The Gaskell Journal Digital Edition is an online, openly accessible edition of a single Gaskell text, Elizabeth Gaskell's manuscript journal, offering an annotated and newly transcribed text side-by-side with high-quality digital images of the manuscript pages. This new edition provides a digitally encoded version of the text. The digital markup embeds metadata and editorial notes and transcription directly into a single Edition file. Additionally, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal - Digital Edition offers editorial headnotes contextualizing the journal as a text predominantly focused on motherhood, and a prosopography identifying important individuals, texts, and geographic locations that created the context within which Gaskell wrote. The journal simultaneously works as an intervention in dissertation practice, through modeling a digital dissertation deliverable which mobilizes current practices in textual encoding to create an online edition of the manuscript which capitalizes on available technologies.

Gaskell's journal was written to record her motherhood. Gaskell gave birth to seven children, of whom four daughters survived childhood: Marianne (b. 1834), Margaret, called "Meta" (b. 1837), Florence (b. 1842) and Julia (b. 1846). The Gaskells also had a stillborn daughter (1833), and two sons who died in infancy (an unnamed son, born between 1838-1841, and William, born in 1845). Gaskell began her journal in 1834 to record the life of Marianne, then aged 6 months, and continued it until 1838, when Marianne was four and Meta was eighteen months old. Gaskell's daughters were her central focus and close companions for over half her life, and the beginnings of this relationship are chronicled in the journal, as are her own reflections on her role as a mother.

Gaskell began her journal with the explicit intention of recording her memories of Marianne's childhood in the face of an uncertain future, but it later became a "paper mother" — a productive tool through which she mothered herself as well as her progeny. Beyond writing the journal to record and reflect on her daughters' development, Gaskell wrote in her journal in order to weigh Victorian norms and expectations for maternal practice, and mobilized it as a tool for emotional self-regulation as she sought to shape her own identity as a Victorian mother. In effect, Gaskell's journal exists as a text that demonstrates maternal life writing as a productive tool employed for shaping a socially acceptable selfhood for Victorian mothers and daughters alike.

TEI in this Project

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition stands as a testament to the possibilities presented by textual encoding and opening the dissertation process to new media forms. Patrick Sahle claimed that "Scholarly digital editions are scholarly editions that are guided by a digital paradigm in their theory, method and practice," and the use of TEI encoding provides the basis for such a paradigm in The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition. The added value of the digital scholarly edition lies in its ability to move beyond the confines of a codex presentation, and in the production of multiple reading views and interactive features. The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition employs digital encoding to provide viewers a choice between a default diplomatic view and a normalized reading view — a choice that would remain minimally plausible, but significantly more challenging and costly to replicate in a print format.

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition provides a new transcription encoded in eXtensible Markup Language (XML), an international standard for editing documents in the humanities and history, as defined by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and utilizing their current P5 guidelines. The TEI was founded in 1987 "to develop, maintain, and promulgate hardware- and software-independent methods for encoding humanities data in electronic form" (TEI). TEI documents are written in XML, published in 1998 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The TEI Consortium was founded to write and maintain Guidelines, which define a broad tag set to be used in textual encoding. The TEI guidelines provide labels and definitions for a standard group of elements and attributes. The Guidelines are extensive, but also allow customization and have grown with the community of users and the projects being created. TEI projects customize their use of the TEI through schemas, which declare subsets of the entire TEI to be used within individual projects and can also modify the usage suggested in the Guidelines to fit their own projects. The specific tools and languages used within the project, including the technical implementation of TEI, are discussed in greater detail in the Methodology subpage of this edition. The Rationale which follows centers around the goals of the edition which the technology seeks to enable.

A Digital Paradigm

Built upon the premise of a digitally encoded text, this edition of the journal is not reproducible in a print format, because many of its users could not read the TEI file itself. Sahle further writes: "A digital edition cannot be given in print without significant loss of content and functionality"(27). The website and its underlying TEI edition file, however, together with the other technological tools used to produce this edition, make possible an interactive user experience that places The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition within an ongoing trend of new Digital Humanities projects and initiatives.

