As part of EMiC at DHSI 2014, I took part in the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) course with Ian Gregory. The course was tutorial-based, with a set of progressive practical exercises that took the class through the creation of static map documents through plotting historical data and georeferencing archival maps into the visualization and exploration of information from literary texts and less concrete datasets.

I have been working with a range of material relating to Canadian radical manifestos, pamphlets, and periodicals as I try to reconstruct patterns of publication, circulation, and exchange. Recently, I have been looking at paratextual networks (connections shown in advertisements, subscription lists, newsagent stamps, or notices for allied organizations, for example) while trying to connect these to real-world locations and human occupation. For this course, I brought a small body of material relating to the 1932 Edmonton Hunger March: (1) an archival map of the City of Edmonton, 1933 (with great thanks to Mo Engel and the Pipelines project, as well as Virginia Pow, the Map Librarian at the University of Alberta, who very generously tracked down this document and scanned it on my behalf); (2) organizational details relating to the Canadian Labor Defense League, taken from a 1933 pamphlet, “The Alberta Hunger-March and the Trial of the Victims of Brownlee’s Police Terror”, including unique stamps and marks observed in five different copies held at various archives and library collections; (3) relief data, including locations of rooming houses and meals taken by single unemployed men, from the City Commissoner’s fonds at the City of Edmonton Archives; and (4) addresses and locational data for all booksellers, newspapers, and newsstands in Edmonton circa 1932-33, taken from the 1932 and 1933 Henderson’s Directories (held at the Provincial Archives of Alberta, as well as digitized in the Peel’s Prairie Provinces Collection).

Through the course of the week I was able to do the following:

1. Format my (address, linguistic) data into usable coordinate points.
2. Develop a working knowledge of the ArcGIS software program, which is available to me at the University of Alberta.
3. Plot map layers to distinguish organizations, meeting places, booksellers, and newspapers.
4. Georeference my archival map to bring it into line with real-world coordinates.
5. Layer my data over the map to create a flat document (useful as a handout or presentation image).
6. Export my map and all layers into Google Earth, where I can visualize the historical data on top of present-day Edmonton, as well as display and manipulate my map layers. (Unfortunately, the processed map is not as sharp as the original scan.)
7. Determine the next stages for adding relief data, surveillance data, and broadening these layers out beyond Edmonton.

Archival map of City of Edmonton, 1933, georeferenced and overlaid into Google Earth imagery

Detail: Archival map of City of Edmonton, 1933. Downtown area showing CLDL (red), booksellers (purple), newsstands (blue), and meeting places (yellow)

What I mean to say is, it worked. IT WORKED! For the first time in five years, I came to DHSI with an idea and some data, learned the right skills well enough to put the idea into action, and to complete something immediately usable and still extensible.

This affords an excellent opportunity for reflecting on this process, as well as the work of many other DH projects. What makes it work? I have a few ideas:

1. Expectations. Previous courses, experiments, and failures have begun to give me a sense of the kind of data that is usable and the kind of outcomes that are possible in a short time. A small set of data, with a small outcome – a test, a proof, a starting place – seems to be most easily handled in the five short days of DHSI, and is a good practice for beginning larger projects.

2. Previous skills. Last year, I took Harvey Quamen’s excellent Databases course, which gave me a working knowledge of tables, queries, and overall data organization, which helped to make sense of the way GIS tools operated. Data-mining and visualization would be very useful for the GIS course as well.

3. Preparation. I came with a map in a high-resolution TIFF format, as well as a few tables of data pulled from the archive sources I listed above. I did the groundwork ahead of time; there is no time in a DHSI intensive to be fiddling with address look-ups or author attributions. Equally, good DH work is built on a deep foundation of research scholarship, pulling together information from many traditional methods and sources, then generating new questions and possibilities that plunge us back into the material. Good sources, and close knowledge of the material permit more complex and interesting questions.

4. Projections. Looking ahead to what you want to do next, or what more you want to add helps to stymie the frustration that can come with DH work, while also connecting your project to work in other areas, and adding momentum to those working on new tools and new approaches. “What do you want to do?” is always in tension with “What can you do now?” – but “now” is always a moving target.

