eREED

The REED series consitutes a massive, richly-annotated dataset on entertainment (and related activity) in print. The print format of the REED series has locked that data into a fixed structure that limits its potential as a research resource. With each new published collection, the ability to effectively analyze the REED corpus diminishes, since it is trapped within a series of print silos, each of which needs to be queried separately via individual indexes.

REED's future viability lies in open access online dissemination. The major challenge REED now faces is the effective and efficient transition from a traditional editorial project producing a print series to a digital humanities-oriented project producing REED Online, a web-accessible repository of the full spectrum of REED’s resources. The digital publication of REED’s content requires developing a strategy and a process for dissemination quite different from existing ones for print or digital publication. Although REED is not the only scholarly endeavor publishing collections of historical texts and documents with substantial editorial apparatuses, these other collections comprise specific books, manuscripts, and documentary corpuses. REED, in contrast, is interested in texts and documents not exclusively as artifacts in and of themselves but, according to its mission statement, as sources of evidence of performance activity. Its mission to collect as much of this kind of evidence or data cuts across individual texts, document collections, numerous historical divisions, geographical regions, social institutions, and understandings of ‘drama’.

Therefore, the challenge REED faces in terms of digital publication is not that of creating a simulacra of a REED print collection online, but of creating an intelligently-structured repository, the data of which is accessible to a diverse range of inquiries and deployments. The data in this repository must be effectively queried, retrieved, and visualized, but must also preserve the unique aspects of the original documents in which this data is found. REED’s aim has always been to give its users transcriptions along with interpretative aids such as translations, notes, glossaries, and indices. For digital publication, REED wants to integrate these aids with the records while still preserving the records’ historical specificity and associated ambiguities. This undertaking raises numerous questions and issues that need to be fully explored: for example, in its optimal form, what would a REED collection and the REED series as a whole become as an online resource? How would it be read/used/navigated? How could it be made accessible to a range of audiences? What new research affordances, new research questions might arise from the ability to combine REED’s data with other datasets on the web and visualize them in multiple ways? What new users, new partnerships and new futures might develop from this process?

In 2007-9, a NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant (“Records of Early English Drama: Digital Innovations for Enhanced Access”) enabled the development of a Perl script that converted REED's in-house 'at-codes' markup used in preparing the records text for publication to XML (TEI Lite), and then populated an SQL database with the TEI Lite encoded records text. The outcomes of the project can be viewed here: http://www.flintbox.com/public/project/2935 .

Thanks to a 2012 Andrew R. Mellon Grant for "The Fortune Theatre Records Prototype Digital Edition," REED will now be able to build upon this earlier work. This project will explore how the materials of the kind traditionally published in print could be both edited and published online. Along with REED’s other online resources mentioned above, eREED would form part of a proposed REED Online, an online environment integrating all of REED’s digital content. This exploration will address and go some way to answering a number of key questions: what form would a digital REED collection take and what web standards for information representation and exchange would be used? How can information in the Patrons database and EMLoT interoperate with information in eREED? What are the requirements of an online editing environment for the REED collections? How will this digital transformation impact on REED’s current editorial roles, tasks and workflows? How would a user search and navigate an online REED corpus? How would the results of a search be displayed, and how could a user manipulate these results for the purpose of creating publishable/printable outputs?

The work of this project represents an essential prototyping stage where these initial ideas and questions can be more formally explored in preparation for providing a solid technical framework for the task of getting both future and past REED information online. This prototype project will take a small but coherent subset of new London-area REED research materials already collected but not yet in the established editorial process – the records relating to London's Fortune Theatre, one of the most important early performance venues from the forthcoming collection Middlesex including Westminster – and use them to develop and explore new protocols, workflows, data formats and software that would then support more ambitious work in the future.

Developing the prototype will result in insights and experience that will, after the project is completed, enable the formulation of an informed, detailed, and pragmatic strategic plan for eREED’s development that will involve:

1. The enhancement of editorial and production processes to allow all new materials that would, in the past, have constituted a print volume, to be processed and published online;

2. Exploring the tasks involved in the digital remediation of the existing print volumes, with the eventual goal of merging the print with the future born-digital volumes;

3. Exploring processes and protocols that would enable data interoperability and interchange between eREED, the Patrons website, EMLoT and the Anglo-Latin Workbook, and, eventually, other relevant online resources (eg, British History Online);

4. Exploring processes that would enable user-selected and organized content pulled from the multiple components of REED Online to be effectively displayed online and published in a variety of formats, both print and digital. 

This project is a partnership of: REED; the Centre for Digital Humanites, Ryerson University (CDH-RU); the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College, London (DDH); the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL); and Boydell & Brewer. 

The Fortune Theatre Records project team:

• Jason Boyd, CDH-RU 
• Peter Clifford, Boydell & Brewer 
• John Bradley, DDH 
• Paul Caton, DDH 
• John M. Geck (Project Manager), REED 
• Patrick Gregory, REED 
• Tanya Hagen, REED 
• Sally-Beth MacLean (Principal Investigator), REED 
• Sian Meikle, UTL 
• Daniela Robibero (Undergraduate Research Assistant), CDH-RU 
• Paul Vetch, DDH 
• Miguel Monteiro Vieira, DDH