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, …
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 …
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 …
Publicity and the Public Sphere (Digital Humanities Caucus)
The ASECS Digital Humanities Caucus is seeking panelists for a 2013 conference session on digital humanities, publicity, and the public sphere. "[D]igital humanities is . . . a social undertaking. It harbors networks of people who have been working together, sharing research, arguing, competing, and collaborating for many years." –Matthew Kirschenbaum, "What Is Digital humanities …
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Visualizations
Relative frequencies of fear, love, think, feel in five Gothic novels
ASECS 2012 Proposal: Student-Curated Web Archives and the Practice of Public Scholarship
This is the proposal for my 2012 ASECS talk; I'll post the full (and very different) piece soon! The process of creating sound public knowledge shares a great deal with the knowledge-making procedures in the arts and humanities. These procedures include interpretation, judgment, imagination, and expression…. In this respect, then, the humanities scholars are natural …
