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Archive for June, 2010
June 9, 2010
totally inappropriate blog use?
June 9, 2010
Since we are fantasizing…
The really engaged posts on the EMiC blog have really got me thinking… If we put all this effort into developing the “EMiC” brand of digital mark-up… Would it be possible to create an online graduate journal, or something similar, within which we could publish samples of our projects? Hosted through EMiC, or partnered with EMiC, but a distinct entity?
This way, like Chris suggests, we could develop a “house style” which all our projects could conform to, but also use and develop.
It could be a collaboration, by both humanities scholars, digital humanists and other computer scientists. If we worked with them to develop the tools we’d need to start out and get the ball rolling, then we would be able to self teach through forums like the DHSI summer course.
Some of the small projects we might be interested in pursuing don’t necessarily have a forum for publication. This would give graduate students a chance to learn new technology, and then have an immediate application for it. They would know that their work had a possible “home” within the journal.
Obviously this is looking a little bit longer term, but it would be really amazing if we were able to lay the groundwork for this in the next few years, while we have an EMiC to support and engage us.
Perhaps it could be split into two parts, half scholarly articles about editing in print and online, and half documents or editorial projects that are entirely born digital.
I realize that I am perhaps being a bit over ambitious… But I couldn’t help but take it to the next level. Thoughts??
Did I take it too far?
Did I?
June 9, 2010
DHSI 2011: Fantasy Curriculum
Chris Doody and I were talking as we poked around the UVic bookstore today, and he was shooting off some great suggestions for things we’d love to see at DHSI next year. Alicia Fahey and I also had a similar conversation with Zailig last night around the kitchen table. Some of these ideas are specifically for EMiCites, but most would also be of interest to the wider DHSI community. Some are lessons, some are tools, but all of them would be useful. Here are the ones that we’ve been discussing, but this will hopefully be a list that grows during the course of the week:
1. Image Markup Tool 2.0: Tools and Tricks
2. a standardized EMiC set of TEI tags, a schema, and a basic CSS template so that we’re all speaking the same language and our final projects have the same aesthetic. Of course we’ll all need to customize things for our individual projects, but consistent appearance and functionality across projects would be great for us as editors and for the EMiC “brand.” Along with this, of course, would be lessons in how to use them!
3. From Code to Digital Edition: CSS and XSLT Stylesheets for TEI
4. Successful Grant Applications 101
5. Issues in Permissions and Copyright
Some of these ideas could become documents that are hosted in a central location that all EMiCites can access. As it keeps getting repeated in TEI Fundamentals, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel, so the more we can all share information and tools, the easier all of our jobs get. Looking forward to hearing more ideas!
June 8, 2010
Thoughts so far on TEI
After two days of TEI fundamentals, I have come to a few conclusions.
First, the most interesting thing about TEI is not the things that you can do, but the things that you cannot do. TEI is, as far as I understand it, only concerned with the content of the text, ignoring everything else (paratextual elements, marginalia, interesting layout, etc.) – stuff some of us find extremely valuable. On top of this, the coding for variants is messy, complicated, and would be next to impossible for complicated variants. For an example of TEI markup for variants, check out: http://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/workshops/uvic2010/presentations/html/advanced_markup_09.xhtml.
As a result, I am glad that EMiC is developing an excellent IMT – this should solve many of the limitations of TEI, at least from my perspective.
Finally, while participants can all learn basic TEI and encoding, the next step of course would be to establish a CSS stylesheet. It seems to me that EMiC, like all publishing houses, should establish a single organization style, and design a stylesheet that all EMiC participants are free to use. This would ensure a consistent design and look of all EMiC orientated projects in their digital form. Maybe this could be something discussed at a roundtable at next-years speculated EMiC orientated course at DHSI.
Something to ponder.