The digital paradigm on which this edition is built embeds editorial intervention and methodology into the encoding file. This digital edition, while it creates a new transcription of the manuscript text, has been envisioned as a means of presenting the text in a way that explicitly reveals the editorial interventions that underlie any received text. The use of XML encoding has made it possible to clearly mark all editorial interventions to create transparency for the reader. The encoding also allows readers to choose their level of interaction with the text, presenting an editorially annotated view and a clean, regularized reading view simultaneously in an easy to toggle format, with optional notes available via mouseover. The Edition similarly presents the manuscript images alongside the transcription to allow readers the opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of the transcription themselves, and to engage in analysis of both text and its original appearance representation at their desired level of interaction.

A Paradigmatic Edition

Historically, editing has taken many forms, depending upon the sources upon which editions are based and the goals the editors undertake when creating them. Elena Pierazzo, in her Digital Scholarly Editing, explains:

editors can edit texts preserved by only one source, hence editing 'documents', or editors can try to provide an edited text combining readings coming from multiple sources, hence editing a 'text of works'. While the latter is normally called 'critical editing', the former is mostly known as 'non-critical' or 'documentary' editing.[1]

Although I have consulted previous editions, the transcription contained in The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is based on the manuscript text, and in this respect, is reminiscent of a documentary edition. The addition of digital technology, however, complicates this terminology. The challenge in characterizing a digital edition is grounded in the use of the encoding practices that make it possible. Text is a string of characters, a set of bibliographic codes. The addition of textual markup to these codes adds a further layer for exploration, but in doing so, complicates the nature of the edition that has been created. XML encoding has the advantage of encoding a text's features in multiple ways. According to Pierazzo: "it is possible to transcribe the text with both abbreviations and their expansions, with typos and without, with unconventional spellings and with regularised ones at the same time; furthermore, it is possible to record features that one may or may not want to display all the time or at all, but use them to generate statistics or indexes."[2] The use of XML tags also bears tangible witness to the history of creation of texts; in the act of 'marking-up' the transcription, the editor marks the manuscript with their own decisions and choices.

The use of encoding, as Pierazzo writes, makes traditional distinctions between editing practices less useful. This edition, for example, seeks to create a diplomatic view of the manuscript text that preserves Gaskell's own text, but this diplomatic version can be toggled into a regularized reading view at the reader's discretion. The result is that while the TEI edition file can create a diplomatic view, the entire edition cannot justifiably be called a "diplomatic" edition. Pierazzo explains that in order to classify digital scholarly editions, "we need to distinguish the data model, where the information is added (the source) from the publication where the information is displayed (the output)."[3] The original source of the edition is Gaskell"s manuscript, but the source of the digital edition is the TEI edition file. The diplomatic transcription is one form of output. Pierazzo offers an explanation that might have been written to describe The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition: "in the case of many digital editions, the diplomatic output is interactive and can be modified by the users, meaning that diplomatic is only one of the possible, unstable states of the output; we could therefore even conclude that these are not diplomatic editions at all, but that they are something else."[4]

While the transcription that is provided by default in this edition is intended to be diplomatic, I follow Pierazzo's conclusions in terming the edition itself to be a "paradigmatic edition, as the choices offered to the reader are collocated in the paradigmatic axis, the axis of variation."[5] The edition combines with the diplomatic transcription encoding choices that are more reminiscent of a critical edition, including the editorial headnotes that thematize the journal as a text of motherhood. The end result is a paradigmatic edition that uses digital tools to invite readers to participate in the choice of textual representation that is produced. Taken together, the edition is intended as a "generous" edition that allows exploration in many directions of Gaskell's text and the editorial decisions that have produced its several published versions since her death.

Scholarly Intersections

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition lies at the intersection of Victorian life writing texts, motherhood studies, and the digital humanities. As a new Edition of a Victorian journal, the Edition intervenes in life writing discourse through foregrounding a reading of a journal text as a productive tool for identity formation. Although Gaskell positions her journal as a reflective text designed to preserve memories of the maternal relationship, this edition positions the journal as a text in which Gaskell as author actively engages the journal form as a means of emotional self-regulation for herself, as well as her daughters. Simultaneously, the Edition explores the presence within the journal of multiple voices, as Gaskell's text is not merely a subjective record of her own thoughts, but rather is deliberately constructed as a text that places mother and daughter in conversation and traces a developing relationship.

