Responses from the user focus groups and interviews
S2, on annotations
He has reviewed Bess of Hardwick’s letter collection before and found the ability to click from one transcription to the other helpful. He also liked the ability to hover over specific parts of the text which would provide additional information (as an interpretive or contextual resource) would be helpful in a digital edition, similar to Wikipedia.
S4, on historical text editing
In relation to his experiences on an historical text editing module, he recognises that there is a balance to be struck between making changes to the text and being as loyal as possible, and he would personally prefer to do the latter. In terms of diplomatic transcriptions, he has experience in showing the changes that writers made (e.g. deletions and insertions), to be able to understand the entire editorial process:
“That’s why I definitely would encourage a diplomatic transcription, because you see how the text comes up, you see the changes that occur to it as well in terms of the Modern English.”
S6, on historical text editing
S6 states that editing is about boundaries and setting parameters:
“We’re talking in terms of the editing and translation, about parameters, so that we’re not creating a completely new interpretation. It’s closer to transliteration and not something that’s a reinvention. What’s wrong with that? Nothing as its own construction, but as a representation of the original, we’ve moved away into something that represents ‘me’ as the author. I think we go back to rules and standards and parameters around what’s acceptable.”
S10, on accessibility
She believes one of the challenges for online editions is that some resources are behind a paywall (e.g. the OED) that you cannot access without institutional access. She also finds that reading a text online (e.g. on TEAMS) can be quite difficult, and sometimes quite bare. She mentions that they are difficult to print, which is still an important aspect of studying. Additionally, students should be able to use the edition on multiple devices especially if they do not have access to a laptop. For example, resources should be readable on tablets or phones in the classroom. They should also be accessible to all, especially disabled people (e.g. with visual impairments).
S12, on online editions
She believes it is a challenge for students to read palaeography, and online editions are helpful in the sense that there are often translations which accompany the edition. She believes that online editions can foster opportunities for open and equitable access amongst the privileged, institutionalised education pathways, which are expensive for individuals. Understanding Middle English involves a lot of time and money which people do not necessarily have, so open access editions are important for those who do not have the opportunity to go to university.
T1, on useful critical editions
She uses The Riverside Chaucer as the critical edition for reading Chaucer’s texts, as it has useful notes and introductions that are not too long, as well as key discussion points. The teaching team scanned the relevant extracts of the Riverside within the 10% rule, as asking students to purchase the book was seen as too much of an investment. The teacher also asks the students to use interlinear translations first to understand what was going on in the text, which is especially useful for students whose first language is not English.
T4 and T5 on reliable editions
T4 uses websites with the text of study on them (e.g. Harvard), which are decent and reliable editions, and the translations are good, but they lack the nuance and the notes/background material which allow students to interpret the text further. She mainly uses the Riverside Chaucer edition, which she states has a good glossary and introductory notes. However, she finds that students do not seem to pick up on introductory notes in paper editions:
“Even in Week 3, some of them don’t seem to realise their glossary notes at the bottom of the page, even though I tell them in Week 1, ‘this is a glossary when you read it, if you come across the word you don’t recognise, look at the bottom margin’. Come Week 7, no one seems to have discovered the notes.”
She also believes it would be an advantage if the edition had the manuscript there for students to click around in. If a teaching edition of the Pardoner’s Tale was created, she would recommend it to her students for a resource but would use the Riverside Chaucer in class, because she needs access to all of the texts. She also feels it would be difficult to read such long texts (e.g. Troilus and Criseyde) on a computer as it would become quite tiresome, and would be quite difficult for students to make annotations in the margins.
In his own personal research, T5 uses the Chaucer Concordance by Columbia University to search for strings or words, and also recommends this to his students as a good resource. He has not personally used any online editions in class. While he can see the dimension and advantages of using an online or digital edition, he feels he is a “faithful adherent to the Riverside Chaucer”. However, he states that the Riverside Chaucer is not always the easiest edition to use in its full capacity as it is quite a powerful and large resource.
T2, on older CD-ROMs as part of the historical editing process
One of the resources that the teacher used to use was the original Wife of Bath CD ROM, which was networked via the university computers. She found that students see these editions as quite ‘vintage’; she notes that these editions are part of the history of editing, and the history of the reception and remediation of the texts, and still finds them useful for teaching purposes. The fact that there are more digitised versions of manuscripts freely available online means that they can be easily accessed during teaching, especially when it comes to teaching paleography.