5. Collaboration. I am wholly indebted to the work of other scholars, researchers (published and not), librarians, archivists, staff, students, and community members who have helped me to gather even the small set of data used here, and who have been asking the great questions and offering the great readings that I want to explore. The work I have detailed here is one throughline of the work always being done by many, many people. You do not work alone, you should not work alone, and if you are not acknowledging those who work with you, your scholarship is unsustainable and unethical.

While I continue to work through this project, and to hook it into other areas of research and collaboration, these are the points that I try to apply both to my research practices and politics. How will we continue to work with each other, and what makes it work best?

I recently met up with fellow EMiC fellow Nick van Orden, along with a few other colleagues here at the University of Alberta, to discuss our shared experiments in Gephi, “an open graph viz platform” that generates quick and lovely network visualizations. Our meeting was in turn prompted by an earlier off-the-cuff conversation about the pleasures and challenges of exploring new tools, particularly for emerging scholars for whom work that cannot be translated into a line on the CV can often feel like a waste of time. We agreed that spending some time together puzzling over a tool of mutual interest might reduce the time investment and increase the fun factor.

During this first meeting the conversation somewhat inevitably turned to the question of why — why, when there is such a substantial learning curve involved, when it takes SO LONG to format your data, why bother add all? What does a new tool tell me about my object of study that I did not already know, or could not have deduced with old-fashioned analogue methods?

I offer here an excerpt from Nick’s reflection on this conversation, because it is perfect:

DH tools don’t provide answers but do provide different ways of asking questions of the material under examination. I think that we get easily frustrated with the lack of “results” from many of these programs because so much effort goes into preparing the data and getting them to work that we expect an immediate payoff. But, really, the hard intellectual work of thinking up the most useful questions to ask starts once we’re familiar with the program.

The frustration with lack of results, like the frustration with spending time learning something you won’t necessarily be able to use, is based on an instrumentalist approach to academic work that suggests two related things. First, it is, I think, a symptom of the state of the academy in general and humanities in particular. Second, it implies that DH tools should function like other digital tools, intuitively and transparently. I say these points are related because often the instrumentalist approach to scholarship develops into an instrumentalist approach to DH as itself a means for emerging scholars to do exactly the kind of CV-padding that learning a new tool isn’t. And therein lies the value of this “hard intellectual work.”

To illustrate, here is an image of one visualization I produced from Gephi.

This image shows the authors featured in each of the six issues of the magazine Western Home Monthly in which Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese was serialized between August 1925 and January 1926. It reveals a few things: that there a number of regular feature-writers alongside the shifting cast of fiction and article contributors; that, in terms of authors, different issues thus interweave both sameness and difference; that Ostenso herself briefly constitutes one of those recurring features that characterizes the seriality of the magazine, even if a larger chronological viewpoint would emphasize the difference of these six issues from any others. None of these points are surprising to me; none of them were even, properly speaking, revealed by Gephi. They were, in fact, programmed by me when I generated a GDF file consisting of all the nodes and edges I wanted my network to show.

This image does a much better job of arguing than it does of revealing, because it is based on the implicit argument I formulated in the process of building said GDF file: that a magazine can be understood as a network constituted by various individual items (in this case, authors) that themselves overlap in relationships of repetition and difference. It can thus, as Nick implies, be understood as the result of a series of questions: can a magazine be understood as a network? If so, a network of what? What kinds of relationships interest me? What data is worth recording? What alternate formulations can I imagine, as I better understand what Gephi is capable of?

Work like this is slow, exploratory, and its greatest reward is process rather than product. It may eventually lead to something, like a presentation or a paper, that can show up on a CV, but that is not its purpose. The greatest value of the painstaking work of learning a new tool is this very slowness and resistance to the instrumentalist logics of DH in particular and academic work in general.

What is your experience with learning new tools. What tools have you experimented with? How have you dealt with your frustrations or understood your successes? Do you think of tools as answering questions or  helping you to pose better questions? Or as something else entirely?

I recently spent some time installing Islandora (Drupal 7 plus a Fedora Commons repository = open-source, best-practices framework for managing institutional collections) as part of my digital dissertation work, with the goal of using the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) digital edition modules (Islandora Critical Edition and Critical Edition Advanced) as a platform for my Infinite Ulysses participatory digital edition.