The Edition engages Victorian studies as a piece of social history that lies at the nexus of multiple discourses, including maternal practice, education, and health and medicine. Gaskell's journal engages with maternal expectations, invoking tropes of maternal sacrifice and sympathy that were prevalent in the day. Gaskell's own proximity to several family doctors and her keen sense of mortality also result in the journal's frequent references to period medicinal remedies or childhood diets, and the journal can be read as a sample of maternal medical practice. Further, Gaskell's position in the middle class intelligentsia and her access to resources also leaves its mark on the journal in several references to period prescriptive literature, including texts by Andrew Combe and Albertine Necker De Saussure. This new Edition brings forward these discourses through the inclusion of editorial notes, allowing a deeper exploration of the social situation of Victorian mothers.

The Victorians' image of the mother as a domestic "angel" were heavily inflected by their separate spheres ideology. As Mary Poovey writes, "the model of a binary opposition between the sexes, which was socially realized in separate but supposedly equal 'spheres,' underwrote an entire system of institutional practices and conventions at midcentury, ranging from a sexual division of labor to a sexual division of economic and political rights." Victorians' expected mothers to be the seat of virtue in the home, and described the role as guiding the morality of the household. Mothers were, within their "sphere", given a heavy responsibility, even as within the period, women's roles were developing. Poovey cites several examples, including the opening of nursing as a profession and an increasing interest in women's rights, and offers a rich discussion of the ways in which definitions of womanhood were shifting in the Victorian period. Gaskell's journal adds another voice to this discourse. While carefully employing the journal to frame her own self-determined expectations for motherhood and tracking her adherence to self-defined goals, Gaskell simultaneously weighs and considers the broader opinions surrounding motherhood throughout its pages. The journal, as a result, acts as an instantiation of a Victorian mother attempting to shape her own role within these shifting cultural norms and ideology.

The journal exists as a text predominantly predicated on motherhood, and the Edition brings out this focus through the inclusion of Editorial headnotes that position each journal entry within easily recognized age-related child development stages. These headnotes initiate a discourse linking Gaskell's historical text with contemporary mommy-blogging trends, as well as with current childhood milestones according to scientific and educational research. The presence of the journal as an online, openly accessible text also acts as a model for other similar sources. While the publication of women's diaries is increasing, and several maternal diaries are available through archives and collections, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is one of the few such sources to be made openly, publicly available on the web, and will ideally serve as the impetus for future projects aimed at increasing access to maternal life writing documents.

The digital medium rewards sharing and open-source collaboration; as such, this dissertation has the potential to reshape how academia values scholarly work and contributions. This edition aims to be intuitive for its users, while simultaneously communicating the reasoning for the behind-the-scenes digital work that produced it. An offshoot of this versatility is the requirement for 'translation' of my methods and processes for a non-DH audience. This dissertation relies on many key digital humanities technologies rooted in open access, including a GitHub repository, IIIF frameworks for image interoperability, and TEI as an international standard for textual encoding. Although the manuscript at the heart of the edition is still within copyright, I have made every effort to make the code and apparatus with which it is presented available to other scholars.

Journals and Life Writing

While scholarship has long recognized the ubiquity and importance of letters and diaries to Victorians, the study of these materials has frequently reduced them to a source of information. Letter scholar Liz Stanley writes: "until relatively recently letters have been used mainly as a resource and treated as referential of a person's life and its historical and relational context, with the focus on content and its recording of factual information." Scholarship has typically focused on letters, and diaries as well, as sources of contextual information often about a single public figure. Such study often occurs as part of research for a biography or article. The tendency to view life writing as an untapped mine of information is long established. Even within the Victorian age, life writing was employed within fiction itself as a plot device for sharing information, as Kym Brindle writes: "unearthed and exposed, letters and diaries disclose documentary 'evidence' to avidly awaiting audiences" (22). Brindle's text underscores the ways in which the letters and diaries of Victorian fiction prefigured assumptions about these forms that have influenced scholarship, even as it marks a move within life writing scholarship to reexamine such texts on their own terms. Along with Brindle, recent scholars Laura Rotunno and Kate Louise Thomas have penned excellent studies focusing on letters within fiction. Catherine Golden and Karin Koehler, in turn, have contributed accounts of the progress of technologies associated with letter writing and the postal system in the Victorian age. Throughout this material, although letters and diaries are primarily discussed as devices within other, more obviously "literary" texts, there is a marked attention to the particular characteristics of the life writing genres, and their ability to stage subjectivity.

