Category Archives: digital humanities

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A Sifendipity that turned into an activity

  September 28, 2014 , ,

This week I have been quite busy conducting interviews for my hybrid pedagogy promotion project, and one aspect that came up frequently during those interviews was my interviewee’s particular reservation against using the microblogging platform Twitter for pedagogical purposes. Most interviewees said they don’t (like to) use Twitter because it would sent their teaching into a tailspin, thereby making it more difficult to administer the students’ learning experience. I can certainly understand the attitude. Once we go hybrid with our pedagogy, we introduce additional spaces into the learning experience and it can become quite overwhelming not only to administer the content that students produce on Twitter, but also to use that content for assessment, not to mention that in every class there will be students who don’t use social media tools at all (at least that has been my experience so far). So, from that angle, I can surely understand how Twitter can be quite intimidating at first. However, a couple of days ago I found an email in my inbox from a research-sharing website which contained a paper on the rhetoric of hashtags by Daer, Hoffman, and Goodman, titled “Rhetorical functions of hashtag forms across social media applications,” and here I can certainly see the merit of using Twitter in the classroom for critical thinking exercises as well as for practicing analytical skills. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, hashtags are used to connect Twitter messages to larger conversations. Hashtags are words or unspaced phrases that … Continue reading

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ePoesis, and John Ashbery’s Ire

  September 25, 2014 ,

The ancient Greek work Poïesis (ποίησις) “is etymologically derived from the ancient term ποιέω, which means “to make” ” (Wikipedia), pointing to the fundamentally creative aspect of poetry. Words exist, like bricks. By a making, a poet creates a poem, like a builder creates a building. Ordering words, then, is poetry. Poets order words by placing certain words in a certain order, but also by creating structures: lines, stanzas, indentations, and so forth. Even the most basic poetic form presents challenges to electronic texts. For instance, since multiple spaces and tabs are not recognized by basic html, how would one easily replicate the following, with the varied indents present in various lines: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Metrical Feet. Lesson for a Boy” (image from this blog) Or, how about the very common use, in poetic texts, of line numbers: (From Project Gutenberg.) Each is, of course, possible in html… but not easily. Rendering a poem in WordPress (like this blog), for instance, is not easy at all, something I discovered personally while trying to add some poems to Free Poems on Demand. Here is one answer to for poetical WordPress users. In terms of Big Time, Famous Poets, when John Ashbery,  “looked at the first four electronic editions of his poetry he observed that they looked nothing like the original print editions and after he complained, his publisher, Ecco, promptly withdrew all four electronic books from circulation.” This story at poetryfoundation.org (quoting heavily from an article in today’s New York Times), however, describes how Ashbery … Continue reading

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Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives

  September 18, 2014

One of the projects I am assigned to is to help Dr. Michael Harker work on the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN). The DALN, as we refer to it, is a collection of narratives from all over the world about literacy. This could mean anything from reading, to writing, and even to digital literacy. I have helped with the DALN in the past, (wo)manning tables at conferences, enticing potential storytellers to our table to get them to speak their narratives into a computer. We then store all these narratives at the link above. Anyone can look into the archive. Anyone can use the archive to do any kind of research they may have relating to literacy, or even beyond. This week, I’ve been spending hours uploading narratives to the archive that were sent to us on a drive all the way from Singapore. Many of these are about learning English, but some are about speaking Mandarin, Idioms, and several are about computing. I am the only person on this project. Once I upload the rest of the files from Singapore, I’ll be playing with an IPad 2, trying to figure out a better way to collect narratives at later conferences. Hopefully I’ll have plenty to say about that project in later posts. 🙂 Valerie Robin

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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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OMEKA: Web Publishing for Archives, Scholars, Libraries, Museums, and More

  September 11, 2014

OMEKA is an open source web-site builder that was designed by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University with folks in mind who need to produce a digital collection of items that is fairly complex or intricate and needs to function as a digital archive or museum or library exhibit or perhaps even a scholar’s web site.  I’m particularly interested in the possibilities of OMEKA to build a site to share scholarship with other researchers as well as to use in teaching.  The most current version of OMEKA, as of July 14, 2104, is 2.2.2.  Though I have not yet used this software, I have begun investigating what others have done with it and what they have to say about it. The following are a few things I’ve discovered. Several example web sites built with OMEKA: Martha Washington Biography site: Project developed by George Washington’s Mount Vernon and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The Making of the History of 1989 site: Project developed by German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. Florida Memory site: Project administered by the Florida Department of State, Division of Library and Information Services. Center for the History of Medicine site: Harvard University  Here’s a link to a video from the OMEKA web site giving a tour of the software. Below is an article evaluating an early version of OMEKA: Using Omeka to Build Digital Collections: The METRO Case Study by Jason Kucsma, Metropolitan New … Continue reading