About the project

Footnotes and analysis
About the sources
Terms of use
Citation
Acknowledgements
Credits and Project Team
Technical information

In 2000, the University first began to investigate routes for delivering online access for educational purposes to variants of Lawrence short stories, in a collaboration between the Manuscripts and Special Collections department, Professor John Worthen and other academic colleagues at Nottingham.

The possibilities and problems in mounting the “Odour of Chrysanthemums” were outlined in E. Archer, “Issues in delivering primary source materials over the internet as resources for research and learning in the humanities: a case study based on developing the short story “Odour of chrysanthemums” by D H Lawrence as an online teaching and research resource” (MA thesis, University of Nottingham, 2004).

The opportunity to build on these findings and develop the present web resource arose through the work of Dr Sean Matthews of the School of English Studies and Director of the D H Lawrence Research Centre. With funding awarded from the English Subject Centre he undertook a project to digitise papers relating to Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, with supporting pedagogic materials for textual, historical and critical study. This allowed for the encoding of the texts to support student interpretation.

Footnotes and analysis

Footnotes

New footnotes have been written for Episode 1 (The Opening), Episode 3 (The Children) and Episode 4 (The Visit to the Rigleys). These are the result of consultation of a range of sources:

Baron, Helen and Carl Baron, eds, Sons and Lovers. London: Penguin, 1994. (Glossary) Cassell Concise Dictionary. London: Cassell, 1998.
Edwards, V. K., P. Trudgill and B. Weltens, The Grammar of English Dialect: A Survey of Research. London: Economic and Social Science Research Council, 1984. (A detailed listing of the features of non-standard grammatical forms in British dialects of English found in research studies up to 1982.)
Forster, W, ed., Pit-Talk: A survey of terms used by Miners in the South Midlands. Vaughan Paper No. 15. Leicester: University of Leicester, Institute of Lifelong Learning, 1972 (reprinted 2008). (Mining terms collected as part of a day-release course for mineworkers organised by the Workers' Educational Association, East Midlands District, and the Department of Adult Education, University of Leicester, 1972.)
Hillier, Hilary, Fictional narrative in a regional dialect. In Hilary Hillier, Analysing Real Texts: Research Studies in Modern English Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 145-74 and 243-6. (The text analysed is taken from Our Mam un t'Others, a first-person narrative written and subsequently read aloud by Fred Wetherill, a retired miner, in the persona of a young member of a mining family using the dialect of Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, a small town within the Erewash Valley.)
Hillier, Hilary, Community, family, 'Morel': a dialect approach to Sons and Lovers. To appear in the proceedings of the 11th D H Lawrence International Conference, 2007: Return to Eastwood. Nottingham: New Ventures/CCC Press, forthcoming. (Relates dialect use by individual members of the Morel family to the language of the surrounding community, and considers the implications of similarity and difference; includes an Appendix, 'Talking Lawrence': Sons and Lovers.)
Hughes, Arthur, Peter Trudgill and Dominic Watt, English Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles, 4th edition. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. (An invaluable introduction to British dialects: surveys and describes the variety of grammatical and phonological features to be found across the British Isles.)
Schwarze, Hans-Wilhelm and John Worthen, eds, D H Lawrence: The Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. (Glossary)
Worthen, John, ed., The Prussian Officer and Other Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. (Notes by Brian Finney)

Analysis

Analysis of the different versions of the story was first carried out in hardcopy, and in several stages:

Photocopies were made of the three versions: one copy of the 1910 text (Version A, Uncorrected proofs), two copies of the 1911 text (Version C, published in English Review) and one copy of the 1914 text (Version D, published in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories). The texts were then systematically compared in pairs: Version A with Version C, and Version C with Version D. Each pair of texts was colour coded for deletions, additions and changes, as shown in 'Compare texts'.
Fresh, unmarked, photocopies of the texts were cut up and pasted on to A3 sheets, in pairs and side by side (Version A alongside Version C; Version C alongside Version D), aligning corresponding paragraphs and sentences as closely as possible. The colour codings on the 'master' copies were then transferred to these sheets, thus creating a clear visual display of where all deletions, additions and changes occur across each pair of versions.
The codings were then applied to the electronic texts using HTML/CSS mark-up.

