About this Edition
Jointly edited by sixteen MA students from the English Department at California State University, Northridge, The Countess of Dellwyn Digitization Project was the primary service-learning project for the Spring 2014 course ENGL 630: Defiant Women of the Eighteenth Century. Students began by correcting the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) via the 18thConnect initiative. Once the text was corrected and checked, students imported the plain text edition to Classroom Salon to annotate distinct sections of the novel. Finally, students corrected and formatted their sections for this website and imported their annotations, learning basic code to provide anchors for their notes.
We view this digital edition of Sarah Fielding's novel as part of an experiential service-learning project because the work conducted in this course has made a digitized edition accessible for students who are visually impaired (their readers can access this OCR-corrected text). This critically annotated edition also provides explanatory notes to help make Fielding's language and references more accessible to the student who is new to Fielding's writing and the eighteenth-century novel.
A note on our editorial practices
One of the many challenges that face any editor--and particularly a group of editors--is to avoid providing notes that delimit and proscribe too narrowly a reader's interpretation of the text. Before annotating, students discussed best practices in textual editing and annotating and were particularly inspired by Claire Lamont's essay "Annotating a Text: Literary Theory and Electronic Hypertext," which considers the particular challenges and freedoms of editing a text via digital edition. One of the potential benefits of our editorial platform, which is taking place via digitized text and, in the case of the notes, variants of hypertext, is that readers will be more liberated to read (and read explanatory notes) non-linearly and freely. As Lamont puts it, “What are the freedoms to which the electronic medium invites us? They are usually proposed as freedom from the print medium, freedom from the organizational conventions and the space and time limitations of the book, and, particularly claimed for literary hypertext, freedom from ‘linearity’ and freedom to ‘decentre’ a text” (54). Readers can link to one and then another link to read outwards from the text, a process that may help them gain more control over their own reading; multimedia and interactive hypertext links may make the reading process even more liberated.
We also consulted several seminal essays on bibliographic scholarship to help guide our editorial practices. Following Alice Walker, we sought to create notes that help, as Walker puts it, to "bridge the gap" between the language of the present day and the language of the author's time period (105). We also referred to Martin Battestin's guidelines for annotating Sarah Fielding's brother Henry's works. In this article, Battestin suggests that "an effective note" ought to (in Battestin's words) follow the following guidelines:
1. It may define obscure terms or provide translations of words and passages in a foreign language;
2. It may identify persons, places, events, and literary allusions, supplying the reader, when appropriate, with such additional
contextual information as he needs to appreciate how the reference ‘works’ in the text’;
3. It may illuminate the authors ideas or expressions either by citing specific sources for them or by adducing parallel
passages from contemporary writings. (Battestin 20)
Our editors have attempted to follow these guidelines in order to illuminate meaning without coercing a distinctive reading of Fielding's work.
A note on the copy text
The editors have remained faithful to the 1759 London edition printed for Andrew Millar at the Strand (ESTC #T66941). The only other extant print edition on record is Volume 1 of the 1759 Dublin Edition, printed for John Exshaw and James Hoey (ESTC #N8793); since this edition is only available at the Ohio State University, we were unable to compare textual variants. Future iterations of this project will seek to collate both texts.
We have retained the 1759 edition's original spelling and have provided notes where we believe printer errors have occurred. All punctuation remains the same as the 1759 edition except in instances where the original paragraph blocking inserted quotation marks on each new line in dialogue; we have standardized those quotation marks to be consistent with full lines of dialogue. To help give readers who do not have access to the PDF version of the 1759 edition a feel for the page layout, we have chosen to include original page numbers and page breaks and to include the catch words that appeared at the bottom of each page.
A note on future work on this site
An XML edition of this text is under construction and will be forthcoming in the fall of 2014 to include relevant metadata and to conform to the TEI Initiative guidelines.
A note of thanks
The editors of The Countess of Dellwyn Digitization Project gratefully acknowledge the guidance of the staff at 18thConnect, particularly Liz Grumbach; the support of the CSUN English Department; and the generous grant funded by CSUN's Community Engagement Office and the College of Humanities.
We view this digital edition of Sarah Fielding's novel as part of an experiential service-learning project because the work conducted in this course has made a digitized edition accessible for students who are visually impaired (their readers can access this OCR-corrected text). This critically annotated edition also provides explanatory notes to help make Fielding's language and references more accessible to the student who is new to Fielding's writing and the eighteenth-century novel.
A note on our editorial practices
One of the many challenges that face any editor--and particularly a group of editors--is to avoid providing notes that delimit and proscribe too narrowly a reader's interpretation of the text. Before annotating, students discussed best practices in textual editing and annotating and were particularly inspired by Claire Lamont's essay "Annotating a Text: Literary Theory and Electronic Hypertext," which considers the particular challenges and freedoms of editing a text via digital edition. One of the potential benefits of our editorial platform, which is taking place via digitized text and, in the case of the notes, variants of hypertext, is that readers will be more liberated to read (and read explanatory notes) non-linearly and freely. As Lamont puts it, “What are the freedoms to which the electronic medium invites us? They are usually proposed as freedom from the print medium, freedom from the organizational conventions and the space and time limitations of the book, and, particularly claimed for literary hypertext, freedom from ‘linearity’ and freedom to ‘decentre’ a text” (54). Readers can link to one and then another link to read outwards from the text, a process that may help them gain more control over their own reading; multimedia and interactive hypertext links may make the reading process even more liberated.
