Versions of Yeats's Poetry
The links below bring readers to multiple versions of William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Byzantium" as prepared by Kelly Parrett, Sean McAneny, Dan Mariani, and Gaston Touafek for Professor Rob Doggett's ENGL 425 Enterprises: Editing Yeats (Fall 2018). Coding according to TEI guidelines, this group tracked variations of the two poems across their drafts using the Versioning Machine. The Versioning Machine allows readers to compare and contrast multiple drafts of these poems simultaneously, highlighting key revisions as they go. The drafts were drawn from the Cornell Yeats Series manuscript collections The Tower and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems.
As explained on its website, the VM "is a framework and an interface for displaying multiple versions of text encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, and is P5 compatible. While the VM provides for features typically found in critical editions, such as annotation and introductory material, it also takes advantage of the opportunities afforded by electronic publication to allow for the comparison diplomatic versions of witnesses, and the ability to easily compare an image of the manuscript with a diplomatic version. VM 5.0 adds a number of new features, including the ability to resize and reorganize text panels, panning and zooming in the image viewer, and text-audio interlinking. The Versioning Machine's underlying code has also been completely revised to support enhanced features."