When teaching the Auchinleck Manuscript, the teacher uses an edition which is around 20 years old, is made up of HTML and images online, and does not break down. She feels there is no learning curve for students to undergo to be able to use the edition, whereas resources such as EEBO may be much more difficult to use. She finds the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive to be a difficult text with a difficult textual tradition, paired with ‘an uncompromising web resource’:
“We have a look at that towards the end of the course, but they’ve got no idea what’s going on. […] Presumably it’s designed for real specialists who work on Piers Plowman professionally for a small group of people. […] I could teach it, but I would need a lot of time. I’d need hours and hours […] for them to really start to get something out of it.”
She states that this is mainly an issue for undergraduates, but that postgraduates tend to be more keen on medieval literature and may be able to work through a resource such as this. She says that undergraduates like technical challenges but there is a limit to what you can do in the classroom, the large amounts of information is not a problem but the interface needs to be simple and accessible.
T6, on user friendly resources
She uses different types of digital resources in the classroom when studying Chaucer, including the OED and the MED; she believes the OED is a rich resource which discusses etymology and the precise nature of when the term came into the language (as far as is possible). This is then supplemented with the MED and the Chaucer Concordance via the New Chaucer Society web pages. She finds the OED to be an easily accessible resource for students and is good for assessments on ‘the history of a word’ and how particular terms such as ‘queer’ have changed over time.
She also uses David Lawton’s Norton Chaucer which she says is student-friendly and has useful glosses and meaning nuances. She believes students like investigating different issues via Google Ngram Viewer due to the ability to visualise the frequency of specific words over time, but that this can be a challenge because they only go back to 1500 when there is a rise in printed texts.
She does not like/use the CD-ROM digital editions for the classroom, especially as the textual variants in hypertext format do not appear to have been designed for teaching. Most students also have laptops without disk trays and the CD-ROMs can crash their computers due to an overload of information.
Ideas for digital resources and tools
S3, on interaction and engagement in editions
In other online texts, he feels that some of the content can be quite dry, and having a page on context would be interesting, ensuring that it is geared towards students:
“There’s so much scope there for adding loads of just interesting [information] because I know personally I’d click on all the links if there was relevant contemporary information from the time or even just manuscripts, paintings, anything like that. Something that is going to give you more of an all-encompassing [insight] on pardoners—it brings it all to life.”
S6, on losing original meaning and immersion
He believes that there are certainly limits to what a teaching edition should do:
“I think the limits would be, how far – in terms of translation – would we start to lose the original meaning. Once we’re moving further and further away into new connections and new associations, then we’re leaving behind the source. And the source is what we’re presenting.”
He states that it is important for the edition to not solely arise from the editor’s imagination, instead focusing on the text as it is, without too much editorial bias.
He would also like to see something immersive:
“Sometimes the text when presented as digital editions could be incredibly dry and don’t really add anything that print could do. I guess the question would be what are the benefits of technology that can add to the text edition. […] text links, it’s recordings, it’s everything else that can be done.”
S8, on interactive games and aesthetics
She had an idea for an edition which involved creating an interactive game for undergraduate students to help with their translation:
“I actually had an idea that something that could be interactive […] to have certain highlighted words where you could click on it and there could be an interactive game where it’s like ‘pick what you think the meaning could be’”.
A further idea related to speaking and listening to Chaucer aloud. She discussed an activity whereby you could highlight the different layers of narration in the tales, especially as it can be confusing for students to decipher between the different voices of the tale.
She feels there needs to be a balance in the way that the digital edition is presented, keeping in mind that the font and colour of the online edition should be readable, but bringing in aspects of the original so that it does not look ‘tacky’:
“I think you’ve got some versions where they’re playing a medieval soundtrack in the background, and then of course it’s running through. I can’t even look at it. It’s camp but I think there needs to be some way to make it feel thematically right for Chaucer.”
She feels the Poetry Foundation is a good example for displaying poetry online:
“I think all of their poems have the same font and size, and obviously they cover a whole range of poems, but it always feels quite true to the text—it’s so stripped back that it stays very true to line length and it works on both mobile and desktop because that might be something you have to consider as well.” One idea she had for a digital edition in relation to the layout is “disappearing options where it could be [that] you add in the line breaks a bit visually or you add in the stresses so you can turn that on and off. It’s not distracting but if you need it, [it’s there].”
