 entries in this file, of which ....
24350 are classified
22995 are plain old entries 
some of which are unclassified
1356 multi-authored entries
1750 fragmentary entries constructed from cross references
30 fragmentary entries constructed from notes
51  notes, xrefs,  and comments
18784  with perf data 
15896  with lic data 
4158  with bib data 
1169 have been matched out of 1300 Lacy references
1327 catalogue entries linked to a Nicoll entry out of 1511

391 entries have a bib referencing Lacy but no @matches
493 have a female author

foxglove

ELTeCTiT : ELTeC Titles in Translation

(I haven’t posted here since last October. I expect it’s lockdown keeping me quiet. But this morning I did manage to dream up quite an interesting research proposal, which I post here for now.)

The ELTeC corpora were designed explicitly and deliberately [ref design criteria] to exclude translated works. [quote] Despite this principled design decision, it seems self-evident that analysis of the mechanisms and results of the cross-cultural dispersal of the novel across Europe – which emphatically is within the scope of the ELTeC project – depended largely if not entirely on the availability of works in translation. It seems probable that the spread of the novel as a popular form was largely determined by the success of particular works, or classes of work, in translation; in particular, we may surmise, those works which responded to common social problems and common cultural trends. Novelists in the traditions from which those works sprang influenced novelists working in entirely different cultural milieux; just as writers raised in other traditions may be presumed to have influenced the development of what we now perceive as a unified European culture by providing easily assimilated versions of the exotic.

Although some multi-lingual expertise was undoubtedly prevalent during this period, the availability of translated versions of novels must have been essential to this diffusion, in both directions. But even basic data about the scale and scope of translations over the period covered by the ELTeC (1840 to 1920) is hard to find [refs needed] being largely diffused across national library catalogues which vary in the extent to which such works are associated with their originals, and rarely give any indication of the exact pedigree of any translation. It seems probable for example that translations into some target languages (say Romanian) would have started not from the version in the original language (say English) but from some other more accessible L2 (say French), but this is hard to determine without substantial research into individual titles and authors. Even harder to find or quantify is any information about the linguistic skills or preferences of a novel’s intended or actual readership. While it is highly probable that the languages of the great imperial powers (English, French, German) would be widely understood in those countries directly under the political or cultural influence of those powers, the extent to which they would be considered appropriate vehicles for reading for pleasure is less clear.

There are many theoretical and formal difficulties associated with any investigation of the relationship between a source and its translation, particularly (perhaps) for works of a literary nature. Translation, like speech itself, is one of the more inexplicable human behaviours. It ought not to be possible, and yet it is done, apparently more or less successfully, every day. [For an entertaining and accessible discussion, written from the perspective of a professional translator, see David Bellos “Is that a fish in your ear?” (2011)] We do not propose to address any such issues in this project, though we may provide some indicative data points to help us others do so. Our goals are more modest. Each completed ELTeC corpus already provides us with a sample of novel production in a given language within a given time frame, hopefully more or less well balanced with respect to date, size, authorship, and impact. We propose to enrich this list of titles with bibliographic data about all translated versions published within a short period (say 15 years) of their first appearance, recording for example the target language, the translated title, date and other details of publication, the translator’s name, and (where this can be determined) the source of the translation. This data will of course be provided in an open format compatible with existing ELTeC deliverables.

Amongst other research questions which availability of this data should address, we identify at least the following:

To assess “impact” or “persistence” of titles, the ELTeC corpora rely on a simple reprint count. Do translation counts complement or contradict this classification?
Are translation counts statistically correlated with any of the ELTeC classification criteria? That is, where a given collection shows an imbalance for a given criterion, is this also reflected in the translation count?
What patterns are discernible in the L1/L2 pairings manifested by our data: for example, which languages are most frequently translated into for each source language?
Is there any correlation between stylistic properties of a given group of sources and the languages into which they are translated? Crudely speaking, are romances more often translated into romance languages?

Where translated texts are available in digital form, it would be easy also to provide an ELTeC encoded version, using existing production pipelines. At this stage in the project, it is impossible to say whether this will be feasible on a sufficiently large scale to constitute true parallel ELTeC corpora: it would in any case require significant investment of time and effort from the existing ELTeC partners, whereas the collection of metadata can be done more simply.

Lou Burnard

February 2021

foxglove

Counting the Books contd.

