Download 10/12/2012 - Jefferson Trust

John O’Brien
[email protected]
Brad Pasanek
[email protected]
The Jefferson Trust
Project Report
Tablet Edition of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia
Summary to date:
Our initial goal, to produce an iPad edition of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of
Virginia, has been accomplished. Working with Performant Solutions, software developers
in Charlottesville, we are now in possession of an edition of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the
State of Virginia that has been designed from the ground up to be read on the iPad. We
continue to promote the tablet computer environment as the ideal medium for reading and
studying this challenging text, and we very much like our application, which pairs a fullyedited and annotated reading text with page images from two unique copies of the book held
in our Special Collections Library: a copy of a 1785 private printing that Jefferson had done
in Paris, and which he gave to the Marquis de Lafayette, and Jefferson's own copy of the
1787 edition that he had published for general consumption in London. The latter copy is a
particular treasure because it includes hundreds of Jefferson's annotations and emendations,
corrections to the book that were never published in his lifetime, and that our edition
transcribes, annotates, and analyzes for modern readers.
But we encountered a problem when we submitted this application to Apple for approval
and release through the App Store (the only venue for the public distribution iOS apps).
Apple’s reviewers have now twice rejected our app on the grounds that it is "simply a book"
and insist that our work must be reformatted in their iBooks Author program and issued
through the iBook Store. Apple’s initial rejection came as a complete surprise to us; our
application is in compliance with all of their published guidelines for applications, and they
continue to sell apps that to our eyes are at least as much a "book" as ours. Our best guess is
that we are running afoul of Apple's long-term business plan, which is to push as much
content into the iBook Store as possible to gain leverage in its ongoing war for market share
219 Bryan Hall
P. O. Box 400121
Charlottesville VA 22904-4121
434-924-6647 • Fax: 434-924-1478
E-mail: [email protected]
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against competitors such as Amazon and Google. In the short term, we will be issuing this
app "in house" through Apple's iOS Developer University Program, which will enable
people at the University to use it. And we will continue to work with our developers to try to
think of ways to recast this app as "not just a book" in ways that we hope will pass Apple's
somewhat whimsical standards.
But we still want to get this material distributed more broadly. To that end, we are doing
what Apple demands and are in the process of moving our programming and editorial
efforts out of iOS and into iBooks Author. We do so a little grudgingly in order to salvage
the research time committed thus far, but we have the assistance of English Department
graduate students this semester who can help us, along with the aid of the Digital Media Lab.
We are also exploring the possibility of recoding the project for the Droid operating system
so that the app can run on Android tablets. At the moment, these have a much smaller share
of the marketplace than does the iOS, but that Apple’s near monopoly on the tablet market
is unlikely to hold forever, as the cost of Android tablets is set to drop precipitously. We will
be meeting with researchers at the Jefferson Library at Monticello, the Jefferson Papers and
librarians at the Massachusetts Historical Society about future development of this material.
Total Cost to Date:
We have spent down our original $23,000 grant, as well as an additional $2,000 from the
College of Arts and Sciences.
Successes:
Simply transcribing a new digital edition of this text is a significant accomplishment, as all
previously-produced digital editions (such as the two housed at the University's own E-Text
Center) turn out to be seriously flawed. We have also discovered that Jefferson’s annotations
and edits in his personal copy have not been carefully reviewed since the nineteenth century.
We are very excited to correct countless centuries-old errors and offer a new faithful
transcription of Jefferson’s notes on his Notes.
After talking to documentary editors and Jefferson scholars, we learned that the team who
has been editing Jefferson’s works for Princeton University Press these past several decades
has never made much headway with Jefferson’s Notes. Indeed, the Notes is so complicated a
text, it has stymied two editors to date! It now appears that work going forward at the
Massachusetts Historical Society on Jefferson’s manuscript and our own work with the 1787
printing will lay the groundwork—finally—for a new and reliable edition of Jefferson’s most
important book. We are very excited to offer the electronic environment as a solution to
several of those problems with textual variants that have derailed past print editions of the
work.
219 Bryan Hall
P. O. Box 400121
Charlottesville VA 22904-4121
434-924-6647 • Fax: 434-924-1478
E-mail: [email protected]
2
Problems:
We detail these above. We reached an impasse in Apple's application process to the App
Store, and are in the process of reformatting the application for their iBook Store. At this
point, however, our time is essentially being donated in order to make sure that the work
reaches its largest possible audience, which was our goal at the outset.
Total number of people:
Seven people are have working been on this project: four at the University and three at the
developer's. Two new research assistants (an M.A. student and a Ph.D student) are taking on
the major work of translating our app to an iBooks format. We are currently receiving
support and consulting from U.Va.’s Digital Media Lab (DML).
Number of students:
Two graduate students assisted with primary transcriptions. Our main transcriber, Annie
Kinnibrugh, has done such great work that we are crediting her with the title of Associate
Editor. She was intimately involved in the XML encoding. Two new students, mentioned,
above are translating the app from iOS to iBooks Author.
Number of people impacted:
Only those working on it, as the software has not been released.
Impact on University and Community:
No impact yet, but we have received encouragement and have been relayed expressions of
excitement from faculty in History, staff at the Library, and at researchers at Monticello.
Is the project completed? When will it be completed?
We expect to complete the in December or early January. While we had originally hoped for
a “big release” in Apple App Store and iTunes U, we will have to release the app on U.Va.’s
enterprise network. The e-book will be released as an “iBook” through the Apple bookstore
and the same PR effort will be mobilized.
We are angling for major media coverage. As an aside, we are considering trying to place a
piece in The Chronicle or the New York Times Book Review on Apple’s (ill-considered)
decision to make a strong distinction between “books” and “apps.”
Future plans:
We tentatively plan to use this as a proof-of-concept to apply for funding from entities like
the NEH or the Mellon Foundation to enlarge the scope of this edition. We imagine more
sophisticated future editions of the app: a Notes 2.0 and a Notes 3.0. (A sufficiently
219 Bryan Hall
P. O. Box 400121
Charlottesville VA 22904-4121
434-924-6647 • Fax: 434-924-1478
E-mail: [email protected]
3
sophisticated app might impress Apple as something more than a book, but we are not,
currently, focusing our main effort on dressing up the app for a third review.)
Opportunities for collaborations with the Massachusetts Historical Society, UVa’s Rotunda
Press, and Princeton University Press exist. We continue to maintain relationships with all
three organizations, and will be meeting this month with Jack Robertson and Jefferson
Looney from the Jefferson Library and the Jefferson Papers.
In the spring and over the course of next year, we hope to take the app on the road and
present our e-book as a scholarly and educational model for electronic reading texts. As we
encode the textual history of Jefferson’s Notes, we are increasingly aware that other
notoriously “problematic” texts (like Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Emily Dickinson’s poetry)
could repurpose the architecture we have imagined. Our PR campaign will almost certainly
include presentations at Monticello, the MLA, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century
Studies, and the annual American Digital Humanities conference, but we would also like to
get farther afield and make an impact beyond the academy.
Other comments:
We are still planning a launch party for the local press, our supporters, and our collaborators
in Special Collections, History, and at Monticello. The week before we are ready to launch
we’ll load the book on several iPads and let our guests demo the book(s). You'll all be
invited!
219 Bryan Hall
P. O. Box 400121
Charlottesville VA 22904-4121
434-924-6647 • Fax: 434-924-1478
E-mail: [email protected]
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