S4, on AI co-pilots
He mentioned one idea in relation to the machine learning aspects of the edition:
“I thought that maybe if there was a digital edition, if you keep seeing those assistants popping up on every website—maybe an AI assistant for Chaucer sitting there in the corner. Maybe incorporating the Middle English Dictionary into ChatGPT rather than just opening up a glossary—I think your AI is the glossary itself.”
S5, on guidance for non-native speakers
She said that while she is fluent in English, as a non-native speaker she found translating Middle to Modern English quite difficult, and would like to see as much detail as possible to help with this process.
S9, on translation assignments
In terms of translation assignments, S9 states that they could be carried out like Duolingo, and that a digital edition might incorporate some of the features of the word in its context, similar to reading comprehension tasks:
“I think Duolingo does a very similar thing where they give you a story and they read you the story in the language that you’re learning and then they’ll give you little prompts like, ‘Why was Mark late?’ and it just tests your inference skills in a way—I think that’s quite interesting.”
S4, on gearing content towards an audience
S4 believes that the process of editing a text in the classroom also involves encouraging students to understand the text and why it was written in a certain way:
“You also need to aim toward your audience. If your audience is a student audience, you want the topic to land and to be understood from the teacher’s perspective. You want to try to at least be as informative as you can for them to assimilate the information at the end.”
S7, on collaboration
One of the modules she took involved creating a ‘Living Library’ via Google Jamboards, whereby students could add discussion under different topics:
“…they were actually quite useful. It was like ‘oh, I’ve gone away and read this thing, I can then share it with the rest of the room’. Because the whole thing with this module, it’s about collaboration, […] we’re not in competition with each other.”
T3, on digital editions in the classroom
He mentions that for teachers to more actively include digital resources in the classroom, digital editions would need to have more contextual information, perhaps about material culture transmission, grammar, information that you would find in the notes section of critical editions (e.g. like in the Oxford World Classics or Penguin editions). The teacher states that this information does appear in the Riverside Chaucer, but they do not put the onerous on students to purchase this edition for just one or two texts. He believes that, in order to make an online text more valuable than plain text, the text would not be cluttered, allowing students to choose whether they simply want to read the text or hone in on specific areas of the text to gather more information. It is not the case that students will need access to all manuscript pages and variants, but they should have enough information to get a feel for grammatical features, the way the text has been transmitted, how it varies between different versions, and to not “be buried under a complete critical apparatus.”
He states that it would be interesting to bring a digital edition into the classroom as a trial run, to be able to read extracts of the text and avoid students becoming daunted by the entire text (especially for the Pardoner’s Tale).
AI
S4, on the reliability of generative AI
He agrees that the earlier stages of ChatGPT may not be able to be relied upon as a source of translation, but that “not every piece of research is 100% accurate, so I think fully condemning ChatGPT for not being 100% accurate might not be the best. AI is intelligent, so if you give it the right material to feed itself on, in this case Chaucer, maybe ChatGPT will actually learn and give us a decent translation, perhaps.”
S6, on reliability and representativeness with AI use
In terms of ChatGPT and translations, he is not sure whether it is sophisticated enough at this stage to be able to cope with translating Middle English to Modern English, to be able to make a critical evaluation of what it’s doing:
“I guess it’s about reliability. Is it representative? At some point, it’s going to get there, and it could be very shortly – I don’t know if we’re there yet – but yeah, I think there will come a point where we can look at its equivalences and see if they’re closer than any human would’ve made, or the same. But I wonder if that’s what we’ll arrive at— ‘this is what a human could do, isn’t that nice?’”
He said it would be a good way to demonstrate the (in)accuracies of ChatGPT in translating Middle English, to see how it put words together to make something coherent but not close enough to the original text.
S13, on ChatGPT and critical thinking
In relation to using ChatGPT in a digital edition, S13 has participated in a similar activity in class before. The activity involved writing a reflection on a critical scholarly essay they had read for class, and asking ChatGPT to do the same thing, followed by an analysis of the differences between them, which she found beneficial for learning. She would like to see similar activities in a digital edition, perhaps involving translation. She believes this would be illuminating for the student and would foster opportunities for thinking critically about Middle English texts that are typically difficult to engage with.
S12, on genAI and teaching
In relation to using ChatGPT in the classroom and for digital editions, S12 has heard from scholars that they are okay with students using the resource, as long as they tell him that they have used it. He is interested in comparing the outputs between what students can produce and their integrity, and what AI-assisted writing can produce. She said it is based around his idea of ‘the Renaissance Computer’:
“…talking about the printing press and how we have moved from this idea of the book as containing all of the information, to the internet—it’s limitless, this endless possibility of information that’s available at our fingertips. I think he’s really curious about the implications of AI and how that’s going to change how we are able to convey information with one another, how we process information […]. I think it’s really interesting that some professors aren’t necessarily shutting down the use of AI-assisted writing, but are in fact encouraging it on an experimental basis.”