We also consulted several seminal essays on bibliographic scholarship to help guide our editorial practices. Following Alice Walker, we sought to create notes that help, as Walker puts it, to "bridge the gap" between the language of the present day and the language of the author's time period (105). We also referred to Martin Battestin's guidelines for annotating Sarah Fielding's brother Henry's works. In this article, Battestin suggests that "an effective note" ought to (in Battestin's words) follow the following guidelines:
1. It may define obscure terms or provide translations of words and passages in a foreign language;
2. It may identify persons, places, events, and literary allusions, supplying the reader, when appropriate, with such additional
contextual information as he needs to appreciate how the reference ‘works’ in the text’;
3. It may illuminate the authors ideas or expressions either by citing specific sources for them or by adducing parallel
passages from contemporary writings. (Battestin 20)
Our editors have attempted to follow these guidelines in order to illuminate meaning without coercing a distinctive reading of Fielding's work.
A note on the copy text
The editors have remained faithful to the 1759 London edition printed for Andrew Millar at the Strand (ESTC #T66941). The only other extant print edition on record is Volume 1 of the 1759 Dublin Edition, printed for John Exshaw and James Hoey (ESTC #N8793); since this edition is only available at the Ohio State University, we were unable to compare textual variants. Future iterations of this project will seek to collate both texts.
We have retained the 1759 edition's original spelling and have provided notes where we believe printer errors have occurred. All punctuation remains the same as the 1759 edition except in instances where the original paragraph blocking inserted quotation marks on each new line in dialogue; we have standardized those quotation marks to be consistent with full lines of dialogue. To help give readers who do not have access to the PDF version of the 1759 edition a feel for the page layout, we have chosen to include original page numbers and page breaks and to include the catch words that appeared at the bottom of each page.
A note on future work on this site
An XML edition of this text is under construction and will be forthcoming in the fall of 2014 to include relevant metadata and to conform to the TEI Initiative guidelines.
A note of thanks
The editors of The Countess of Dellwyn Digitization Project gratefully acknowledge the guidance of the staff at 18thConnect, particularly Liz Grumbach; the support of the CSUN English Department; and the generous grant funded by CSUN's Community Engagement Office and the College of Humanities.
Works Cited
Battestin, Martin. “A Rationale of Literary Annotations: The Example of Fielding’s Novels.” Studies in Bibliography 34 (1981): 1-22.
Lamont, Claire. "Annotating a Text: Literary Theory and Electronic Hypertext." Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and
Theory. Ed. Katheryn Sutherland. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 47-66.
Walker, Alice. “Principles of Annotation: Some Suggestions for Editors of Shakespeare.” Studies in Bibliography 9 (1957): 95-105.
Lamont, Claire. "Annotating a Text: Literary Theory and Electronic Hypertext." Electronic Text: Investigations in Method and
Theory. Ed. Katheryn Sutherland. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 47-66.
Walker, Alice. “Principles of Annotation: Some Suggestions for Editors of Shakespeare.” Studies in Bibliography 9 (1957): 95-105.
About Our Editors
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Wafa Azeem
Wafa edited Vol. 2, Book 4, Chapters 8-10. Arpine Barseghyan Arpine edited Vol. 1, Book 1, Chapters 1-3. Vana DerOhanessian Vana edited Vol. 2, Book 4, Chapters 4, 5, and 7. Megan Fine Megan edited Vol. 2, Book 3, Chapters 4-6. Lizette Hernandez Liz edited Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapters 4-6. Hannah Jorgenson Hannah edited Vol. 1, Book 1, Chapters 7, 9, and 10. Naz Keynejad Naz edited Vol. 2, Book 3, Chapters 7 and 9-11. Nicole Koczanowicz Nicole edited Vol. 2, Book 3, Chapters 8 & 12, and Vol. 2, Book 4, Chapter 1. |
John Kubler
John edited Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapters 2 & 3. Kayla Lopez Kayla edited Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapters 7 & 8. Lusine Makarosyan Lusine edited Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter 9 and Vol. 2, Book 3, Chapters 1-3. Duke Marine Duke provided notes for Vol. 1, Book 1, Chapters 4-6. Jennifer Rodrick Jennifer edited Vol. 1, Book 1, Chapter 14 and Vol. 1, Book 2, Chapter 1. Hannah Schiff Hannah edited Vol. 1, Book 1, Chapters 11-13. Adam Sokol Adam edited the Preface. Rachelle Yousuf Rachelle edited Vol. 2, Book 4, Chapters 2, 3, & 6. |