Life writing scholarship is taking a new direction that emphasizes the ability of these forms to actively create and drive discourses, rather than merely recording life as it passes. Stanley recounts: "over the last two decades or so, the emphasis has been on the performative, textual and rhetorical aspects of letters" with the result that "greater attention has… been given to the ways that letters in a correspondence construct, not just reflect, a relationship, develop a discourse for articulating this, and can have a complex relationship to the strictly referential" (The Epistolarium). This project seeks to foreground the same complexity of life writing texts that Stanley recognizes within letters, at work here in Gaskell's journal in the way that Gaskell uses her journal to shape her relationship with her daughters within the broader discourse of Victorian motherhood expectations.

The edition intervenes in the ongoing trend of life writing scholarship by bringing to light a journal that stands on its own as the focus of scholarly work. Gaskell's journal also invites scholars to view the text as an instantiating nexus of the discourses in which Gaskell was involved, including motherhood, Unitarianism, health and education. The Victorian period marked a novel, globally networked culture with an evolving mass readership, new communicative technologies and media, and new ways of engaging in social relationships through the use of these forms, as Rotunno and Golden have noted. Within the Victorian period the rise of literary celebrity conflicted with domestic ideologies and challenged the identities of authors who found themselves writing in dual spheres, simultaneously composing texts like novels intended for publication as well as letters and diaries, texts which were most often associated with domestic life, but were increasingly becoming a site of public interest. Gaskell, in her position as a middle class, educated woman who would go on to have a prolific professional career, was establishing her role as a mother within a changing culture, viewed and scrutinized from her position in Manchester, and her journal exists as a piece of social history from the period.

The Journal's Audience

This is not to say that Gaskell offers a clear or straightforward account of her life in Victorian Manchester; on the contrary, life writing texts are notoriously complex. Felicity Nussbaum explained, building on her study of narrative, that journals are "representations of our imagined relation to reality, mediated by a narrator and reader."[6] The complexity of the journal results from this imagined relationship, which is created by the writing situation of the genre itself. In an oft-cited essay, Walter Ong writes of the journal's particular problem of subjectivity:

"The audience of the diarist is even more en-cased in fictions. What is easier, one might argue, than addressing oneself? As those who first begin a diary often find out, a great many things are easier. The reasons why are not hard to unearth. First of all, we do not normally talk to ourselves-certainly not in long, involved sentences and paragraphs."[7]

Ong goes on to explain that although we assume diaries are written to ourselves, the truth is less clear, and the self who is the recipient of the diary is always fictionalized:

Second, the diarist pretending to be talking to himself has also, since he is writing, to pretend he is somehow not there. And to what self is he talking? To the self he imagines he is? Or would like to be? Or really thinks he is? Or thinks other people think he is? To himself as he is now? Or as he will probably or ideally be twenty years hence?

Although she certainly follows the convention of "long, involved sentences and paragraphs," Gaskell's audience in the journal is complicated. She simultaneously takes on Nussbaum's roles of narrator and reader, as she shapes a narrative that is both written for her daughter and for herself: "To my dear Marianne I shall dedicate this book" she writes at the outset. Gaskell asks that the journal be preserved for her daughter should she not live to "give it her myself", and we recognize that her audience is the grown Marianne. Yet Gaskell also writes for herself, admitting: "I sometimes think I may find this journal a great help in recalling the memory of my darling child, if we should lose her" (Journal 7 February 1836). From the moment of its beginning, Gaskell writes for a reader that is simultaneously herself and her grown daughter, and it is clear throughout that although begun for Marianne, Gaskell uses the journal to regulate her own identity.

