Digitizing the Pyrates: Making a Digital Critical Edition of Captain Charles Johnson's A General History of the Pyrates (1724-1726)

Critical editing in a digital environment has changed how bibliographic practices are employed.This thesis investigates how digital critical editing impacts eighteenthcentury literary studies.The way scholars examine questions of author attribution and employ bibliography practices has changed with the advent of digital tools.Since the mid nineteen-nineties, digital editing has taken on various forms, from hypermedia archives to crowdsourced projects.A critical apparatus that provides a high-level of interactivity to elucidate the intricacies of a text over its production in a given time is often overlooked in these projects.By producing a digital edition that compares the first four editions of A General History of the Pyrates (1724-26) using the Versioning Machine V.4.0 and conducting a user experience survey regarding the edition's functionality (both are at http://ingridreiche.com/Resume/Thesis.html), the goal of this project has been to show how eighteenth-century print culture was a highly collaborative space where authorship was unstable.voices asking the other pertinent question: Why make a digital critical edition of this work at all?In short, the answer to this question is the very reason for this paper, and is because the practices of digital editing change and inform the way one looks at the production of eighteenth-century literature.However, there is also a larger threefold explanation.First, the practice of digital editing changes one's view about the relationship between authors, booksellers and printers, and the production of eighteenth-century literature, forcing one to notice the large and small changes made to a work over the course of its printing history, and how one finds it presented today.Producing a digital critical edition of A General History of the Pyrates was initially inspired by the inquiry into its authorship.In 1932, John Robert Moore, a scholar of eighteenth-century literature and a bibliographer who specialized in the works of Daniel Defoe, attributed the book to Daniel Defoe, though this attribution remains contested.Second, this leads to larger questions about the concept of authorship in that period, as well as the process of author-attribution in the twentiethcentury.The discussion about that process is based from both primary sources from the eighteenth-century, such as those of Edward Young and William Duff who wrote about literature and individual "genius," as well as twentieth-century scholars and bibliographers of Defoe's work, such as J.R. Moore, P.N.Furbank and W.R. Owens, who discuss the question of author-attribution as it applies to this work.Third, alongside this discussion are scholarly writings that address broader questions about the climate of authorship and printing in the eighteenth-century, and help contextualize literary commerce at that time.These discussions are, in many ways, prefatory material that could not be incorporated into the digital critical edition, but which provide a backdrop for the production of the text and Reiche 3 familiarise readers with eighteenth-century print culture, and the development of and changes to concepts of authorship between the eighteenth and twentieth-centuries.The process of making/editing a digital critical edition of A General History of the Pyrates, necessitated the incorporation of certain practical considerations.Traditional print critical editions provide readers with a singular reading text, based on all available information, alongside substantial footnotes and introductory material.However, this project uses The Versioning Machine V.4 (hereafter VM 4.0), a software program developed by Susan Schreibman, a scholar of digital editing, which allows for a comparative parallel-text reading of the four editions examined for this thesis.The decision to produce this type of digital edition was based on numerous factors.First, there was the desire to apply traditional principles of descriptive bibliography and include information about the collation, pagination, signatures, and the contents of the source texts, which could be accomplished using the VM 4.0 "Bibliographic Information" pane that allows the editor to add whatever information is deemed important.The second chapter of this thesis provides a thorough discussion of the bibliographic principles developed over the course of the twentieth-century by W.W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, Thomas Tanselle and Ronald McKerrow, and how they have been applied to this project.Thankfully, the VM 4.0 also allows for a "Critical Introduction," which has been written for each section of A General History of the Pyrates included in the digital edition that accompanies this work.Finally, and most importantly, the VM 4.0 allows editors to create a parallel-text reading that provides readers/users with multiple versions (known as witnesses) of the text, instead of producing a singular reading text.However, readers/users may choose to look at any single version as a reading text.This approach to creating a digital critical edition allows Reiche 4 readers/users to compare the changes throughout the versions an editor has chosen by using interactive highlighting, underlining (which was customized to display as text in a different colour, for the final production of the critical edition accompanying this thesis) and notes to mark the changes and explain them.In this project the first four editions of A General History of the Pyrates were chosen for comparison.A brief discussion of each edition immediately follows this section of the introduction.What emerged from the work of creating this edition was a vastly improved understanding of the process of encoding a text using extensible mark-up language (XML) in accordance with the Text Encoding Initiative (hereafter TEI) Guidelines, in order to document and make the changes visible to readers/users.A more in-depth discussion of the theories and methodologies of digital editing and encoding a digital edition will be elaborated in Chapter Three and Four of this thesis.The process of encoding led to two realizations.First, by having to document and mark-up each change in the four editions, so users could view these changes, and by providing explanatory notes about each variant in the texts, it became evident, that a substantial amount of material was added to the work in three years.What was more intriguing were the minute changes made to the typesetting, capitalization, spelling, punctuation and wording, which were more numerous than the additions to the text itself.Second, there were numerous ways to encode these differences for transmission to the audience, which begged the question of what was most appealing to the audience.In order to answer this second question, a user experience survey was created and circulated to participants from four different, but sometimes overlapping, fields: scholars in English literature, scholars of the digital humanities, scholars of library and information science, and the general public (being people who may or may not be Reiche 5 active in academia but are not generally familiar with digital editing platforms).The results of this survey are discussed in Chapter Four of this thesis, and informed the encoding methodology that was employed for the final iteration of the digital edition.Research into the construction of authorship, the attribution of A General History to Defoe, bibliographic theory, its application in a digital environment, the practice of encoding the work in XML, and the results from the user experience survey and its impact on the final encoding methodology used in the digital critical edition amounted to a firm justification for producing a digital critical edition of A General History.The justification is not because it might help resolve issues surrounding the authorship of the book, or answer questions of author-attribution.It is rather because the practice of encoding the work and producing a digital edition informs questions about eighteenth-century print culture and how the relationship between authors (known or unknown), booksellers, and printers made up the editorial practices of that era.Through writings from the eighteenthcentury, one comes to understand the construction of authorship in that era.From modern and contemporary scholars, and the application of bibliographic principles, one sees how author attribution combined with careful examination of texts, demonstrates that the production of literature in the eighteenth-century was much more of a collaborative process, and that a single individual rarely, if ever, had control over the changes made to a book.As works travelled from one bookseller to another, and from one printer to the next, small changes became apparent and the culmination of all these little changes results, in this case, in a significant expansion of A General History.From whence these changes and expansions came remains elusive, but they are the result of many hands, not one.Changes in typesetting may be from printers, while additional material may have come from the Reiche 6 author, or may have been added at the request of a bookseller and written by a different hand.Revisions were plentiful, and while some were of little consequence, others, such as additional chapters, changes to the organization, layout and continuity of a work, were of more significance.

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