As there are many different methods of linguistic analysis, there are many different ways of approaching gesture analysis. This chapter gives a selective overview of the current state of art on gesture coding and annotation systems. It opens with a discussion on the difference between coding and annotation, before it considers aims and challenges in gesture coding and annotation. Afterward, the chapter reviews existing systems and reflects on the interrelation between subject, research question, coding and annotation system. The chapter emphasizes that coding and annotations systems are always influenced by the particular theoretical framework in which they are situated. Accordingly, similar to the analysis of language, a theory-neutral analysis of gestures is not possible. Rather, theoretical assumptions influence subjects, aspects and levels of analysis and as such also make themselves visible in annotation systems. This will be illustrated by exemplary research topics in gestures studies: language, language development, cognition, interaction, and human–machine interaction. The account of the individual systems thereby does not aim at an extensive discussion, but rather focuses on their general logic for answering their particular research question. Here, differences between systems addressing the same research topic (e.g. language) as well as differences across research topics (e.g. language vs. interaction) will be explored. The chapter closes with some considerations on possible future developments.

This introductory chapter provides the rationale for the book, as well as its organization. As part of the linguistic landscape, public signage provides glimpses of a culture and its changes. The ability to read signs is a practical skill essential for daily survival in the target language environment. But there seems to have been a general neglect of signs in the typical Chinese language curriculum, even at advanced levels of instruction. This book aims to rectify the situation.

Starting with the observation that the word translation has its etymological roots, as does metaphor, in notions of space, this chapter attempts to revivify the relevance of the notion of space in translation, by relating it to the space that typically is occupied by textual editors. It takes the example principally of Samuel Beckett: looking at examples from his own translation practice as well as his attitudes towards that practice; looking at the work of scholarly editing that went into the four-volume edition of his letters; and questioning the role of the editor who has traditionally been seen as ideally invisible and authoritative. The various stages that go into the making of such an edition – transcription, translation, selection, annotation – are revealed to be reluctant to conform to the notional ideal of the editor’s transparency.

Chapter 5 examines the annotations by scribes and marginalia by readers in manuscripts of the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate. A quantitative survey of the treatment of margins shows that, although poets planned elaborate paratexts for their works, scribes and readers seldom used the page for annotation or marginalia. From this survey the author deduces that scribes and readers in the fifteenth century were more interested in reading the poem continuously and for kinds of reading aloud or for pleasure, in ways that do not lend themselves to written record in margins. The poem lives in an immaterial dimension of cognition and feeling, beyond what appears on the material page.

This chapter addresses the issue of measuring consonants from an acoustic perspective. After reviewing some of the historic precedents that laid the foundations of acoustic analysis relevant for speech, the chapter provides a detailed report of the techniques for measuring the acoustic information of consonants of six manners of articulation (fricatives, stops, affricates, nasals, approximants, and the group of trills, taps and flaps). The chapter discusses links between the main articulatory characteristics of consonants of each manner and their acoustic correlates, with a focus on those acoustic variables that differentiate consonants within a manner, and on the variety of methods that are employed to measure them. Whenever possible, the chapter gives specific guidelines on how to apply the measurements, highlighting the differences in implementation between authors as well as the advantages and disadvantages of selecting one approach over another. In its closing sections, the chapter discusses some recent studies which address the issue of measuring consonants, provides some practical recommendations for teaching, and identifies some future directions for the topic.

This part of the book offers a guide to writing about poetry. It addresses the two main kinds of essay you might be invited to write about a poem – a commentary or close reading, and the more discursive essay – and shows how to manage them, from annotation, to planning, to constructing an argument, to editing and proof-reading.

Chapter 3 describes the fundamental research questions, empirical approaches and findings of language documentation and descriptive linguistics. These are two closely interrelated linguistic subfields concentrating on the collection and/or analysis of primary data for the purposes of documenting and describing languages (corpora and grammars). Methodological issues include considerations on research objects, fieldwork, as well as techniques and procedures of data collection, editing, and analysis such as transcription, annotation, and elicitation. The chapter ends with recommendations for further reading and a list of short exercises and ideas for small research projects.

Begins by examining the career of the publisher Thomas Pavier in order to provide context for a puzzling collection of texts that he issued in 1619. The collection would seem to be the first attempt to offer the public a 'selected works' of Shakespeare, though, in fact, some of the plays included have only a tenuous connection to the playwright. The logistics of the project are considered, as well as the various arguments for why it appears to have been undertaken in a rather clandestine fashion. The chapter then moves on to consider the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, the 'First Folio', published in 1623. The volume is viewed within the context of the overarching career of Edward Blount, its primary investor. The progression of the volume through the printshop of William and Isaac Jaggard is tracked, drawing on the seminal work of Charlton Hinman, who made extensive use of the collection of First Folios established by Emily and Henry Clay Folger. The subsequent set of folio editions issued between 1632 and 1700 is also discussed.