If you’ve ever thought about creating your own digital edition (or edition collection) website, here’s some of the features using Islandora plus the EMiC-developed critical edition modules offer:

• Upload and OCR your texts!
• Batch ingest of pages of a book or newspaper
• TEI and RDF encoding GUI (incorporating the magic of CWRC-Writer within Drupal)
• Highlight words/phrases of text—or circle/rectangle/draw a line around parts of a facsimile image—and add textual annotations
• Internet Archive reader for your finished edition! (flip-pages animation, autoplay, zoom)
• A Fedora Commons repository managing your digital objects

If you’d like more information about this digital edition platform or tips on installing it yourself, you can read the full post on my LiteratureGeek.com blog here.

At our DEMiC 2011 orientation session, I had a chance to welcome 30 EMiC participants to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria. Or, rather, 31 including myself. A long month of EMiCites. This is our largest contingent so far, and DHSI itself has grown to host over 200 participants attending 10 different courses. The EMiC community is represented at DEMiC by 13 partner institutions. EMiC has people enrolled in 7 of the 10 offered courses. But what really makes DEMiC 2011 different from previous years is that EMiC is offering its own DHSI course.

If you’re already dizzied by the acronyms, this is how I parse them: DHSI is the institute in its entirety, and DEMiC is our project’s digital training initiative that allows our participants to take any of the institute’s course offerings. With the introduction of EMiC’s own course, DEMiC has transformed itself. EMiC’s Digital Editions course draws upon the specializations of multiple DHSI course offerings, from Text Encoding Fundamentals to Issues in Large Project Management.

The course has been in the making for roughly six years, beginning with the pilot course in editing and publishing that Meagan and I first offered at Dalhousie in 2006-07. This course was not offered as part of my home department’s standard curriculum, which actually proved advantageous because it gave us the freedom to develop an experiential-learning class without harbouring anxieties about how to make the work of editing in print and digital media align with a traditional literary-studies environment. In other words, we started to develop a new kind of pedagogy for the university classroom in line with the kinds of training that takes place at digital-humanities workshops, seminars, and institutes. To put it even more plainly: we wanted to import pieces of DHSI to the Maritimes. That was pre-EMiC.

With EMiC’s start-up in 2008, we began flying out faculty, students, and postdocs to DHSI. After two years (2009, 2010) of taking various DH courses at introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels, we consulted with the EMiC participants to initiate the process of designing our own DHSI course. Meagan and I worked together on the curriculum, and Matt Huculak consulted with both of us as he surveyed the various options available to us to serve as an interface and repository for the production of EMiC digital editions at DHSI. After six months of trial and error, weekly skype meetings with about a dozen different collaborators, three different servers, and two virtual machines, we installed Islandora with its book ingest solution pack. That’s what we’re testing out in Digital Editions, keeping detailed logs of error messages and bugs.

I would like to thank the many people and institutional partners who have come together to make possible the first version of Digital Editions. This course is the product of an extensive collaborative network: Mark Leggott’s Islandora team at the University of Prince Edward Island (Alan Stanley, Alexander O’Neill, Kirsta Stapelfeldt, Joe Veladium, and Donald Moses), Susan Brown’s CWRCers at the University of Alberta (Peter Binkley, Mariana Paredes, and Jeff Antoniuk), Paul Hjartarson’s EMiC group at the UofA (Harvey Quamen and Matt Bouchard), EMiC postdoc Meagan Timney at UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, Image Markup Tool developer Martin Holmes at UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre, and EMiC postdoc Matt Huculak at Dalhousie.

As I write this at the back of a computer lab at UVic, fifteen EMiC participants enrolled in Digital Editions are listening to Meagan, Matt Bouchard, and Alan walk them through the Islandora workflow, filling out MODS forms, testing out the book ingest script with automated OCR, and editing transcriptions in the web-based TEI editor. Some people are waiting patiently for the server to process their ingested texts. We’re witnessing the first stages of EMiC digital editions of manifestos and magazines, poems and novels, letters and short stories. We ingested texts by Crawley, Livesay, Garner, Smart, Page, Scott, Sui Sin Far, Watson, and Wilkinson. And we’re working alongside an international community, too: our newly born repository is also populated with editions of D.G. Rossetti, Marianne Moore, Tato Riviera, Hope Mirrlees, Catherine Sedgwick, and James Joyce.

