Beginning the Conversation on the Future of Digital Donne Resources: Results of JDS User Survey

With a foundation of prose texts in place (see our previous post), it is now time to look forward to a union of the prose and poetry resources dedicated to the study of John Donne. The starting point for this discussion must be a consideration of the most mature and extensive of these resources, DigitalDonne, and the use our community has made of it. As we start planning a combined site and its desired affordances, we thought it apposite to survey the user community to assess the form and presentation of resources in DigitalDonne and how they are used by those most fully involved in the study of Donne. These results were presented at the annual conference of the John Donne Society on 11 February 2024. Here I summarize our findings from the survey and the conversation that followed.

On January 3, 2024, I sent an email to the John Donne Society listserv inviting participation in an unscientific survey with this preamble:

It is time to start thinking and planning concretely for a complete digital archive that will combine the materials at the Variorum's DigitalDonne site with the prose materials accumulated on the project blog. In keeping with the history of these two projects, we aim to build these materials as a community to meet the needs of our community and of all scholars and teachers of Donne. To that end, I am enlisting your help in imagining what such a website should contain and how it should function. This survey is intended as a conversation starter, a conversation we will continue at the meeting of the John Donne Society in Baton Rouge this coming February and beyond in other contexts as well. I am asking you to contribute to this conversation by completing this fairly brief questionnaire. 

Multiple-choice questions about use of resources

I then presented links to DigitalDonne resources referenced in these questions:

• Facing-page facsimile editions (manuscript and print sources)
• Concordances of these manuscripts and print editions (e.g. here)
• Front matter in the print volumes of the Variorum (in pdf)
• First-line indexes of poems contained in the print editions and manuscripts
• Short-form indexes of poems contained in the print editions and manuscripts
• Master list of poems in 17th-century sources
• Location list of poems in 17th-century print editions
• Transcriptions used in collations for the Donne Variorum
• Complete poems concordance
• Concordance to the 1654 letters
• Roberts Bibliographies
• Gallery of ms images (giving samples of the various ms hands)

Then followed two question for each of these resources:

1. Which of these elements in DigitalDonne (see links above) have you used?
2. Which of these same elements do you anticipate using in future? 

The directions also asked users to indicate whether they have used or hope to use these resources for teaching, for research, or for both.

Nineteen respondents completed the survey. A full set of results from the multiple-choice questions can be found here. I will only summarize a few results that seem particularly meaningful and informative as we think about developing these materials in an intentional way.

Accessibility and findability:

In many cases, the process of doing this survey brought users into corners of the site they had never seen before, and in many instances, they found resources that they would like to use. This and the case presented next points to a common theme in the prose responses that we will look at in more detail below: a key consideration as we develop the resources must be accessibility and, related to that, findability.

In answer to the question “Which of these elements in DigitalDonne have you used / anticipate using?” it became clear that there are some resources on the DigitalDonne site that have gone unnoticed but, when highlighted, are clearly of interest to users. In most cases, where some answered “have you used ______?” with “never” or “once” (first graph below), the answers for “do you anticipate using in ______ future?” (second graph) were more promising / promissory.

One such case that particularly stands out is a “Master list of poems in 17th-century sources.”

This master list is indeed a powerful resource, but it is buried in the site and in a form that is not immediately comfortable for many users. In brief, this Excel spreadsheet is essentially a complete representation of all the poems (works) and all textual versions (manifestations) of them in all the documents containing Donne’s verse, complete with first lines, headings used to name the poem (in cases where there is one), and more. It would be a powerful mechanism for linking resources and enable movement between them as well as finding resources and searching across the whole body of material.

Teaching in relation to Research:

In many cases, the balance between teaching (blue) and research (green) leans more prominently toward research in the “anticipated” use than it does in actual use. Here again we can infer that users were unaware of this resource: quite a few have never used it, and very few anticipate they would never want to use it. We might also infer that often teaching is given priority over research and more time dedicated to research is wished for.

