Today in class we discussed the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, specifically "Song: to the Men of England," "The Masque of Anarchy," and "England in 1819." "England in 1819" is a sonnet, and so I chose it for its brief lines and form to use for experimenting with Juxta Commons. According to their website, "Juxta is a tool that allows you to compare and collate versions of the same textual work."
Juxta Commons allows you to collate sets and share visualizations with your peers. The help section of the website has easy to understand directions that detail the three steps shown in the image above. Juxta Commons allows you to compare a minimum of two texts and a maximum of twenty. I chose to work with four versions of the text, all found online at the Poetry Foundation, Poets.org, the University of Toronto, and the University of Warwick. These were chosen randomly just for the purpose of experimentation. A comparison of four versions of a sonnet can be done by the eye alone, so again I want to reiterate this was just to experiment with the site. Juxta Commons would be an excellent choice for comparing much longer texts, such as the different editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Juxta gives a side-by-side view for comparison purposes. The help section states these views can only be shared via email or URL, so I'm posting the link here. For anyone using a Wordpress blog, there is a plugin that will allow these to be embedded if I'm understanding it correctly. juxtacommons.org/shares/U9PMkv Juxta also allows you to view a "heat map," which is the collation of all documents (called witnesses) against the base document. The base document can be changed as needed. The darker the shade of blue, the more numerous the number of witnesses that differ at this location. Heat maps give a code for embedding, but as you can see below it's not working here. Perhaps this is what can only be done on Wordpress via the plugin. I will try to figure out the issue, but in the meantime will leave the link for it here. juxtacommons.org/shares/8REmZn
Within the heat map, you can click on any of the highlighted areas for more information. The main differences in the four versions of "England in 1819" are punctuation marks such as the hyphens and the spaces used around them, though one version has a few different words.
Overall, this was an easy tool to use and I recommend it for anyone needing to compare texts. I will update this post once I have more information on the ability to embed your results into Weebly.
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