S3, on generative AI and ‘reverse learning’
S3 believes that it will be necessary to use ChatGPT pedagogy-wise, but is not sure about its usefulness now for students. He said it might be a good exercise but it might be better to continue to translate in class. However, he said it does flip the teacher-student roles:
“There’s a valuable way of learning in reverse engineering basically. And you’re taking on that typical marking role and you’re having to understand everything from a different perspective. Even if it was put up from the context of it being specifically like ‘there’s going to be faults in this, find them’, or at least interrogate it, I find that really interesting.”
Student involvement in the editing process
T1, on student involvement in translation and editing
In terms of teacher and student involvement in the ‘editing process’, the teacher states that in a previous role she used to ask students to translate lines from a romance and ask them to contribute in any way they wanted:
“I remember thinking that that was a really interesting thing to do and involve students in that way, and it turned out that we found it fun. I thought ‘oh no, they’ll be intimidated, it’ll be really scary and they won’t want to’, but actually it becomes a sort of puzzle, like you want to go ‘oh I want to crack this code and translate these bits.’ And I guess if you have a group they help each other.”
The teacher liked the idea of giving the floor to students to create something like part of an edition—while it will be a challenge to the creators of the edition to meet everyone’s demands, the teacher found it an interesting idea.
T2, on student involvement in the editing process
As part of the textual editing course (for postgraduates), T2 would often select really specific examples after students find their own texts in the archive, for instance, comparing transcriptions from the Ellesmere and the Hengwrt manuscripts, and analysing the decisions that the editor has had to make. She also uses the Riverside Chaucer, investigating “the Chaucer we normally end up reading at university” and take this apart, honing in on the fact that the edition represents 80 different versions of the Canterbury Tales. She finds that students with a linguistics background immediately understand why these editorial decisions are interesting, in relation to different variants in the language, how these feed into the concepts of variation and change in the language, and the transmission of texts. But there are also a few literature students who do get involved in the textual editing side of things.
She says that providing students with raw materials is really important and if students could be part of the editorial process alongside teachers, it would be an interesting task to uncover the transcriptions of the manuscript, looking at how to build a corpus with materials, and analysing marked up material or manuscript images. An edition would be most helpful if it is fairly structured and accessible to students, where they can have an interface to interact with the material, to make it easier for them. The teacher mentioned she would like to incorporate more digital humanities approaches to her teaching, so that further options can be presented to students (e.g. going down the DH route, corpus route, or sticking with original manuscripts). The teacher believes that digital humanities in the classroom can be defined by students being asked to make or build something. This might include being asked to critique the digital structure, analysing how something might be constructed, and what this means for the digital, material form.
T6, on crowdsourced editions
In terms of digital editions, T6 would like to see more open access and crowdsourced editions that are designed with students in mind. An example of a crowdsourced translation is Beowulf by All: Community Translation and Workbook by Abbott, Treharne and Fafinski in 2021 which allowed different people to contribute to its translation. She said this could lead to an evolving edition which is made better through different professional and student editors and writers’ inputs, or a static edition that allows students to determine what the different interpretations of the text would be. She has also participated in Piers Plowman reading groups where people break up into chat rooms and translate different portions of the text:
“We’re invited to translate them as imaginatively as we want, and then we come back and share all our different translations. It’s hard to know how you might represent that in a static form, but it’s highly generative and of course, getting students to participate in these things is absolutely invaluable. That’s absolutely what they have to do.”
She believes that the online Harvard resources are useful for students but that they do not “encourage that plurality of meanings, or how you might translate something more idiomatically.” She advised that taking sections of the Pardoner’s Tale, which are pertinent to understanding the tale (e.g. the Host’s reaction to the Pardoner, the old man knocking on the Earth with his staff, the ‘perched like a dove on a barn’ section) and asking people to translate/interpret them in different ways, perhaps alongside adaptations such as the Refugee Tales.
Overall, she feels that students must be consulted in digital editions for the classroom, and perhaps allow the edition to become a classroom practice where students feed into the edition and they are acknowledged within it; there are issues of time and energy but if it was part of their required learning students may be more willing to give up their time.