A couple of days ago I reported here on some imbalance in the representation of male and female novelists in current digital archives, written while I was still trying to persuade the Google Books server to do tricks for me. I can now report further progress. After 21 iterations, I did finally manage to confect a complete list of all the ATCL titles freely available from Google Books. Putting this together with data already stored in ATCL for Google, I have now identified 2823 ATCL titles in Google Books, which brings the total number of known digitizations up to 11,510: 58% of all available titles. This seemed good enough pretext to revisit the summary table I produced last time, so here it is again in a new and hopefully slightly more comprehensible form:

As might have been predicted, with more data the situation becomes more nuanced. Note first that the percentages of available titles which get digitized (column “%dig”) apparently decreases as the actual number of texts available for digitization (column “All”) increases, suggesting that the more titles you have available the less likely you are to deal with any one of them. Only tentative conclusions are warranted, since we are lacking so much data for the later part of the century. That said, comparing the columns M-dig and F-dig suggests that throughout the century, digitizers are consistently and disproportionately more likely to go for a male-authored text. Even in titles from the 1850s, where there are substantially more female authored titles available than male (778 as opposed to 595), the proportion of them which get digitized is still lower than the proportion of male authored titles (79% as opposed to 84%). In the 1880s, 55% of titles are explicitly female-authored, as opposed to 41% male (the remainder being unspecified); yet the male authors are still sampled for digitization at a far higher rate (59% as opposed to 37%).

My previous accusations of sexism amongst the digitizers en masse thus vindicated I next considered the practice of individual archives. The following table shows the numbers of ATCL titles I found in each of five major archives, and the proportions attributed to male and female authors in each.

	A-dig	M-dig	F-dig	U-dig	%Male	%Fem
All	11510	6207	5050	253	54%	44%
Hathi Trust	5655	3568	2022	65	63%	36%
InternetArchive	1665	889	748	28	53%	45%
Google Books	2823	1138	1580	105	40%	56%
British Lib	5104	2742	2252	110	54%	44%
Gutenberg	2275	1682	590	3	74%	26%

Digitization choices by archive

Overall, the balance is comparable with that shown in the previous table: a small preference for male as opposed to female authored titles (54% to 44%). But this is perhaps concealing a marked variation in practice amongst the archives. At one extreme, Project Gutenberg has nearly three times as many male authored titles as female, while at the other Google Books actually has significantly more female authors than male (56% as opposed to 40%). In between is the British Library Microsoft collection, which matches exactly the proportions for all the archives combined.

Irrespective of gender, how much variation is there in the holdings of these archives? Here’s a frequency distribution showing how many ATCL titles are available from 1, 2, or more archives (note that I cannot distinguish how many of these are actually copies of the same digital version).

1	7247	63%
2	2780	24%
3	1201	10%
4	267	2.3%
5	16	0.7%

Archive overlap: how many titles are available from how many archives?

Encouragingly, this suggests that there is little overlap amongst the holdings of the main digital archives: 63% of all 11,511 digitized titles listed occur in only one archive, 87% in one or two.

Which titles get digitized most frequently? This is hard to tell, for several reasons. Some archives list multi-volume titles as multiple copies; some archives list items simply copied from other archives. For my Google Books listing I excluded titles which were already listed by another archive. But for what it’s worth, here, in no particular order, are the fifteen titles listed as available from all five archives I looked at:

Caine, Hall (1853-1931). The Deemster: A Romance (1887)
Caine, Hall (1853-1931). A Son of Hagar: A Romance of Our Time (1887)
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert (1834-1894). Wenderholme: A Story of Lancashire and YorkshireEdinburgh: Blackwood 1869
Collins, Wilkie (1824-1889). Antonina: or, The Fall of Rome. A Romance of the Fifth Century London: Bentley 1850
Collins, Wilkie (1824-1889). The Woman in White London: Sampson Low1860
Eliot, George (pseud.) (1819-1880). The Mill on the Floss. Edinburgh: Blackwood 1860
Dickens, Charles (1812-1870). Oliver Twist: or, The Parish Boy’s Progress. London: Bentley 1838
Eliot, George (pseud.) (1819-1880). Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Edinburgh: Blackwood 1872
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn (1810-1865). Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. London: Chapman and Hall 1848
Grant, James (1822-1887). The Romance of War: or, The Highlanders in Spain London: Henry Colburn 1847
Dickens, Charles (1812-1870). Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of ‘EightyLondon: Chapman and Hall 1841
Dickens, Charles (1812-1870). Bleak HouseLondon: Bradbury and Evans 1853
Wood, Mrs. (-). It May be True: A Novel. London: T. C. Newby 1865
Oliphant, Margaret (1828-1897). Harry Jocelyn. London: Hurst and Blackett 1881
Ouida, (pseud.) (1839-1908). Folle-Farine. London: Chapman and Hall 1871

No, it makes no sense to me either. I expected to see Charles Dickens and George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell on the list, but Hall Caine and Philip Hamerton? Clearly one needs to be very careful in interpreting this data.

See previous bloggage for details of how the numbers were obtained. Supporting data and scripts have been updated in my github repo.