June 8, 2010
Report to Scaling the Digital Humanities
In the unavoidable absence of Dean, Megan and I did a report on EMiC. The aim of Scaling the Humanities is to explore ways in which the Digitial Humanities can “scale up” to avoid unnecessary duplication, to encourage co-operartive development, and to produce the strongest possible face to granting bodies. The first couple days have consisted of a series of reports from a wide range of projects. Tomorrow we will be pooling our various experiences.
Meagan, who is more knowlegeable about EMiC than I am — or than anyone is except for Dean — did a quick survey of the origins of EMiC and I carried on with a brief version of Dean’s update on recent developments, focussing on:
1. image-based editing and markup
2. digitization
3. text analysis
4. visualization
Response to the report was very positive. EMiC is clearly seen as a model digital humanities project, especially in its flexibility and openness to development in previously unforeseen directions. I will report on the results of tomorrow’s discussions and their relevance to EMiC.
June 8, 2010
EMiC Love at DHSI
EMiC has been getting some real love in the #dhsi2010 stream on Twitter. For those of you not using Twitter, here are some of the major observations about EMiC that you’ve been missing:
We’re here, and we’re a force:
chrisdoody: Which is more prevalent at #dhsi2010: bunnies or EMiC participants? #emic_project
We’re modelling an approach to pedagogy in the digital humanities:
sgsinclair: #emic exemplary 4 training students & new scholars using experiential-learning pedagogies http://bit.ly/dBPjS9 (expand) #dhsi2010
Our grad students are doing work that is unique and “ambitious”:
jasonaboyd: Hannah McGregor talks about first stages of author attribution study of Martha Ostenso’s work (co-authored with husband?) #dhsi2010 #emic
jasonaboyd: Emily Ballantyne talks about creation of an ambitious critical & interactive digital ed of P.K. Page #dhsi2010#emic
We’re assembling a rich tool kit, an extensive list of partners, and honing our approach:
irvined: A New Build: EMiC Tools in the Digital Workshop http://ow.ly/1VgkZ #emic #dhsi2010
And most importantly, we’re building a community:
irvined: Good luck Emily Ballantyne & Hannah McGregor at #dhsi2010 grad student colloquium. Mila says, “break a leg.” Or “feed me.” Your pick. #emic
isleofvan lunch-hour #dhsi2010 musings on modernism, descriptive markup, and typographic codes http://ow.ly/1VR8P#emic
isleofvan: EMiCites get on the sushi boat in Victoria #dhsi2010 #emic http://yfrog.com/6d4tqoj
MicheleRackham: Great night with #EMiC_project participants last night. Looking forward to a great first day of class. Ready to learn TEI at #dhsi2010
reillyreads: finished orientation sess of #emic @ #dhsi & feel the community vibe growing.
mbtimney: Had a great dinner with the folks from #emic. Hurray, it’s time for #dhsi2010!!
gemofanm: very much enjoyed the non-mandatory “preparatory session” at the Cove at #dhsi2010 with #emic tonight!
Finally, if that’s not enough to get you on Twitter, how about this:
baruchbenedict: I am now doing my first tweet. I owe it all to Meagan.
Yes kids, that’s Zailig Pollock, on Twitter.
June 8, 2010
lunch-hour musing
The last two days have been an overwhelming combination of new information, new faces, and new ways of thinking about texts. A relative novice to the field of digital humanities, my participation up to this point has been more on the process of digitizing physical texts and the training of undergraduate and graduate students in this process. As I furiously try to transfer all of this new information from the receiving end of my noggin’ to the processing end, here is an initial thought:
Yesterday in “Text Encoding Fundamentals & Their Application” we learned that descriptive markup is based on a philosophy of the text: texts have a structure based on typography. As readers we all have a fairly standardized kowledge of what those typographical codes are (i.e., we can easily identify the difference between a heading and a footnote). Descriptive markup takes advantage of that shared or assumed knowledge in formulating its own codes. This got me thinking about the ways that so much modernist literature works to disrupt such assumptions about the function of text. Take Wyndham Lewis’s play with text in Blast, for example, where his imitations of advertising typography manipulates text direction and plays with multiple fonts (a style re-created even in our new EMiC website logo!). I know I suffer from Watson-on-the-brain but both Sheila and Wilfred Watson as well as Marshall McLuhan all provide other examples of Canadian modernism’s challenge to typographical codes. What sort of challenges do these purposeful breaking of typographical codes pose for digital humanists? More importantly, how can our responses to those challenges reverberate back into digital humanities to enrichen the editorial practices of scholars in other disciplines, fields, etc.?