 

Insights shared in the open-ended questions

Most insightful to me are the prose responses to the open-ended questions at the end of the survey. These are the highlights.

Question 1: What do you most appreciate about DigitalDonne? What are the most valuable materials, resources, uses, or functions of DigitalDonne at present?

Generally, respondents expressed great respect and appreciation for the amount of material there.

Concordances: five responses named the concordances, but it must be noted that there were a few indications here and in the third multiple choice question gauging use of concordances that not all users are aware of all the available concordances (of the whole body of poems, of select document concordances, and of the 1654 letters). One respondent wrote:

I mostly used the concordances to conduct efficient keyword-based research in Donne's corpus (i.e. what are the other occurrences of a given concept or word in other poems or texts I may have missed). These types of "technological lookups" have been invaluable in my research to identify and address patterns in Donne's writing that have not necessarily been researched or identified so far by others.

Concordances are a theme in the next two sets of answers as well.

Images and transcription of artefacts: five respondents indicated their appreciation for images of original artefacts (documents) and/or facing-page transcriptions presenting text with corresponding images. Here we saw indication of value for both teaching and research in representing the materiality of documents, where texts come from, and editing processes.

Roberts’ bibliographies: three respondents indicated their appreciation of the pdf files of the four volumes of John Roberts’ annotated bibliographies of modern criticism on Donne.

Availability and Access: several respondents expressed their appreciation of access to a variety of resources and the convenience of having them all in one place. Simply put, users appreciate that they can access this material electronically from their own workstations without having to consult (and travel to) archives and libraries. Two respondents wrote,

It is INCREDIBLY valuable for teaching--I love the ability to introduce my grad students to [images of] early modern script, early print editions, and to give them the kinds of tools that ordinarily are only available in well-resourced libraries or in unwieldy physical volumes (which my school may or may not own, and which if I own I may not be able to share efficiently)

AND

I appreciate the wealth of materials it makes available as well as its relative ease of use. The other day in my Donne seminar, a student brought up an argument she had read in an article ... on NY3. To address her question, I simply brought up DigitalDonne on the main screen, clicked into NY3, used the index to find the poem, and then we all examined the cancelled lines [the author] talks about. We came to a very different conclusion than she did ... . This whole exchange wasn't planned; it just came up. DigitalDonne was on-hand as an immediate resource.

Authoritative sources: one respondent mentioned explicitly what others imply and assume, that these are scholarly and reliable resources.

Question 2: What would you change on the DigitalDonne site?

The dominant them here is means of access rather than the content itself. Predominantly and throughout the answers, users note the interface and the form of some materials. While respondents appreciate having ready access to the content on a single site, easy and logical access to the materials is sometimes lacking. Access comes up repeatedly in terms of “more direct access,” “clarity and accessibility,” “easy access," “user-friendliness,” and “navigation.” These responses are not surprising given that 1) DigitalDonne evolved over time with new materials and features as they became available; 2) was never professionally designed; and 3) does not use up to date and integrated technology. Understandably, financial resources were dedicated to content first and form second. 

Upgraded content and forms: a few respondents noted opportunities for updating and upgrading content for improved access and usability, e.g. the Roberts bibliographies in pdf. One wished for addition of images and transcriptions of more manuscript sources, including newly discovered sources. One respondent identified a gap in content, wishing for information about Donne’s library.

Findability:  A couple of respondents would like to see “cross-references” and “links” between resources already contained as well as links to annotation. There was an expressed desire for a “search all” function (with filters and facets) covering all the text-form materials on the site. In this and the next question, there was one answer calling for XML-encoding to enable a different kind of accessibility and enriching of the text, making it more “agile” for a variety of future uses.

Question 3: Looking forward now, what materials, resources, functions, or features would you like to see in a unified DigitalDonne that would include both poetry and prose? Please think about both teaching and research.