Ong writes "The case of the diary, which at first blush would seem to fictionalize the reader least but in many ways probably fictionalizes him or her most, brings into full view the fundamental deep paradox of the activity we call writing, at least when writing moves from its initial account-keeping purposes to other more elaborate concerns more directly and complexly involving human persons in their manifold dealings with one another."[7] These "manifold dealings with one another" that Ong mentions lie at the heart of Gaskell's journal, and center on the relationship between mother and daughter. Beneath the veneer of worries for her daughter and treasured recollections, the "account-keeping" nature of a text which presents itself as a mere observational record, is a deep vein of self-crafting that brings the fictionalization of Gaskell as mother figure into sharp relief.

A Maternal Journal

Making the Gaskell Journal available online opens new discussions surrounding motherhood studies. Gaskell's journal is manifestly preoccupied with her maternal choices, and with her children's development. The journal acts in one respect as an article of social history, a testament to the maternal practices and expectations that surrounded Gaskell in her time. On another level, the journal offers insight into historical child development trends; Gaskell was writing before the compulsory education movement, yet she made the choice to send her daughter to school. More poignantly, the journal offers insight into the shifting of thought required by motherhood. Gaskell's journal offers a model of life writing meant to represent not a single consciousness, but two complementary individuals in a close proximal relationship. The journal juxtaposes observation and confession, metacognitive analysis and sentimental reflection, and this multilayered portrait of feminine subjectivity in the Victorian age is instructive.

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition is important to scholarship as an example of a specifically maternal journal. While others have been identified, and in some cases published, motherhood journals are not widely available. Cynthia Huff has published a descriptive bibliography of British Women's Diaries; of the fifty-nine she identifies and describes, only twelve include descriptions of childbirth or child-rearing, and some of these are written by elder siblings who engaged in childcare, rather than by mothers. Margo Culley's collection of American women's journal and diary writings, A Day At A Time (1985), similarly publishes only excerpts. Culley writes: "I am conscious in the extreme of the limits of diary excerpts and every choice represents a compromise with other possible choices. My hope is that these brief examples of women's periodic life-writing will stimulate sufficient interest that the reader will use the bibliography to seek out these diaries and others in order to experience the integrity and power of entire texts."[8] Culley's explanation is a poignant comment on the situation of women's diaries more broadly. Many archives hold mother's diaries, but few of them have been digitized, resulting in a requirement for in-person access that limits their use. As a case in point, the Ontario Ministry of Government and Consumer Services offers an online exhibit of late 19th century women's diaries, which like Culley's text, provides only excerpts. Similarly, the British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries Archive offers the collected documents of over 500 women, but the archive is difficult to search, requires a library subscription, and offers a fragmented presentation in which diaries are not easily read as continuous text. The creation of the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition provides one small step toward the increasing availability of such texts.

Gaskell's journal stands apart among her other written legacy as an instructive text, which offers her prescriptive maternal advice, veiled in the trappings of memory keeping. This text stands out among Gaskell's written output in that she requested that most of her life writing not be made public following her death. Gaskell knew firsthand the attention that was paid to authors' documents after her experience writing Charlotte Brontë's biography. Gaskell had given her daughters explicit instructions that they would publish no biography.[9]). A prolific correspondent, she also made several requests over the years to her recipients that her letters be destroyed. She wrote to Marianne in March 1854: "Pray burn any letters. I am always afraid of writing much to you, you are so careless about letters," and ends the same letter with another emphatic postscript: "Burn this."[10] A mere two months later she wrote to John Forster: "Oh! Mr. Forster if you do not burn my own letters as you read them I will never forgive you!"[11] In a later letter, to George Smith, Gaskell explains her reasoning behind these requests:

Now to business; only please when I write a letter beginning with a star like this on its front [drawing of a star], you may treasure up my letter; otherwise please burn them, & don't send them to the terrible warehouse where the 20000 letters a year are kept. It is like a nightmare to think of it." [12]

I have found no mention of such a warehouse actually in existence, and suspect Gaskell meant to add a touch of humor to her epistle. One might suggest, however, that libraries come perilously close to fulfilling such a function with their shelves bearing the published collected letters of multiple nineteenth century public figures. We might suspect that Gaskell would have gladly given up her place on the shelf, in this case.