This afternoon the server at UPEI processed 20 different texts. Hello world. Welcome to Day 1 of the EMiC Commons.

The One Week | One Tool project, Anthologize, officially launched today at 12:30 ET, with 100+ people watching the live stream. I have say that I’m really impressed with the tool so far!

Below, I’ve compiled a list links to information, blogs, and groups pertaining to Anthologize (I will update as needed):

Official Sites
The Anthologize Homepage: http://anthologize.org/

Anthologize Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/anthologize-users

The Official Launch Podcast: http://digitalcampus.tv/2010/08/03/episode-58-anthologize-live/

Cafe Press: http://www.cafepress.com/oneweekonetool

Blogs
Boone Borges: http://teleogistic.net/2010/08/introducing-anthologize-a-new-wordpress-plugin/

Dan Cohen, “Introducing Anthologize”: http://www.dancohen.org/2010/08/02/introducing-anthologize/

Dan Cohen’s Thoughts on One Week | One Tool: http://www.dancohen.org/2010/08/05/thoughts-on-one-week-one-tool/

Jana Remy: Daily Reports: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Launch, or One Week | One Tool, Goes Live

Tom Scheinfeldt’s Lessons from One Week: Part 1: Project Management | Part 2: Tool Use | Part 3: Serendipity

Effie Kapsalis: Please Feed the Visitors | Smithsonian 2.0: Rapid Development at a 162 Year Old Institution

Kathleen Fitzpatrick: http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/anthologize/

Chad Black: http://parezcoydigo.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/anthologize-this-anthologize-that/

Mark Sample: http://www.samplereality.com/2010/08/04/one-week-one-tool-many-anthologies/

Anthologize at UMW: http://anthologize.umwblogs.org/

Julie Meloni @Profhacker: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/One-Week-One-Tool/25972

Patrick Murray-John: http://www.patrickgmj.net/blog/anthologize-uses-what-can-we-turn-on-its-head

Meagan Timney (My “Outsider’s Perspective”): http://corpora.ca/text/?p=422

News Items & Press
NEH Report:
http://www.neh.gov/ODH/ODHUpdate/tabid/108/EntryId/140/Report-from-ODH-Institute-One-Week-One-Tool.aspx

CUNY Commons: http://news.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2010/08/03/one-week-one-tool-the-reveal/

The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/08/academics-build-blog-to-ebook-publishing-tool-in-one-week/60852/

Musematic:
http://musematic.net/2010/08/03/anthologize/

Read-Write-Web: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/scholars_build_blog-to-ebook_tool_in_one_week.php

Chronicle Wired Campus: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Digital-Humanists-Unveil-New/25966/

BookNet Canada Blog: http://booknetcanada.ca/index.php?option=com_wordpress&p=1787&Itemid=319

BBC Tech Brief: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/seealso/2010/08/tech_brief_61.html

Snarkmarket: http://snarkmarket.com/2010/5979

Videos

Anthologize Test Drive by Ryan Trauman

—
I’ll finish with @sramsay‘s description of One Week | One Tool: “It was like landing on a desert island w/e.g. a master shipbuilder & someone who can start fires with their mind.” #oneweek

Please send additions and corrections to mbtimney.etcl@gmail.com or direct message @mbtimney

G’Day Folks;

I hope you are all finding your way into summer mode since returning from UVic. I had my first lake swim of the summer on Friday afternoon. It was glorious.

I’ve not had a single sighting of a bunny since my return…I got used to them but now they are strange again. Ok; on to DEMiC things…

One of my main interests in approaching TEI and XML is how to present non-hierarchical versions of texts (mostly poems, I guess) within an explicitly hierarchical encoding structure. As a result, I am less interested at this point in the issues of explanatory mark-up and more interested in structural issues.

