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The Hoccleve Archive and the Sudden Currency of Old-Fashioned Skills

  September 17, 2014 ,

I haven’t written yet about what is probably my personal favorite of the SIF projects, an ambitious digital humanities project called the Hoccleve Archive, which is attempt to create a digital variorum edition of Thomas Hoccleve’s early 15th century poem, the Regiment of Princes. One aspect of this poem is the complex computing and scholarly challenge of collating, displaying and digitally ‘marking-up’ a 5500 line poem which exists in 43 different manuscript versions. MSS. Dugdale 45, Hoccleve’s Regiment Bodleian Library, Oxford Another Manuscript version of Hoccleve’s Regiment In addition to these manuscripts, the Hoccleve Archive project hopes to conserve and make accessible a huge amount of material gathered in the 1980’s and 1990’s for what turned out to be a (very productive!) failure to produce a printed variorum edition of the Regiment. This extra material, which gives the Hoccleve Archive huge head start, includes over 6000 handwritten collation sheets, and nearly 150 text-based computer files containing an archaic, but still legible orthographic and lexical mark-up of Hoccleve’s holograph manuscripts. Hoccleve Archive Collation Folders Using these materials, however, is far from straightforward. The mark-up of the new, all digital archive will be done XML/TEI (a specialized tag set for manuscripts and literary documents), whereas the older mark-up was done in a customized language, which the computing end of our team (Ram, Sruthi, Rushitha), are translating into XML/TEI. Figuring out how to use the handwritten collation sheets, which have been scanned, but will also need considerable work to convert into digital form, … Continue reading

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Digital Pedagogy Meetup 1.0

  September 14, 2014

This Monday (9/8) was the first Digital Pedagogy Meetup of the school year. It was held at Manuel’s Tavern in the back room (though it’s really not as clandestine as it sounds), and is part of a larger Atlanta studies community now called “Atlanta Connected Learning.” Nirmal speaks about Mahana – a part of Georgia Tech’s first year experience. Spearheaded by innovative faculty from several Georgia schools in the Atlanta area, including but not limited to GSU, SPSU, Agnes Scott, and GATech, Atlanta Connected Learning is going to be an umbrella community that will eventually house several different educational and innovative meet ups designed to encourage the kind of innovation that is already happening in this community, but gather more followers and minds to take on all the projects to be tackled in the Georgia school systems. Digital Pedagogy Meetups will continue to feature 2 sets of speakers who will talk, in a casual setting, about the projects they are working on to promote lifelong learning and a journey into the future of pedagogy. Check out atlcl.org  for more developments, as the site will be developing and changing a lot over the coming semester. Get on board, if you aren’t already. Valerie Robin

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Late Night Blog WOOOOO!!!

  September 14, 2014

Yes, as the title suggests, this is a late night blog. I see that I work best at night when it’s quiet and the creativity just flows out of me. It reaches critical mass once I start giggling at things for no reason. I’m a weird person… Anyways, back to business. CURVE had it’s big grand opening on Wednesday, and I was there to see the initiation of the ceremony. It was cool, and I met some people thinking about how the technologies would help them. Many of them were either into the advanced mapping technologies or the bioware things that showed proteins. What I have been working on this week are two things: three.js and the Tools Wiki. Three.js is a Javascript API that focuses on bringing 3D elements to any web browser. Examples here. Pretty cool right? Everyone has been wanting something for that 4K workstation, so I thought this would be a perfect fit. For interactivity, I plan on manipulating the code to give the mouse position on each of the renders, which will be cool but also take up some resources. The Tools Wiki is another project I’m working on with other people at CURVE. I can’t say I’m having a little bit of trouble getting off the ground. Since wikis are supposed to be on the Internet on a server somewhere for easy access and edit ability, there is little “base code” available for small, local wikis. However, I am researching as I go, so … Continue reading

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Let Me Visualize Your Words, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are

  September 14, 2014

Consider the following everyday life situation: you’ve bought a defective item, and now you are discussing return policies with a customer service agent over the phone…then maybe you are not discussing return policies at all but you want to place an order over the phone. In any event, I dare you to ask yourself if you’ve ever wondered what the agent on the line might actually look like? I am sure that we’ve all done that at one point or the other, and I am also speculating that 9 out of 10 times our intuition would fail us and the agent on the other line doesn’t look anything like the image we crafted of him or her in our minds. Now, why might this be worth noting? The inference that we can draw is that there are certain cues embedded in the human voice which, when all we have is sound, motivate us to craft an idea of the speaker in our heads. Moreover, not only do we imagine physical attributes, we also equip the voice with certain characteristics that the speaker presumably has. Succinctly put, when we only have the sound of a voice available, we are often tempted to fill in the blanks of the speaker’s personality. And this leads us to the well-grounded assumption that the human voice is shaped by the relative relationship of various parameters such as pitch, tone, timbre, rhythm, inflection, and emphasis among others, which—during the act of listening—leave us with impressions about … Continue reading

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CURVE–Ribbon Cutting!

  September 14, 2014 ,

CURVE is officially open as of Wednesday of this week! from Andrew Vaughan: Here are a few images from the 4K workstation where we were showing off 3D Visualizations in Archaeology for the attendees. Here I am showing off an artifact to an attendee. GSU Anthropology’s DJI Phantom and Artifacts Dr Becker checks out the GSU Anthropology Quadcopter. Robert, Dr. Glover and I showing off research to Dr. K, the Anthropology Chair. Robert Bryant and Dr. Glover giving GSU President Dr. Becker a lesson in Digital Archaeology. Dr. Jeffrey Glover Showing an Artifact to attendees. Robert Bryant demonstrating 3D artifact modeling.