The Frankenstein Variorum team has completed work on a digital scholarly edition that compares five distinct versions of the novel Frankenstein. Working with the Frankenstein Variorum‘s edition files, we can study precisely where and how much the novel changed over five distinct instantiations from 1816 to 1831. Our encoded data invites us to visualize the edition’s moments of alignment, divergence, and gaps where material was missing or removed. This presentation shares a “big picture” view of Frankenstein’s changes over time using two variations of eXtensible Markup Language (XML): images drawn in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) from our data encoded in TEI, the language of the Text Encoding Initiative.

This talk is part of the Dialogues digital humanities miniseries of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2024-25 Distiguished Lecture Series.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
 

An active member of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), Elisa Beshero-Bondar serves as an elected member and now chair of the TEI Technical Council, an eleven-member international committee that supervises amendments to the TEI Guidelines. She has been teaching humanities in web-savvy ways since the 1990s, and she began teaching markup languages and XML stack processing almost as soon as she began learning them in the 2010s. Before moving to direct the DIGIT program at Penn State Erie, she directed Pitt-Greensburg’s Center for the Digital Text.  She has led TEI data modeling of the Frankenstein Variorum project, the Digital Mitford Project and other digital research projects involving TEI XML to build editions and prepare structured analyses of variants and collocations in texts. Find her on GitHub at https://github.com/ebeshero and on her development site named for her pet firebelly newts at https://newtfire.org.

Elisa Beshero-Bondar was invited to campus by Hilary Havens (English).