The journal, however, is a text which Gaskell meant to survive her. Explicitly dedicated to and written for her daughter, Gaskell intended the journal to be received and read by her descendants, and hoped that it would be instructive for the grown Marianne: "she will perhaps like to become acquainted with her character in it's earliest form" (Journal Dedication). One new feature of this edition which aims to prioritize the maternal texture of the journal is its contextual headnotes. At the beginning of each entry, I have provided readers with the ages of Gaskell's daughters, the time elapsed since the last entry, and the length of the entry, as well as a contextual note detailing the context of the entry and key concepts that Gaskell is engaging with. These headnotes serve to underscore the reading of the journal with Gaskell's own role as mother. These headnotes highlight the infrequency with which Gaskell wrote, and the length of time that she devoted to the entries that she created. A far cry from the typical daily journal method, Gaskell's entries are widely spaced, but deeply introspective and reflective. The inclusion of the children's ages also adds a dimension of familiarity for contemporary mothers, who are deluged with reminders to evaluate their own children according to developmental milestones, weight-for-age ratio charts, and similar standardization measures.

The journal is a brief text, but it is hoped that this new edition will invite conversation surrounding the study of life writing texts, and in particular of those written by mothers. Gaskell's journal is a highly introspective account which reveals links between motherhood, responsibility and deep-seated doubt. As "mommy-blogging" and social media continue to proliferate, consideration of historical motherhood practices and expectations opens a venue for comparison and study.

The Gaskell Journal Digital Edition seeks to be transparent in its editorial treatment of the text and aims to preserve Gaskell's own manuscript's individuality while rendering it available for others to read and study. At the same time, this digital edition provides a critical apparatus which foregrounds the maternal in Gaskell's text, and simultaneously calls attention to the interpretive work of editing, and the ability of digital technologies to invite new and various interpretations of a single text. As a mixture of coding, writing, and design, the Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition seeks to open the leaves of Gaskell's life writing to a new field of inquiry.

Presentational Rationale: The Problem with Images

This project was initially conceived with the aim of providing images of the manuscript pages in a clear, side-by-side format with transcriptions of the original manuscript pages.

This early wireframe was modeled on the appearance of the Shelley-Godwin Archive. During the process of building the digital edition, a new visual model was devised which presents the edition not in individual boxes, but in a continually flowing container on the left side of the object window, with the images that correspond to each section of the manuscript floated on the right in approximately the same location. This decision to change the page structure was not taken lightly and is the product of much deliberation regarding the semantic structure of the text and of the project itself.

The structural markup that has been applied to the manuscript transcription clearly delineates Gaskell's own paragraph structure and adheres closely to her semantic choices. This edition does not alter Gaskell's punctuation; I have chosen instead to allow the paragraphs to run as long as she chose to continue them. This careful markup is intended to present the text as a fluid whole, without artificial divisions introduced by the page breaks. At the same time, one goal of this edition was to represent the manuscript pages, which are unavoidably linked with the codex form in which they are physically bound, to audiences without requiring a journey to the Brotherton Special Collections to view them.

A conflict arose when considering how best to structure the text and images so as to view them together. During the encoding stage, line beginning elements had been applied so that the text could be matched effectively with the manuscript images. In designing the website structure, however, it became apparent that an attempt to line up the text alongside each image prioritized the codex form by invoking it as a structural hegemony for the transcribed text. In order to smoothly allow a page-by-page structure that presented images and their transcription side-by-side, priority would have to be placed on the page beginning elements in the code. Page breaks are self-closing elements that do not need to adhere to XML's hierarchical structure and sit outside of the regular syntactical relationship between entries and paragraphs. In order to create digital synchrony with the images, it would have been necessary to "flatten" the paragraph-based markup structure that had been applied to the text, in effect, breaking much of the code.