I figured that Dorothy Livesay’s poem “Spain” would work as a good text to play with and try out multiple methods of editing. After trying a couple of different things, I decided to work with a form of layered parallelisms: at the level of the poem as a whole; at the level of stanzas; and, at the level of the individual line. I took six different versions of the poem and included them all in my XML document:

<body>
<head corresp=”#spain”>Spain<lb></lb>by Dorothy Livesay</head>
<div xml:id=”nf” type=”poem”>
<head><emph rend=”italics”>New Frontier </emph>Version</head>
<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”nfs.01″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.01″>When the bare branch responds to leaf and <rhyme label=”a”>light</rhyme>,</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.02″>Remember them! It is for this they <rhyme label=”a”>fight</rhyme>.</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.03″>It is for hills uncoiling and the green <rhyme label=”b”>thrust</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.04″>Of spring, that they lie choked with battle <rhyme label=”b”>dust</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”nfs.02″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.05″>You who hold beauty at your finger <rhyme label=”a”>tips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.06″>Hold it, because the splintering gunshot <rhyme label=”a”>rips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.07″>Between your comrades’ eyes: hold it, <rhyme label=”b”>across</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.08″>Their bodies’ barricade of blood and <rhyme label=”b”>loss</rhyme></l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”nfs.03″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.09″>You who live quietly in sunlit <rhyme label=”a”>space</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.10″>Reading the <rs type= “newspaper”>Herald</rs> after morning <rhyme label=”a”>grace</rhyme>,</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.11″>Can count peace dear, when it has <rhyme label=”b”>driven</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”nfl.12″>Your sons to struggle for this grim, new <rhyme label=”b”>heaven</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>
</div>
<div xml:id=”mq” type=”poem”>
<head><emph rend=”italics”>Marxist Quarterly </emph>Version</head>
<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”mq.01″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.01″>When the bare branch responds to leaf and <rhyme label=”a”>light</rhyme>,</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.02″>Remember them! It is for this they <rhyme label=”a”>fight</rhyme>.</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.03″>It is for hills uncoiling and the green <rhyme label=”b”>thrust</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.04″>Of spring, that they lie choked with battle <rhyme label=”b”>dust</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”mqs.02″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.05″>You who hold beauty at your finger <rhyme label=”a”>tips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.06″>Hold it, because the splintering gunshot <rhyme label=”a”>rips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.07″>Between your comrades’ eyes: hold it, <rhyme label=”b”>across</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.08″>Their bodies’ barricade of blood and <rhyme label=”b”>loss</rhyme></l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”mqs.03″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.09″>You who live quietly in sunlit <rhyme label=”a”>space</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.10″>Reading the <rs type= “newspaper”><emph rend=”italics”>Herald</emph></rs> after morning <rhyme label=”a”>grace</rhyme>,</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.11″>Can count peace dear, when it has <rhyme label=”b”>driven</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”mql.12″>Your sons to struggle for this grim, new <rhyme label=”b”>heaven</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>
</div>
<div xml:id=”cpts” type=”poem”>
<head><emph rend=”italics”>Collected Poems </emph>Version</head>
<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”cptss.01″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.01″>When the bare branch responds to leaf and <rhyme label=”a”>light</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.02″>Remember them: It is for this they <rhyme label=”a”>fight</rhyme>.</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.03″>It is for haze-swept hills and the green <rhyme label=”b”>thrust</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.04″>Of pine, that they lie choked with battle <rhyme label=”b”>dust</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”cptss.02″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.05″>You who hold beauty at your finger-<rhyme label=”a”>tips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.06″>Hold it because the splintering gunshot <rhyme label=”a”>rips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.07″>Between your comrades’ eyes; hold it <rhyme label=”b”>across</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.08″>Their bodies’ barricade of blood and <rhyme label=”b”>loss</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”cptss.03″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.09″>You who live quietly in sunlit <rhyme label=”a”>space</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.10″>Reading The <rs type= “newspaper”>Herald</rs> after morning <rhyme label=”a”>grace</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.11″>Can count peace dear, when it has <rhyme label=”b”>driven</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cptsl.12″>Your sons to struggle for this grim, new <rhyme label=”b”>heaven</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>