June 8, 2010
IMT and the P.K. Page Digital Edition
Well team, I tried to give us a good plug at this morning’s talk. Given the large size of our contingent this year, I thought it was important to let people know a bit about the project as a whole. And, it also gives us a chance to define ourselves for ourselves, and remind us of who we represent while we are here.
Though I don’t know how to do it, I am going to attempt to post some of the sections from my talk today on the blog. They provide a taste of the IMT, which we will get a bigger helping of on Friday when Zailig & Meg give us a quick peek into the project in its current development. This also helps follow in Dean’s footsteps in the reconfiguration of his talk as a blog post.
Enjoy!
June 8, 2010
To infini-TEI and beyond
Jetlag keeps knocking me out before I can write anything on this beautiful new version of the EMiC community site, but I’ve finally managed to get my act together to post something …
Ever since reading about DHSI in the Chronicle of Higher Ed as “Summer Camp for Digital Humanists”, I’ve wanted to come here and hang out with a community of people who not only have the sharp critical intelligence borne of literary and humanistic training, but who can also do neat stuff with machines, and who don’t see an entrenched opposition between humanistic and computational analysis. To be able to attend DHSI with many of the other EMiC-ites makes the experience even richer. Working on Canadian material across the Atlantic, I rarely get the chance to be in the same room with more than two people who have even heard of the writers I study. It’s a rare pleasure to spend a week with people who have not only heard of the obscure authors whose work and lives fascinate me, but who are also enthusiastic about the potential of digital humanities tools to discover new things about this period of literary history that would be harder to find with the conventional analytical tools of literary analysis.
So far, DHSI has delivered on all my expectations and more. By the end of our first day of Text Encoding Fundamentals we’d already started to mark up our texts with XML. I launched merrily into letter #1 from the collection of correspondence I’ve begun to gather from archives around Canada, and immediately ran into half a dozen problems. How do you encode a date when you can’t be sure of the exact year? What if there is a paragraph break in the middle of the address from which the letter was sent? But Julia and Syd sorted most of them out. It’s exciting to finally get the encoding underway, and also reassuring that using Oxygen turns out to be as easy as falling off a log.
This morning I am looking forward to hearing Emily’s paper on the P.K. Page digital edition, and Hannah’s on attempting to unravel the authorship of Martha Ostenso’s works using stylistics analysis. If I had another research life to live over I would be a forensic linguist. (Why aren’t there CSI-style TV shows about forensic linguists? There really should be.)
Side project, if I can stay awake long enough in the evenings: learning Python from the Programming Historian site Dean told us about at TEMiC. Anyone want to join me?
June 8, 2010
Bunnies: not just a logo
Even in my residence room, I’m surrounded by bunnies. They’re on my course kit for Text Encoding Fundamentals. They’re on my thumb drive. They’re on my ticket to the Wednesday night DHSI banquet. They’re on my campus map. They’re smile-inducing as they pop up everywhere in their silhouetted logo form, but they’re even more entertaining in person.
I’ve heard about the (in)famous UVic bunnies, but experiencing them firsthand is something else. Excuse my delighted squeals in the video: we don’t get too much wildlife in downtown Toronto other than the garbage-eating raccoons, which are definitely not on par with a swarm of baby bunnies. DHSI is a great blend of academic pursuits and fun; the bunnies, in their logo and furry forms, really embody the latter side of this week. Enjoy!