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?