</div>
<div xml:id=”cvii” type=”poem”>
<head><emph rend=”italics”>CV/II </emph>Version</head>
<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”cviis.01″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.01″>When the bare branch responds to leaf and <rhyme label=”a”>light</rhyme>,</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.02″>Remember them: It is for this they <rhyme label=”a”>fight</rhyme>.</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.03″>It is for hills uncoiling and the green <rhyme label=”b”>thrust</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.04″>Of spring, that they lie choked with battle <rhyme label=”b”>dust</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”cviis.02″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.05″>You who hold beauty at your finger-<rhyme label=”a”>tips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.06″>Hold it because the splintering gunshot <rhyme label=”a”>rips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.07″>Between your comrades’ eyes: hold it, <rhyme label=”b”>across</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.08″>Their bodies’ barricade of blood and <rhyme label=”b”>loss</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” subtype=”quatrain” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”cviis.03″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.09″>You who live quietly in sunlit <rhyme label=”a”>space</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.10″>Reading the <rs type= “newspaper”>Herald</rs> after morning <rhyme label=”a”>grace</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.11″>Can count peace dear, if it has <rhyme label=”b”>driven</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”cviil.12″>Your sons to struggle for this grim, new <rhyme label=”b”>heaven</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>
</div>
<div xml:id=”rmos” type=”poem”>
<head><emph rend=”italics”>Red Moon Over Spain </emph>Version</head>
<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”rmoss.01″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.01″>When the bare branch responds to leaf and <rhyme label=”a”>light</rhyme>,</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.02″>Remember them! It is for this they <rhyme label=”a”>fight</rhyme>.</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.03″>It is for hills uncoiling and the green <rhyme label=”b”>thrust</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.04″>Of spring, that they lie choked with battle <rhyme label=”b”>dust</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”rmoss.02″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.05″>You who hold beauty at your finger <rhyme label=”a”>tips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.06″>Hold it, because the splintering gunshot <rhyme label=”a”>rips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.07″>Between your comrades’ eyes: hold it, <rhyme label=”b”>across</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.08″>Their bodies’ barricade of blood and <rhyme label=”b”>loss</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”rmoss.03″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.09″>You who live quietly in sunlit <rhyme label=”a”>space</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.10″>Reading the <rs type= “newspaper”><emph rend=”italics”>Herald</emph></rs> after morning <rhyme label=”a”>grace</rhyme>,</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.11″>Can count peace dear, when it has <rhyme label=”b”>driven</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”rmosl.12″>Your sons to struggle for this grim new <rhyme label=”b”>heaven</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>
</div>
<div xml:id=”sis” type=”poem”>
<head><emph rend=”italics”>Sealed in Struggle </emph>Version</head>
<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”siss.01″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.01″>When the bare branch responds to leaf and <rhyme label=”a”>light</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.02″>Remember them: It is for this they <rhyme label=”a”>fight</rhyme>.</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.03″>It is for haze-swept hills and the green <rhyme label=”b”>thrust</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.04″>Of pine, that they lie choked with battle <rhyme label=”b”>dust</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”siss.02″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.05″>You who hold beauty at your finger-<rhyme label=”a”>tips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.06″>Hold it because the splintering gunshot <rhyme label=”a”>rips</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.07″>Between your comrades’ eyes; hold it <rhyme label=”b”>across</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.08″>Their bodies’ barricade of blood and <rhyme label=”b”>loss</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>

