(Paper 1) From Repository to Database and Back: Distributed Authority in Ian Lancashire’s Online Libraries

Ian Lancashire produced three main repositories of texts: UTEL (the University of Toronto English Library), RPO (Representative Poetry Online), and LEME (the Lexicons of Early Modern English). All three repositories came into being partly, if not wholly, because of Lancashire’s academic generosity: allowing the world to access important works of English literature and the history of the English language. At a late stage of UTEL’s development, Lancashire and his assistants envisioned the site as “our English Department’s Web site” (Douglas et al, 1999, 18) and an on-line simulacrum of the department and its teaching and research goals (18). The authority of the web site is an extension of the authority of the scholar. By linking to online syllabi for English literature courses taught at the university, the authority of the web site becomes distributed rather than residing in one web master. RPO’s development shows a tension between three motivations: being true to the original goals of Representative Poetry in making available the best English-language poetry, representing multiple English language world cultures through their poetry, and representing Lancashire’s own particular tastes in poetry. Authority here shifts from the pre-post-modernist canon to inclusivity and personal tastes. LEME grew from being a digitization of the important dictionaries of the Early-Modern period to being a digital repository of all English dictionaries, dual-language dictionaries, and assorted lists of words from the period. The authority of the prominent lexicographers is joined with idiosyncratic collectors of words. In all three cases, the authority inherent in the original project is relaxed to become much more catholic in nature. While UTEL was and remained a repository of texts and links, RPO transformed from a repository of texts to “a dynamic website built upon a relational database wherein all the poetic data and metadata are stored” (Plamondon, 2012, 2). RPO was designed to be a database for the digital analysis of the poems, in addition to a site for reading, studying, and enjoying excellent poetry. LEME was constructed on similar principles, where the texts are not just available for reading and searching, but also for integration with text analysis tools. The authority and stability of the text gives way through the database design to the authority of the poetic line and of the lexicon word entry. These are the building blocks upon which RPO and LEME were built. With the most recent edition of RPO and the second version of LEME, these building blocks have been hidden. The authority returns to the texts. The sites, while (potentially) still built on relational databases, have obscured most of the functionality that comes with taking advantage of the relational database foundation. The databases designed for reading, searching, and integration with text analysis tools have returned to being repositories of texts. This paper will trace the shifts in authority in RPO and LEME, arguing that the authority of the repository obscures and neglects the value inherent in the distributed authority contained in their underlying database designs.

(Paper 2) In their own words: Ian Lancashire, Cognitive Stylistics, and the Return of the Author

Ian Lancashire (1942-2025) was known to many as an eminent scholar who worked at the intersections of digital humanities and early modern English drama (Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain, 1984) and historical lexicography (Lexicons of Early Modern England). But another major area of research for Lancashire was Cognitive Stylistics, which Lancashire defined below:

Cognitive Stylistics underscores how every utterance is stamped with signs of its originator, and with the date of its inception…. Cognitive Stylistics determines what those traces may be, using concordances and frequency lists of repeated phenomena and collocations: together, partially, these conceivably map long-term associational memories in the author's mind at the time it uttered the text. … The length of fixed phrases, and the complexity of clusters of those collocations, are important quantitative traits of individuals (Lancashire 2004).

Starting in the early 1990s, Lancashire explored how computer-assisted text analysis could reveal and differentiate not merely the distinctive style of a text, but how it could enable the development of a neuroscientific interpretation of creativity and the cognitive processes of authorship (Lancashire 1993, 1995, 2004). From the beginning, Lancashire’s work suggested that cognitive stylistics marked the return or rebirth in literary studies of ‘the author,’ a personage that had been declared dead by theorists like Roland Barthes. Lancashire’s analyses “search for the author’s brain function in his text. … Is the author who died three hundred years ago truly dead in his work, or can he be partly recognised in them?” (Lancashire 2010). This question is fully explored in Lancashire’s 2010 study, Forgetful Muses: Reading the Author in the Text, which ranges over the works of numerous authors, from Caedmon to Margaret Atwood. Working with computational linguist Graeme Hirst and others, Lancashire went on to study how the author manifests in their writing through symptoms of dementia, analysing and comparing the corpora of Iris Murdoch, Agatha Christie and P. D. James (Le, Lancashire, Hirst & Jokel, 2011). Lancashire later expanded this analysis to include additional authors including Ross Macdonald, known for his hardboiled private eye novels, and children’s writer Enid Blyton (Lancashire 2015).

This presentation will provide a synopsis of Lancashire’s work in cognitive stylistics, with particular focus on the significance of Lancashire’s neurocognitive literary theory and how an author’s vocabulary reveals the creative mechanisms of the individual author.

(Paper 3) (Poetic) Bonds in Primal Testament: A Digital Tools-Based Analysis of Ian Lancashire’s Book-Length Poem

In 2016, Ian Lancashire published Primal Testament, a book-length poem about science, life, and, as perhaps all poems are about, language. One of the features of the poem is how it plays with the letters CGAT, the letters standardly used to represent the nucleobases that are the core constituents of the DNA molecule. Lancashire’s playful use of the CGAT letters within the poem invites, at the very least, a statistical analysis of the use of these and perhaps other letters throughout the poem. Lancashire’s playfulness with language can be extended to an analysis of his poem. Stéfan Sinclair (2003) advocates for a playfulness with the use of digital tools when approaching a text: “I am suggesting that play is an integral part of a humanist’s interpretive activities, and it should not be neglected in the design of our tools” (181). This paper will present the results of a playful, digital-tools-based investigation into the textual components of the poem. One can theorize that the lines of Lancashire’s poem represent base pairs in a DNA strand. A count of the frequencies of the occurrences of the letters CGAT at the start and at the end of the lines should possibly be higher than one might usually expect. A tabulation of the frequencies reveals that the letters A, T, and C do indeed occur more frequently at the start of the lines, while G has only a minimal increased presence. The letters G and T occur much less frequently than expected at the ends of the lines. These comparisons are based on Lancashire’s edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (on Representative Poetry Online). While Lancashire seems to be downplaying the importance of guanine in his poem, the letter G does occur moderately more frequently than it does in a large sample corpus of English writing. The letter T is even more prominent in Lancashire’s poem, while the frequencies of appearance of the letters A and C are not much different than the large sample corpus. This paper will also examine the positioning of the letters within individual lines of the poem, theorizing about how the letters of the lines are rooted in the use of CGAT and held together by a poetic equivalent of electromagnetic bonds. Comparisons of data about Lancashire’s poem to similar data from other poems, in particular poems on RPO, will playfully suggest ties to and breaks from the models Lancashire is following, such as the poems of Milton, T. S. Eliot, and Yeats. Ultimately, the main goal of this paper is to draw attention to and honour the poetic creativity of Ian Lancashire using some digital text analysis tools with which he worked and which he appreciated.

(Works Cited ommitted due to length restrictions.)