XML is a hierarchical language, meaning that most tags which are used to bracket, and thereby markup, the text need to occur as nested pairs. The paragraph elements, for example, are like a box placed around a section of the text, which cannot be broken. Other elements must either fit completely into the box — as in the case of tags that both open and close within the paragraph — or must exist as a larger box that completely surrounds the paragraph, effectively opening and closing or wrapping around it. Because the physical manuscript pages have beginnings and endings that do not regularly coincide with the beginnings and endings of paragraphs, it would have been necessary to change the paragraph-level markup by replacing the paired "opening" and "closing" tags with self-closing elements. Self-closing elements are used individually, rather than in pairs, allowing them to sit at any point within the textual hierarchy, which can be quite helpful, but the result is that the semantic effect of the self-closing element is quite different from paired tags: since self-closing elements cannot wrap around a portion of the text, they act as milestone markers instead. Self-closing elements cannot be identified with a portion of text, but only with a specific place within it, much like a period.

While changing the paragraph-based markup would have been possible, it would have fundamentally altered not only Gaskell's journal, but also its readability. Flattened paragraphs would have falsely divided the text, through effectively "chunking" it up and separating the text based on arbitrary page break divisions. In addition, the loss of the paragraph tags would render the XML text nearly unsearchable. One of the primary values of an XML transcription is that the nested hierarchy allows for easy searchability through Xpath, searches that can be built on and productively mobilized through XSLT. Without the paragraph markup, Xpath would be required to look through nearly the entire manuscript for any instances of individual text or structures, instead of being able to follow a clear path down the XML tree from major sections to subsequently smaller elements to reach the desired result. "Chunking" the text to align with arbitrary page breaks similarly alters its human readability, by dividing the text into divisions that do not correspond to Gaskell's semantic choices.

I have therefore chosen to alter the initial design structure in favor of one which will keep the journal text intact, while providing internal links for easy navigation by users. The images will be presented in a relative location to the portions of the text they represent, allowing users to view and study both per the goals of this new Edition. A future goal, after the dissertation stage, is to further refine the site presentation in such a way that the text is prioritized and unaltered, offering the contextual notes and information that this edition is intended to provide, while also producing a secondary, image-based viewing option. Possibilities for viewing the images include separating the transcription from a IIIF based image presentation which allows in-depth examination, including zoom capability, which is not presently available in the edition, or an image-first page which subsequently opens the appropriate section of the transcription file for users who seek direct comparison of the transcription with the original manuscript.

The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition stands as a testament to the possibilities presented by textual encoding and opening the dissertation process to new media forms. Patrick Sahle claimed that "Scholarly digital editions are scholarly editions that are guided by a digital paradigm in their theory, method and practice."[13] and the use of TEI encoding provides the basis for such a paradigm in The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition. The added value of the digital scholarly edition lies in its ability to move beyond the confines of a codex presentation, and in the production of multiple reading views and interactive features. The Elizabeth Gaskell Journal: Digital Edition provides viewers a choice between a default diplomatic view, and a normalized reading view — a choice that would remain minimally plausible, but significantly more challenging and costly to replicate in a print format. Sahle further writes: "A digital edition cannot be given in print without significant loss of content and functionality."[14] Built upon the premise of a digitally encoded text, this edition of the journal is not reproducible in a print format, because many of its users could not read the TEI file itself. The TEI edition file, however, together with the other technological tools used to produce this edition, makes possible an interactive website that places the edition within an ongoing trend of new Digital Humanities projects and initiatives.

The digital paradigm on which this edition is built embeds editorial intervention and methodology into the encoding file. This digital edition, while it creates a new transcription of the manuscript text, has been envisioned as a means of presenting the text in a way that explicitly reveals the editorial interventions that underlie any received text. The use of XML encoding has made it possible to clearly mark all editorial interventions to create transparency for the reader. The encoding also allows readers to choose their level of interaction with the text, presenting an editorially annotated view and a clean, regularized reading view simultaneously in an easy to toggle format, with optional notes available via mouseover. The Edition similarly presents the manuscript images alongside the transcription to allow readers the opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of the transcription themselves, and to engage in analysis of both text and its original appearance representation at their desired level of interaction.

Preservation Rationale

As this dissertation will be the first digital dissertation in the English Department at MSU, it was necessary to create a plan for preserving the digital portions of the site in a meaningful way. I have worked with several individuals with expertise in data, archiving, digital humanities and digital preservation to formulate the following plan for preservation of the website and coding files. The preservation plan for the digital portions of the dissertation is four-fold, consisting of a video walkthrough of the site's user experience, a time-bound capture of the site using Archive-it software, the submission of a PDF copy with a zipped digital file containing the Edition code via ProQuest, and a GitHub Fork to preserve the code at the time of final submission.