<lg type=”stanza” rhyme=”aabb”><lg subtype=”quatrain” xml:id=”siss.03″>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.09″>You who live quietly in sunlit <rhyme label=”a”>space</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.10″>Reading The <rs type= “newspaper”>Herald</rs> after morning <rhyme label=”a”>grace</rhyme>,</l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.11″>Can count peace dear, when it has <rhyme label=”b”>driven</rhyme></l>
<lb/><l xml:id=”sisl.12″>Your sons to struggle for this grim, new <rhyme label=”b”>heaven</rhyme>.</l></lg></lg>
</div>
</body>

In the back material I included some basic bibliographic material (which certainly needs to be beefed up) as well as a more complex set of link targets that allow for the parallel structure:

<listBibl>
<bibl corresp=”#nf”>
<author corresp=”#dorothylivesay”>Dorothy Livesay</author>
<title>New Fronier</title>
<date>1937</date>
</bibl>
<bibl corresp=”#mq”>
<author corresp=”#dorothylivesay”>Dorothy Livesay</author>
<title>Marxist Quarterly</title>
<date>1966</date>
</bibl>
<bibl corresp=”#cpts”>
<author corresp=”#dorothylivesay”>Dorothy Livesay</author>
<title>Collected Poems</title>
<date>1972</date>
</bibl>
<bibl corresp=”#cvii”>
<author corresp=”#dorothylivesay”>Dorothy Livesay</author>
<title>CV/II</title>
<date>1976</date>
</bibl>
<bibl corresp=”#rmos”>
<author corresp=”#dorothylivesay”>Dorothy Livesay</author>
<title>Red Moon Over Spain</title>
<date>1988</date>
</bibl>
<bibl corresp=”#sis” >
<author corresp=”#dorothylivesay”>Dorothy Livesay</author>
<title>Sealed in Struggle</title>
<date>1995</date>
</bibl>
</listBibl>

<div>
<linkGrp type=”alignment”>
<link targets=”#nf #mq #cpt #cvii #rmos #sis”/>
<link targets=”#nfs.01 #mqs.01 #cptss.01 #cviis.01 #rmoss.01 #siss.01″/>
<link targets=”#nfs.02 #mqs.02 #cptss.02 #cviis.02 #rmoss.02 #siss.02″/>
<link targets=”#nfs.03 #mqs.03 #cptss.03 #cviis.03 #rmoss.03 #siss.03″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.01 #mql.01 #cptsl.01 #cviil.01 #rmosl.01 #sisl.01″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.02 #mql.02 #cptsl.02 #cviil.02 #rmosl.02 #sisl.02″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.03 #mql.03 #cptsl.03 #cviil.03 #rmosl.03 #sisl.03″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.04 #mql.04 #cptsl.04 #cviil.04 #rmosl.04 #sisl.04″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.05 #mql.05 #cptsl.05 #cviil.05 #rmosl.05 #sisl.05″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.06 #mql.06 #cptsl.06 #cviil.06 #rmosl.06 #sisl.06″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.07 #mql.07 #cptsl.07 #cviil.07 #rmosl.07 #sisl.07″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.08 #mql.08 #cptsl.08 #cviil.08 #rmosl.08 #sisl.08″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.09 #mql.09 #cptsl.09 #cviil.09 #rmosl.09 #sisl.09″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.10 #mql.10 #cptsl.10 #cviil.10 #rmosl.10 #sisl.10″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.11 #mql.11 #cptsl.11 #cviil.11 #rmosl.11 #sisl.11″/>
<link targets=”#nfl.12 #mql.12 #cptsl.12 #cviil.12 #rmosl.12 #sisl.12″/>
</linkGrp>
</div>

“s” stands for stanza and “l” stands for line within the “link targets”

Although not written into the XML file, this parallel structure allows for the POTENTIAL versioning of the poem within a web-based interface. In other words, I think I am creating a non-hierarchical BASE for future application. As I said, I THINK I am creating a non-hierarchical BASE… am I?

I’ve been discovering this week at DHSI that I don’t really know what I talk about when I talk about digital humanism. As someone who also talks about modernism, and Canadian modernism, and labour, and print, this fogginess is nothing new. It might even be productive.

The tools we are encountering, and the ways in which we work through them, are restructuring the ways we think about text, and place, and time. Our conversations about the digital realm and the boundaries of our various disciplines are a key part of relating to these very technical concepts and grappling with the future we are propelled toward. But we’re also talking about the way we relate to modernity and how the issues we are confronting right now are also a way of reaching through to the earlier moment that we have taken up as modernists.

I have been considering the ways in which modernist print betrays anxieties about modernity through reflexive styles of rhetoric and form. Giddens has discussed how modern self-conceptions depend on constantly ordering and re-ordering social relations to accommodate continual knowledge input. It is a process of selection and shaping – not determinism; the modern actor is self-defined and highly conscious of the world around her. I’ve been considering the conversations floating around DHSI, and our own para-conversations here and elsewhere, as part of a reflexive field. As a researcher, I have to redefine myself and my position constantly to account for new tools and approaches. As a reader, I begin to connect texts and ideas in ways I was blind to before. As a conscious actor, I have to try to filter through a world of potential to find what has meaning to me and what fits to who I am. The reflex, as I experience it, is about redefining oneself as much as it is about kickback. It’s destabilizing, and exhilarating.

