The document discusses representing the material aspects of Willa Cather's personal copy of her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop in a digital archive. It describes annotations and additions Cather made to her copy, including her signature, photographs, and drawings. It also evaluates different digital text modeling approaches for encoding this material information, such as TEI, FRBR, and library metadata standards, considering their benefits and limitations for this case study.

1. Representing Materiality in a
Digital Archive: Death Comes for
the Archbishop as a Case Study
Matthew Lavin
CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
University of Nebraska – Lincoln
http://matthew-lavin.com
Twitter: @mjlavin80

2. Digital Texts, or Digital Books?

3. • Her signature on the
front end paper and
her parenthetical
phrase below it
“(personal copy)”
(Cather wrote her
name in the middle of
a cumulus cloud in a
landscape of the
Southwest.)
• A folded fan letter
pasted in the inside
cover, which includes a
snapshot of Kit
Carson.

4. • A watercolor image of
an adobe church on the
blank recto preceding
the limitation page.
(Aside: Mignon says it’s
a colored block-print.)

5. • A pasted photograph of Cather on horseback in a gravel-
bed stream (on the contents page)
• Additional personal photographs, on facing pages 16 and
17, following the prologue
(Mignon, Charles. “Cather's Copy of Death Comes for the
Archbishop.” Cather Studies 4 (2003). The Willa Cather
Archive. Ed. Andrew Jewell. U of Nebraska-Lincoln. Web. 9
July 2013.)

6. • the interpretive payoff of imagining all digitization work
in the context of data modeling
• significant complexities associated with linguistic and
bibliographical aspects of book, and resulting
implications for digital text models
• the pros and cons of widespread digital text modeling
approaches, including text encoding work and digital
cataloguing conventions
• sites of future convergence for seemingly incompatible
approaches
• the minimum baseline for representing materiality in
digital form (as well as what might constitute the
optimum standard)

7. Digital Humanities’ Next Top Model

8. • Providing a resource
• Key versions in circulation during Cather’s lifetime
• “item-level” specificity for all books
• relationships among multiple types of materials
• distinctions among edition, issue, state, and impression
• books as products of collaboration
• revisions (amounts and scope)
• technological processes
• history of institutions

9. The Site Timeline

10. Item Browse

11. Technical Documentation

12. Raw data

13. TEI and FRBR

14. Pros:
• Versatile / extensible
• Machine readable in the most general sense
• Includes both textual and “book” information
• Provides a core basis for comparison of dissimilar objects
• Provides a structure to record textual variance without necessarily
making a judgment
• DOM container hierarchies do not match mark-up type hierarchies
• (A hierarchical structure mapped to data types could be oppressive)
Cons:
• High learning curve
• Huge time investment
• Lack of (current) analytics payoff
• Not a complete book/text model … too much room for variety and
idiosyncrasy?
• DOM container hierarchies do not match mark-up type hierarchies
• (A hierarchical structure mapped to data types could be useful)
• Too versatile and open to idiosyncrasy?

16. Pro:
• Nuanced bibliographical data
• Powerful relational data
• Designed to facilitate user discovery of related materials
• Once you get the hang of it, easy to enter data
• Easy to down-code to adhere to other standards
Con:
• Hard to explain
• Hard to up-code into FRBR
• Never fully realized or leveraged
• High learning curve
• Some question as to the realness of the categorical
distinctions

18. Potential Connectors
• namespace declaration
• linked data
• hierarchized markup
• stand-off markup

19. Your Metadata is (are) My Data