Although digital content allows for broader access, the rate at which applications, digital formats and software changes means that digital data and products can quickly become out of date or be lost. As Elena Pierazzo writes, "Digital is fragile, ephemeral and mutable, all characteristics that are ill-suited for a medium used to convey scholarship."[15] The ideal preservation plan for the digital portions of the site would be to simply direct readers or guests to a still-working version of the site itself, with all its commensurate parts. The reality, however, is that the dissertation site will eventually lose functionality or be updated. As such, the preservation plan is based on two assumptions. First, this preservation plan assumes that the site will continue to be updated and new content will be added in time. Second, the plan assumes that the website will eventually lose some functionality due to age, maintenance issues, or the obsolescence of technology, requiring either updating or a new site entirely. The plan put in place attempts to create a record that will allow later users to come as close as possible to the experience of using the original site.

In terms of preservation, the project will benefit from the longevity of the TEI. Many older archival projects have recently adopted XML, as traditional files like Word and Pages are proprietary and are less useful for cross-platform legibility. Encoding the Gaskell Journal's Edition file in TEI XML will enable the content to be quickly updated for use online as needed. In addition, the TEI Council continues to maintain and update the TEI Guidelines, ensuring the continued applicability of the technology. Another advantage is the ability to use XSLT identity transformations to update the TEI file. When changes to online standards occur, XSLT can be designed and run to make subtle changes in the original transcription, outputting the remainder of the text as-is, so that a single tag, for example, can be changed in one action throughout the text without impacting the rest of the file. XSLT can likewise be used to generate new html pages for the site, thereby making changes and updates simply and quickly. Additionally, the structure of XML embeds metadata into the file, which can be used to generate bibliographic citations or data for other systems, like MARC or Dublin Core. These technologies will ease the burden of keeping the site current.

First, the user experience of the website itself will be preserved through a recorded walkthrough of the site. For this I will use Camtasia or a similar software to record a video showing the screen as a user clicks through the site, with a voiceover. This video recording will save a record of the interactivity on the site at the time of submission, so that later visitors to the site will still be able to experience it the way it appeared at the final submission.

Second, a final submission version of the site will be recorded through the use of Archive-It. Formed in 2006, Archive-It is self-described as "the leading web archiving solution for a wide range of organizations, including academic, federal, state or local libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions" (Archive-It). The use of Archive-It, which provides services for "capturing and preserving web-based content," will allow the creation of a searchable, interactive snapshot version of the site at the time of dissertation submission. The Archive-It capture will be produced by MSU librarians, under the guidance of Robin Dean.

The MSU library has an established protocol for the submission of Electronic Dissertations as a PDF file through ProQuest. ProQuest submission also allows the inclusion of digital files. The written portion of the dissertation will be submitted in the usual format as a PDF file containing links to the dissertation website and GitHub repository. Additionally, the submission to ProQuest will include a zipped file of the code files for the project. This will allow the MSU repository to have an inclusive version of the dissertation that represents the digital as well as the written content. The ProQuest file will be linked to the Archive-It capture.

Finally, I will create a GitHub release to preserve a version of the code at the time of submission. A release is a 'deployable software iteration" that can be made available for download and use." GitHub releases "mark a specific point in [the] repository's history". GitHub tracks the version history of the code files. By creating a release, the specific version that was submitted as the dissertation will be easily identified without the need to search through the entire commit history. The use of a release also allows for the addition of documentation to explain the release and the code at that point. The dissertation PDF will contain a link directly to the release on the GitHub repository. The end result of the preservation plan will be a tightly cross-linked set of data and description that will be searchable from multiple directions.

The Editor will also maintain a reference link to the original Dissertation release and documentation of the updates to the project on the main website, which will continue to be maintained through the Reclaim Hosting account. I will personally fund continued purchase of the domain name, so that the site remains available as it is updated. These measures should ensure that a reasonably complete version of the dissertation at the time of submission, given the current available tools, remains available for scholars for years to come.