Re-Imagining Scholarly Communication

This is a republishing of an article I wrote for the Strange Bedfellows project.  The original url is here.

Yesterday I attended a conference at UTSC titled “Re-Imagining Scholarly Communication“.  The keynote speaker, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, spoke mainly on scholarly communities revolving around ideas of peer review and Stefan Sinclair focused mostly on the history and strength of web-based digital scholarship applications in Canada however an interesting commonality they shared was a proposal to think beyond the journal article as “the” form of scholarship in academia.

Could One Word Change a Story?

This is a republishing of an article I wrote for the Strange Bedfellows project.  The original url is here.

Early modern drama, and Shakespeare’s works in particular, have a very troubled past.  So troubled that, especially in Shakespeare’s case, editors have been fighting over what exactly were Shakespeare’s “true words”.  Early modern methods of printing, copying, and ideas of copyright were varied to say the least.  Thanks to nearly infinite variation that comes from this, any play that has Shakespeare’s name should also have the names of its editors.  So much is involved in editing Shakespeare and early modern plays, the length of time involved in editing the Cambridge Edition of Ben Jonson’s works comes to mind, that any editor could easily be considered a coauthor.  Editors resolve variant issues anywhere from single words, like “hath” or “have”, “Ay” or “I”, etc., to complete passages, like in Act 3.1 of King Lear.  Editors have fought over these issues for so long, contrasting schools have formed, and different editions have be published in response to others, that I feel like a particularly modern question must be asked of this early modern “drama”: “Do individual words matter, specifically in literature?”

Digital Humanities Inspiration

This is a republishing of an article I wrote for the Strange Bedfellows project.  The original url is here.

While I have been researching digital humanities and digital humanities centres, I have come across a lot of interesting ideas and quotes, especially regarding the relationship between the humanities and computing.   Here is a small collection of the quotes I have found, arranged in a pseudo-meaningful way.  I am not quite sure of the point that I am trying to make here, perhaps it is several.  Hopefully you will find these as interesting as I do.

Look in Thy Glass, and Tell the Face Thou Viewest Now is the Time that Face Should Form Another

This is a republishing of an article I wrote for the Strange Bedfellows project.  The original url is here.

I watched a TED talk by Aaron Koblin about “artfully visualizing our humanity” but I think his talk could also serve as a “how to” guide for the best way of thinking about the digital humanities.  In it, Koblin speaks mainly about accessing large data sets and crowd-sourcing, both of which are topics that might not seem applicable to the humanities.  But, one of the things I remember about Professor Michael Witmore’s work is one of our conversations regarding statistics.  Professor Witmore was relaying to me a conversation he had with a professor of statistics about trying to find the best method for “artfully visualizing” Shakespeare’s corpus and literature in general.  The statistics the other professor recommended for Witmore’s project were similar in kind to the methods used on the human genome project but Witmore’s study of literature was infinitely more complex than DNA.  That literature could contain so many variables is, at first glance, hard to conceive of but becomes easier as one considers that individual words, even common “filler” words, are counted as well as phrases, clauses, etc.  In this respect, even a contained data set like Shakespeare’s corpus proved to be much hard to visualize clearly and meaningfully than scientific studies.  The “largeness” of the humanities then, is a question of scope; a question that has had trouble being answered as scholarship moves into the digital realm.

The Rationale for JSON over TEI/XML in Literary Markup

This is a republishing of an article I wrote for the Strange Bedfellows project.  The original url is here.

 Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information.[1]

I recently wondered, “what is TEI used for?”   I have known about TEI for about three years but somehow its purpose slipped my mind. (There is a basic introduction to TEI here.) All I could remember was that it took a lot of time.  When I looked back at my dissertation (where I had wrote a little about it in relation to the Rossetti Archive), I could not remember much more about it than it was used as a structuring element for the massive amounts of information housed in the Rossetti Archive.  After a quick Google search, asking the same question, I came up with an answer.