Vanessa’s post reflecting on the ways TEI’s structures work to enforce typographic codes, even as these codes were challenged by many modernist writers, shows so much insight into the way our tools can force us to re-think our texts – or to reify what was once revolutionary. I want to consider our conversations in the same way. I become absorbed in the intensity of a good conversation, and have had a few already. I am an inveterate gesturer. Pub stools make for good conversational bases. I want our conversations to flow back and forth from screen to stool and back again with fluid boundaries. I will do my best this week to seek out more voices and challenge more of my thoughts on these tools and approaches. I invite you to join me (and to try to convince me about Twitter…)!

To build on Stéfan Sinclair’s plenary talk at DHSI yesterday afternoon, I thought it appropriate to put Voyeur into action with some born-digital EMiC content. Perhaps one day someone will think to produce a critical edition of EMiC’s Twitter feed, but in the meantime, I’ve used a couple basic digital tools to show you how you can take ready-made text from online sources and plug it into a text-analysis and visualization tool such as Voyeur.

I started with a tool called Twapper Keeper, which is a Twitter #hashtag archive. When we were prototyping the EMiC community last summer and thinking about how to integrate Twitter into the new website, Anouk had the foresight to set up a Twapper Keeper hashtag archive (also, for some reason, called a notebook) for #emic. From the #emic hashtag notebook at the Twapper Keeper site, you can simply share the archive with people who follow you on Twitter or Facebook, or you can download it and plug the dataset into any number of text-analysis and visualization tools. (If you want to try this out yourself, you’ll need to set up a Twitter account, since the site will send you a tweet with a link to your downloaded hashtag archive.) Since Stéfan just demoed Voyeur at DHSI, I thought I’d use it to generate some EMiC-oriented text-analysis and visualization data. If you want to play with Voyeur on your own, I’ve saved the #emic Twitter feed corpus (which is a DH jargon for a dataset, or more simply, a collection of documents) that I uploaded to Voyeur. I limited the dates of the data I exported to the period from June 5th to early in the day on June 9th, so the corpus represents  the #emic feed during the first few days of DHSI. Here’s a screenshot of the tool displaying Twitter users who have included the #emic hashtag:

#emic hashtag Twitter feed, 5-9 June 2010

As a static image, it may be difficult to tell exactly what you’re looking at and what it means. Voyeur allows you to perform a fair number of manipulations (selecting keywords, using stop word lists) so that you can isolate the information about word frequencies within a single document (as in this instance) or a whole range of documents. As a simple data visualization, the graph displays the relative frequency of the occurrence of Twitter usernames of EMiCites who are attending DHSI and who have posted at least one tweet using the #emic hashtag. To isolate this information I created a favourites list of EMiC tweeters from the full list of words in the #emic Twitter feed. If you wanted to compare the relative frequency of the words “emic” and “xml” and “tei” and “bunnies,” you’d could either enter these words (separated by commas) into the search field in the Words in the Entire Corpus pane or manually select these words by scrolling through all 25 pages. (It’s up to you, but I know which option I’d choose.) Select these words and click the heart+ icon to add them to your favourites list. Then make sure you select them in the Words within the Document pane to generate a graph of their relative frequency. If want to see the surrounding context of the words you’ve chosen, you can expand the snippet view of each instance in the Keywords in Context pane.

Go give it a try. The tool’s utility is best assessed by actually playing around with it yourself.  If you’re still feeling uncertain about how to use the tool, you can watch Stéfan run through a short video demo.

While you’re at it, can you think of any ways in which we might implement a tool such as Voyeur for the purposes of text analysis of EMiC digital edtions? What kinds of text-analysis and visualization tools do you want to see integrated into EMiC editions? If you come across something you really find useful, please let me know (dean.irvine@dal.ca). Or, better, blog it!