With the help of at least (!) one tech-savvy friend and the samples that come with eXisit-db, I've cobbled together a basic prototype of the Novels in Context project! Here's what I've done and learned so far, in addition to some things that don't work, and which I plan to fix: I was able to …
On constructing an editorial apparatus
How do we go about constructing a thematic editorial apparatus in TEI? The challenge is generating a thematic schema that is flexible and useful but not overly directive or misleading. I've been meditating on how to mark up thematic elements in a small (but growing!) collection of primary source materials for the study and, primarily, …
Sabbatical Project(s)
This fall, I have a sabbatical--while I'm very much looking forward to getting back into research, and especially to learning more about TEI and XML, it occurs to me that I have a tendency to be more productive the more things I have going on in my life, and so the prospect of a sabbatical …
Working Project: Corpse Humor
I'm currently working on an essay about the way that popular drama addresses the material practices of death in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, entitled "Corpse Humor: Funereal Practices in Early 18th Century Popular Performance." A (very drafty) draft is available online for comment and feedback. I anticipate cutting some sections and foregrounding other …
Innovations 2013: TEI and XML for Humanists
TEI and XML for Humanists: A Report from the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer Seminar How and why do humanists use programming? XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language) is an accessible but robust syntax for making texts machine-readable, and the Text Encoding Initiative has developed standards for describing texts through XML. These mark-up syntaxes, in conjunction with XSLT …
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First TEI-validated XML file: The Tatler 238
Today was an exciting first day of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer Seminar--I'm in the TEI stream, led by Sebastian Rahtz. Incidentally, I'm really happy with his teaching style, which is definitely lecture-based but is very conversational and filled with detailed examples in the presentation materials. The day is broken out into a lecture/discussion …
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Teaching with technology materials
Materials for my two sessions are available in a google drive folder here. If you want easier access to the google doc on using google drive (very meta, I know!), I've made it public to anyone in the world to view; here's a link to it, and it's also embedded below. Now that I've put …
The Pomp and Farce of Death: PCA 2013 Abstract
“The Pomp and Farce of Death: Funeral Humor on the Popular 18th Century English Stage” This paper examines the presence of funereal humor on the popular British stage during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries, English funereal practices once reserved for the nobility began to become available—though not …
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Juxta Collation of Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend of Good Women
This Juxta Commons collation compares the B-Text and the A-Text of Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. The legends were composed around 1386, but the prologue was written earlier and substantially revised later. It is therefore available in two versions, the A-Text and the B-Text. The B-Text is generally considered the …
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Innovations 2012
Ever wonder how web-based tools and text-based analysis intersect? Come find out how to analyze literature (and text more broadly understood) using a variety of online tools that have minimal learning curves. I will introduce you to a manageable number of such tools--Voyant, Mandala browser, ManyEyes, and others--and then we will experiment with them as …
Tonya Howe 