Manual
This is the Manual as it was published in November 2015 for the publication of the third module:
Krapp's Last Tape / La Dernière Bande. The document in its
first state (published on 24/06/2011) can be found here. The
document in its state at the publication of L'Innommable in 2013, can be found here. The document in its current state can be found here.
This manual is organized according to the items in the main menu of the
first module of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, the electronic edition of Stirrings Still / Soubresauts. Features in this manual not applied in
more recent modules have a grey
background.
1. About
In the menu, the heading 'About' contains the following options:
- Catalogue: a survey (and short description) of the documents (each MS number is clickable and linked to the corresponding transcript);
- Chronology: The intricate composition process of the work is charted in a genetic map. The transcriptions of the documents can be accessed directly from the map.[1]
- Manual: a link to this manual.
2. Documents
This menu contains a full list of all available documents in a
module. From here, users can access an overview page for any document anywhere in the
module.
Under the heading "About", all meta information is given for the
document: a description of the physical document, information on who made the
transcription, on the holding library and if there were any revisions to the
transcription since it was first published.
Thumbnails give a general overview. A document can be browsed in more
detail in a linear transcription ("Text view"), or in an image viewer. The "Image View"
includes the following:
- a zoom feature;
- topographic transcriptions: a graphic representation of the documents (respecting the layout of the pages);
- an image / text feature: a combination of the facsimile of a page and its linear transcription, by means of clickable zones on the image. The main text is segmented into zones of no more than 8 lines. Doodles, marginal additions, dates, titles and metamarks are also individually clickable;
- a link to the linear transcriptions.
(only applied in Stirrings
Still/Soubresauts and Comment dire/ what is the word)
3. Leaf through the notebook
Users can leaf through the most important notebooks of the
modules, notebook MS 2934 for Stirrings Still / Soubresauts and MS 3316/1
for Comment dire / what is the word, through a pageflip
reconstruction.
(only applied in Stirrings
Still/Soubresauts and Comment dire/ what is the word)
4. Language
This option facilitates examination of either
(a) all French drafts or
(b) all English drafts exclusively. Some French versions are originally written in French, whereas others are translations.
(c) Early translations can be visualized separately, facing the version on which they are based (in parallel presentation).
(d) Bilingual comparison: this option highlights mismatches between the English and French versions. Translation variants are marked in blue. The absence of a word or phrase vis-à-vis the text in the other language is visualized by means of a vertical bar |.
(a) all French drafts or
(b) all English drafts exclusively. Some French versions are originally written in French, whereas others are translations.
(c) Early translations can be visualized separately, facing the version on which they are based (in parallel presentation).
(d) Bilingual comparison: this option highlights mismatches between the English and French versions. Translation variants are marked in blue. The absence of a word or phrase vis-à-vis the text in the other language is visualized by means of a vertical bar |.
In all views that include the transcription, two new items appear in the
menu: "Tools" and "Compare sentences".
5. Compare sentences
All the versions of each sentence or segment can be presented in
vertical juxtaposition, starting from any version of the text: each sentence or
segment that made it into the base text is preceded by a sentence number; by
clicking on the icon or number preceding a particular sentence or segment its
composition history can be viewed in vertical juxtaposition. If a document only
contains sentences that did not make it into the base text, this is made explicit at
the top of the page.
In a box under "Synoptic Sentence View", users are given the
option to: "Compare all English [or French] versions of this sentence with
CollateX". This link lets the third party software program "CollateX" perform a
collation of all versions.[2] The result is a
table in which the versions are aligned and the variation highlighted.
Users can determine which versions they wish to compare and go to
the relevant scanned page of any version.
6. Tools
The 'Tools' section in the main menu presents four different
visualizations of the internal composition history of each document:
6.1. Default transcription
This default visualization indicates cancellations with
strike-through; additions in superscript; additions on the facing leaf in
green.
6.2. Place indications
This more detailed visualization explicitly mentions the
place of an addition (e.g. place = supralinear, when a word is added above
the line).
7. Search
The search engine offers full-text searches of all the
transcriptions and notes. The results appear within the context of the sentence in
which the search string was found, with the search string highlighted. Searches can
also be finetuned to include only occurrences within the two most prominent features
of manuscripts: additions and deletions. The search engine makes use of Elasticsearch.
As an extra, a number of potentially interesting searches are
suggested, such as 'intertextual references', 'dates', 'doodles and diagrams',
'gaps' or 'transpositions'. They can be run by selecting them from the dropdown menu
under 'Suggested searches'. The search for 'Intertextual references', for instance,
calls up allusions to passages by such authors as Shakespeare and Dante (and
corresponding annotations).
Notes:
[1] Stirrings Still
/ Soubresauts has a complicated genesis, and many different versions.
Although the catalogue numbers reflect the chronology of versions, only the
chronology of UoR MSS 2935/3/11, 2935/3/12, 2935/3/10 and 2935/3/9 differs slightly from the order suggested by the
archive numbers, some documents (in Stirrings Still / Soubresauts notably the
'Super Conquérant' Notebook, UoR MS 2934) contain more than one version of a
particular passage. The versions in this document are not successive, since Beckett
made alternate use of this notebook and loose sheets of paper. In the case of
Beckett's penultimate text, the writing of the three sections that eventually became
Stirrings Still (sections 1, 2, and 3) was preceded by three abandoned
sections. To distinguish them, the abandoned sections are identified by a zero
preceding the number ('before Stirrings Still', sections 01, 02, and
03).
[2] As part of the
InterEdition Project, CollateX is a Java-based collation software package that can
be used to produce a critical apparatus for digital editions. <https://collatex.net/>
© 2021 Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project
Directors: Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon | Technical realisation: Vincent
Neyt
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