Yes, my friends, I have learned a new word this afternoon.
Prosopography. Check it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopography#Other_examples_of_prosopographical_research
Here it is, lunchtime on day one of the DHSI. As I happily munch on lunch with my fellow roommates, I feel a tinge of jealousy that I can’t retake the TEI Fundamentals course. This year, we are lucky enough to have 14 of the 19 EMiC participants enrolled in that class. Having that large a group to commiserate with is very helpful at the early stages of learning a new language. As P.K. Page struggles and goes silent because of the overwhelming nature of learning Portuguese in Brazil, so I too struggled with learning a language of angle brackets and abbreviations that has been a bit suppressed since my last visit to Victoria.
Returning now with a fresh face, I feel re-engaged with the digital tools. My new course, Transcribing Primary Sources, is much more invested in the bibliographic and social text features of the text. Matt just spent half an hour talking about all the ways you can describe the scribes who wrote the text and how to mark specific regional geography to “map” the transmission of the text. How awesome is that?
Because lunch is fast wrapping up, the last piece of news I want to share is about our afternoon project. I am doing digital mark-up fill in the blank! This guy definitely understands my abilities. I get to go hunting for the right information, but I also have the safety blanket of knowing that in this case there is a “right answer” which I can try to find.
Back to work, and I can’t wait to talk (and read!) about your experiences at DEMiC today!
DEMiC +1
On the occasion of our 2010 DEMiC summer institute I’d like to present an interim report on EMiC’s major digital initiatives, our new institutional partnerships, and our four streams of collaborative digital-humanities research: (1) digitization, (2) image-based editing and markup, (3) text analysis, (4) and visualization.
Last June I trekked out to Victoria to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute with a group of graduate students, postdocs, and faculty affiliated with the EMiC project. There were a dozen of us; some came with skills and digital editing projects in the works, others were standing at the bottom of the learning curve staring straight up. Most enrolled in one of the two introductory courses in text encoding or digitization fundamentals. Meagan Timney, who is our first EMiC postdoctoral fellow, and I enrolled in Susan Brown and Stan Ruecker’s seminar on Digital Tools for Literary History. They introduced us to a whole range of text-analysis and visualization tools. I started to pick and choose tools that I thought might be useful for the EMiC kit. These tools have been principally intended for the analysis of text datasets, either plain vanilla transcriptions of the kind that one finds on Project Gutenberg or enriched transcriptions marked up in XML. The common denominator is obvious enough: these tools are designed to work with transcribed texts. But what if I wanted tools to work with texts rendered as digital images? What if I didn’t want to read transcribed texts but instead use tools that could read encoded digital images of remediated textual objects? What kind of tools are being developed for linking marked-up transcriptions to images? How can these tools be employed by scholarly editors?
Just a friendly neighbourhood reminder that this Friday we have another EMiC meeting and lunch. Details to follow!
It is finally here! The bunnies are hopping, the sky is grey, and the sleep-deprived, jet lagged EMiC contingent finally comes together.
After a bit of a rough start with no A/V and an unexplained lost pizza order, when I arrive on scene forty minutes before the meeting, my confidence is slightly shaken. I dig through my backpack for my “backup” laptop and USB key, and I interrupt a lady in a chef’s hat.
“Excuse me, but do you know if this room is equipped with A/V?”
Blank stare.
“I apologize, but do you know where I could set up a power point presentation?”
Blink, blink.
“I need to use a computer for this meeting and I need a screen to project the image on. Do you have any idea who I might contact?”
Mouth starts to fall open.
“Can you tell me where our pizza is?”
“OH! It’ll be here just after seven. Sorry about that!”
It’s all good. I can work with this.
I survey the room, note the large amount of M&M cookies, and I breathe a sigh of relief. People like cookies. And, these tables move. We are good to go. When Zailig arrives, the number of laptops double. Megan comes, and now we have three. From this point forward, it is smooth sailing.
As the participants trickle in, my heart is filled with joy. They are here, they are happy, and everyone has a bed to sleep in. My work here (in this regard) is complete.
As we set up “viewing stations” and plug in the presentation on each laptop, I realize that this is a far more communal experience than watching a powerpoint on the big screen. People huddle together, talking and laughing as the set-up process takes place. Happy visions of networking and collaboration are made tangible.
Zailig brings the meeting to order after intros have taken place. He clarifies he is reading Dean’s paper, and then goes straight into it. Dean’s personal anecdotal remarks are not altered. Zailig uses Dean’s personal pronoun, much to my delight. As he regales us as “Dean”, I remember listening to this talk two weeks ago. Then, I flash back to meeting Dean for the first time at DHSI last year.
What an impressive learning curve this project has experienced in the last year. If it wasn’t clear before, it is definitely clear now: Dean is a super-human. I can’t believe all the work (and heart) he, Megan, Zailig, Vanessa (… and all of you!) have put into bringing Editing Modernism in Canada into its second year, and its second DEMiC. It is such an exciting time.
Though I have plenty more I could say, I just want to express my delight that you are all here. It is going to be a great week, and I look forward to visiting with all the DEMiC participants throughout the week.
Goodnight, friends. I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.
Tonight we had a dinner gathering for EMiC participants at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, BC. Zailig Pollock did a great impression of our fearless director, Dean, and discussed some of the digital humanities initiatives with which EMiC is involved. After Zailig’s presentation, I showed off the new (in-progress) website.
I encourage our EMiC contingent to blog and tweet while at the DHSI. I’ve now created user accounts for everyone, and you should receive an email with your login details. If you haven’t received an email, please let me know by posting in the comments, or sending me a message (mbtimney.etcl@gmail.com). I also encourage everyone to use twitter in conjunction with our hash tag, #emic (and #dhsi2010).
It was wonderful to see old friends, and to meet new ones, too. We’ve got a great group of folks who comprise a strong EMiC team. I am really looking forward to this week at the DHSI!
Congress is always the one time of year when I have to admit to myself that I just can’t do it all. Inevitably, the panels I want to attend are scheduled in simultaneous sessions. Often I’m presenting on one panel and wish that I could be in another room at the same time. Until we develop the EMiC cloning tool, I’ll have to settle for the reality that our community has grown to such a size that it’s no longer possible to see everyone present at Congress. That said, I was extremely pleased with the panels I managed to find (even if they were sometimes at the bottom of a back stairwell in the basement of the old Faubourg). I was especially delighted with the papers by the armada of EMiC participants. The panel on radical modernist pedagogy that I co-chaired with Karis Shearer was well attended and featured papers by Paul Hjartarson, Linda Morra, and Vanessa Lent. Paul spoke to Wilfrid Watson’s radical theatre productions in Edmonton in the 1960s (my favourite moment was when Paul quoted Watson asserting that in the absence of a mainstream public for Canadian theatre, a playwright might as well go avant-garde). Linda addressed the public and national pedagogy of Ira Dilworth on CBC radio in the 1940s, calling particular attention to his role in broadcasting the work of Emily Carr. And Vanessa toured us through the life of Sheila Watson as a teacher and student, from a her stint during the early 1930s in a one-room schoolhouse in the Cariboo to her classes with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto in the 1950s to her career as a professor of modernist literatures at the University of Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s. Vanessa’s reading of the Cariboo adaptation of Macbeth from Deep Hollow Creek stands for me as one of the highlights of the Congress.
Dean Irvine