Complete access: a recurring theme was the desire to see the poetry and prose brought together into one site (four times, and this was part of the framing of the whole thing) along with all the other resources on DigitalDonne. Respondents wanted to see a concordance of everything and the ability to search the whole set of resources all at once.

Completeness: both in terms of the content (transcriptions of as many witnesses as possible, again specifically XML encoded texts) as well as a mechanism for updating the secondary bibliography (i.e. the Roberts bibliographies).

Annotation and linkage: again, there were a few mentions of linking resources, here as a form of annotation: “cross-references” and “linked notes” and annotations of “obscure persons and references,” as well as implementation of a social annotation mechanism.

Additional content: users noted a few absences in the current content. One noted a wish for all of Donne’s prose letters (beyond those in the 1651/1654 edition); another wished for recordings of the poetry and prose read aloud as an added measure of accessibility for students and for the visually impaired. And one respondent noted the need for a more readable, slightly modernized version of Donne’s works that would be more accessible to students as well as for the general use of scholars.

Association with the Donne Variorum: one user noted the imperative that any new site preserve the function of DigitalDonne as the first volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne.

Question 4: What are some purposes or use cases you can imagine for the materials contained in such a site? Again, please think about both teaching and research.

These answers mostly repeated the desiderata above with an added indication of how the affordances would be useful for teaching and research. 

• Concordances for research and teaching
• XML encoding for unanticipated future uses
• All the materials (but particularly images of original artifacts) for teaching book and manuscript history, editing, textual studies and also for research in these areas.
• Images for maintaining the interest of students in teaching, making Donne’s work “come alive.”
• Texts that can be used in class (i.e. more edited and modernized)
• Use of material in digital humanities applications for textual and linguistic analysis
• Use of the site as a platform to encourage the exchange of teaching materials practices and resources related to Donne
• Social annotation to foster and complement scholarly exchange
  

 

Discussion and "blue skying" toward future development of digital Donne resources

A robust discussion following the presentation of these results at the conference affirmed and fleshed out many of these themes and desiderata for future development of digital resources related to John Donne.

A unified, rationalized site: clearly there is a strong desire to bring the poetry and prose materials together and (I would add) to bring them to the same level of development and to a contemporary technological standard: this means bringing the poetry transcriptions to a TEI P5 standard and bringing the metadata of the prose up to the same standard as the poetry.

Accessibility, liking, and findability: there are many aspects to this point. Users want to be able to access the materials more easily and readily and to access all the material in the same search: this suggests retaining the finding functions already available (concordances) but expanding them to cut across resources. Related to this is linking of resources.

Sustainable expansion and updating of content: we need a plan and structure in place to enable expansion of the materials, particularly completion of the prose, but also, for example, continuing the work of John Roberts’ annotated bibliography.

DigitalDonne and the Donne Variorum: we need to maintain in some form the identity of DigitalDonne as the first volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, and there is also opportunity to refine and augment the introductory function of the resources here. On a related point, one idea arising from our discussion is the need for a single-volume, user-friendly (and student-friendly) edition of the poems as edited in the Variorum. A set of poems in this form could also serve as an avenue into the whole set of resources, as the entry point for all version and other content related to a give work (i.e. poem).

The need for capacity building: finally, arising from the survey and especially our discussion is a clear sense that while users sometimes find the material difficult to access and to use, it is also true that users do not always come to these resources with enough awareness of what they have to offer and how they might be used with available digital processes and tools.

Teaching and research: an unanticipated emphasis in our discussion was the attention paid to teaching. I infer two things from this: first (and this was remarked upon in our discussion) the close relationship between teaching and research for scholars in this field; and second, a tendency to think about digital resources in the context of teaching (where uses are readily apparent) matched by uncertainty how to use the resources for research beyond a simple search function.

Continuing the Discussion

This blog post is a first step in what needs to be a series of discussions toward a plan for sustainable and intentional development of these resources, beginning with integration of the poetry and prose materials. Watch this space for forthcoming communications about the planning process.

Submitted by Brent Nelson