This chapter takes up the issue of the expansion of the market for Shakespeare editions across the nineteenth century. A culture of home reading encouraged the practice of producing expurgated editions, which proved highly popular. A gradual broadening of the educational franchise had the effect of significantly raising the level of literacy in the UK, and this coincided with the cost efficiencies afforded by the industrialisation of printing, making it possible to serve a growing market with ever cheaper editions. The highly popular, inexpensive Globe Shakespeare is considered, together with subsequent editions which reduced the cost of complete works editions to unprecedentedly low levels (just sixpence, in the case of the Ward Locke edition). By the later decades of the nineteenth century Shakespeare was increasingly finding a place in school curricula, and some of the major schools editions – such as the Pitt Press and Clarendon editions – are considered in detail.

Long understood as purifying the church by rejecting worship routine and devotional ceremony, pious New England settlers in fact observed formal and informal rituals that defined lived religion within the Reformed tradition. Given that access to the vernacular word was central to puritan self-definition, literacy and reading became intensely ritualized. Thus, along with life-cycle rites (birth, marriage, death), annual and occasional ceremonies (fast days, thanksgiving days, election sermons, artillery sermons), and sabbath customs (the sacraments, the public confession, the audition of preaching), ritual was derived from the experience of books. The chapter demonstrates this experience by looking at moments of cross-cultural contact during Metacom’s War, where reading seeks to stabilize tradition. It studies reader annotations of devotional works as a means to understand the meditative, recursive, and extractive practices that grounded and routinized lay piety. And it examines the visual iconography of illustrations within devotional manuals, illustrations that idealize and demonize kinds of identity for the proper pilgrim reader. Ritual, routine, and iconography are not typically associated with puritan worship, but with an ear and eye to reading habits, we better understand experiential religion in early New England.

This chapter reviews the transformative effects of technology on dictionary-making, focusing on four main areas: the use of databases for storing and organising dictionary text; the creation and exploitation of corpora for use as the dictionary’s evidence base; the enhancement of the value and usability of corpus data through the application of software tools developed in the NLP (natural language processing) community; and the migration of dictionaries from print to online media. During the last half-century, activity in all these areas has brought fundamental changes to the way dictionaries are created and made available to their users. We trace the development of corpus-based lexicography in English, from the early work of John Sinclair and his colleagues in the 1980s to the present day. Lexicographers working in English and other widely used languages now have access to resources which would scarcely have been imaginable thirty years ago: very large corpora (measured in tens of billions of words) and sophisticated corpus-querying tools are routinely available. The move from print to digital publication is a more recent development, but no less significant. The far-reaching implications of these changes – for dictionary-makers and dictionary-users alike – are explored at every stage.

As the impact of the internet has rippled in ever larger circles over the past twenty-seven years, Pound’s presence on the web has slowly made itself felt: as web aggregators starting anthologizing poetry, selections from his work, particularly the shorter poems, were showcased on websites like Poetry Foundation, Bartleby.com or Poetry Archive. Universities, in their turn, began hosting modernist literature projects, such as PennSound in Philadelphia, where parts of Pound’s work are presented and commented on next to that of other modernist writers. Online libraries or book clubs hold scanned versions of the New Directions edition of The Cantos in closed access. Commentators publish their own work with extensive quotations in blogs or digital magazines, and artists upload artwork inspired by Pound and his poem. Wikipedia now boasts a long article on Pound himself, one on The Cantos and one on a ‘List of Cultural References in The Cantos’.

Chapter 4 argues that calls for crowdsourcing digital scholarly editions have misconceived the nature of the scholarly edition and its changing relationship to its readers. The relationship is argued to be essential. A survey of post-war scholarly editions reveals a shifting understanding amongst editors of the needs and capacities of readers. However, an increasing tolerance for the reporting of variant readings has come at the cost of shrinking print runs (some figures are provided). The digital environment is argued to offer a solution by putting into operation a distinction between the archival and editorial functions of the scholarly edition. The latter should henceforth be understood as an argument directed at the reader about the archive. This conception is shown to open the way for editors to transgress those literary-historical and literary-critical domains where, because of the 100-year horizons of print editions, editors have traditionally been reluctant to tread.