About the sources

Images, texts and transcriptions are drawn from the Lawrence Collection and other holdings of the Manuscripts and Special Collections Section at the University of Nottingham.

In February 2008, the Lawrence Collection won recognition through The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) Designation Scheme as being of outstanding national and international importance.

Additional photographs have been sourced from Picture the Past and permission to use these on the site is gratefully acknowledged

Terms of use

Copyright in materials within the resource varies. It has been approved for educational use only and may not be re-used in any form.

For further advice contact Manuscripts and Special Collections.

Citation

If you wish to cite the website in a publication please list it with the URL, and the month and year you accessed it, as in the following example:

Odour of Chrysanthemums: A Text in Process, The University of Nottingham. date you accessed the site <http://odour.nottingham.ac.uk>.

Acknowledgements

The development team in Manuscripts and Special Collections and Dr Sean Matthews gratefully acknowledge the support and advice of colleagues at the University and the feedback of students and colleagues who commented on early versions. Particular thanks are due to:

Professor James Boulton
Dr Hilary Hillier
Picture the Past
Pollinger Limited

Credits and Project Team

The Project is a collaboration between Manuscripts and Special Collections, Information Services and the D. H. Lawrence Research Centre at The University of Nottingham.

The principal Project Team members have been:
Dr Sean Matthews and Dr Hilary Hillier (both from D H Lawrence Research Centre)
Elizabeth Archer, Claire Emery and Dr Dorothy Johnston (Manuscripts and Special Collections)

Roles and contributions:
Academic oversight of all content: S Matthews
Project management: E Archer
Project development and initial scoping of themes: S Matthews and E Archer
Text analysis and footnotes: S Matthews and H Hillier
Selection of supporting images and background material: E Archer
Framework for describing the dialect of the Erewash Valley: H Hillier

TEI markup, image processing, website design and development: C Emery
XML/HTML markup for footnotes and text comparisons: H Hillier
OCR capture and checking: A Bowler
Image capture and metadata: M Bentley, A Bowler

Technical information

The project aimed to create electronic copies of the texts and mark these up in XML, so they could be generated as HTML pages on the fly.

The content: 'Read texts'

Three versions of Odour of Chrysanthemums were converted to electronic text files using Optical Scanned Recognition (OCR). This process scans each page and transcribes the content into digital form, which is then manually checked against the original to ensure the software has created an accurate copy. The OCR software used was Abbyy FineReader 7.0.

One version was not considered for OCR capture and is available on this site as image only. It is a copy of Lawrence's original proof with corrections in pencil by the author.

To create re-usable content, the project converted these texts to XML, specifically the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard. This XML markup has been used to define the structure of pages, headings, paragraphs, etc. An XSL file provides the formatting information for these texts.

The three text versions were broken down into episodes for further processing. Footnotes were created for the early part of the story and additional XML markup was introduced for linking to these footnote files.

Additional processing: 'Compare texts'

The aim was to provide 'guided comparisons' for some episodes, which would present the texts side-by-side and highlight the changes between them. This raised several issues:

It was intended that all three digital versions should be compared side-by-side, but this was soon abandoned as only users with larger screens would find such an approach usable.

In addition, the analysis did not compare all three versions at once but compared the English Review text twice (once with the earlier version, and again with the later one). It was felt that trying to incorporate three texts and two sets of changes on the same page would be difficult to achieve satisfactorily.

Therefore this section of the site shows the English Review compared with one other text, and the user can quickly switch to the alternate comparison.
The texts were saved in their HTML form and the scripting for the comparisons was added to these static copies.
As the texts would be squashed into half a page, retaining the line-breaks was unhelpful so these were stripped out and only the starting page:line numbers for paragraphs were marked for reference.

In these comparisons, users can see all the changes highlighted for them, or else discover the changes for themselves by clicking on the text. This was achieved with Javascript and CSS styles.

The delivery

The site delivers HTML content using a combination of static pages and Active Server Pages (ASP), and is delivered from a Windows 2003 server running IIS 6 and ASP 3.0.

It has been checked for conformance with accessibility recommendations using the 'HTML Validator' add-on for Firefox, the online WAVE tool and the W3C markup validation service.