The Digital Page is a digital edition of the writings of P.K. Page and of the visual art she created under her married name P.K. Irwin, employing an open source text-image tool, the Digital Page Reader, created especially for this project.
P.K. Page’s career as a writer and visual artist extended over some eight decades, from 1932, which saw her first known publication, to 2010, the year of her death, in which she published six books. Throughout these years, she produced some of the most admired and beloved poems in Canadian literature—and many fine works in the genres of fiction, children’s stories, non-fiction, and travel writing, as well as a voluminous correspondence. In the second half of her career she also produced a substantial body of visual art, which has only recently come to be recognized for its own excellence as well as for the light it throws on her writing.
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The Digital Page makes use of the Digital Page Reader, especially designed for this edition, which allows the user to view transcriptions of all versions of PK’s texts side-by-side with images of the documents on which the transcriptions are based. Where these documents show evidence of PK’s revisions, the revisions are presented in a clear and concise manner, avoiding esoteric symbols and abbreviations, and each point in the transcription is linked to the equivalent point in the document image. In other words, at each point, the reader can check the map against the territory. PK’s visual art will be presented with a slightly modified version of this text-image tool.
Sandra Djwa and Zailig Pollock
