EMDA2013 participant blog posts

Blog posts written by members of the Folger Institute's 2013 Early Modern Digital Agendas seminar.

Davis, Robin Camille. "EMDA: Final Report"

• Closing thoughts.

Duhaime, Douglas. "Identifying Poetry In Unstructured Corpora"

• Proposes using line-length to identify poetic texts in large, unstructured corpora

---, "NGram Frequencies and Eighteenth Century Commonplaces"

• Uses string-matching to identify allusions and intertextuality across a corpus

---, "Co-citation Networks in the EEBO-TCP Corpus"

• Uses the XML fields from the EEBO-TCP corpus to visualize co-citation networks in early modern writing.

Harrison, Matthew. "It's Not Distant Reading: I'm Just Far-Sighted"

• Explores the stakes of informal, non-systematic, or non-quantitative search as a tool in close-reading

Lamb, Jonathan. "The Light Commodity of Words: Digitizing the Material Book" (YouTube Video)

• EMDA retrospective talk given at the University of Kansas.

Powell, Daniel. "Early Modern Digital Agendas"

---, "Dispatches From Capitol Hill: #1"

• Notes on our first sessions.

---, "EEBO and the Infinite Weirdness: Dispatches from Capitol Hill #2"

• "Rather than focusing on the history of Early English Books and the movement of the project from preservation to active research use and from microfilm to PDF facsimiles, I’m going to throw up some interesting screenshots of weird corners we found today through some pretty odd searching patterns."

---, "XML and TEI Are Scary: Dispatches from Capitol Hill #3"

• "How we go about the comprehensive creation of scholarly digital editions, and exactly how these projects might impact the types of questions we can ask as early modern scholars, remain to be reckoned with."

---, "What is Transcription, Really?: Dispatches from Capitol Hill #4"

• "In other words, what does it take to produce a useful (and, possibly, accurate) model of early modern manuscripts? What needs to happen behind the scenes to ensure that such a resource is usable by scholars, students, and the like?"

---, "EMDA: A Retrospective"

• "Overall, the most valuable takeaway for me personally is a new sense of community, one centred on a group of early modern digital humanities all explicitly concerned with asking the types of question and pursuing the types of projects I’ve come to think of as ‘my type’ of research."

Wernimont, Jacqueline. "A Paradox"

• "It’s easy to become entrenched in the have/have nots conversation - while the structures of higher education hierarchy and closed data deserve calling out, they might also be a distraction. Why bother fighting for a very dirty data set when we could create it anew and in better form?"

---. "Exercises"

• "Well, I’m looking for a better sense of how many people were writing about exercise – whether spiritual, rhetorical, mathematical or otherwise. "

---. "Echo of Whitney Trettien’s EEBO Oddities"

---. "Alternate EEBOs?"

• " How can we understand the ways that technologies are shaping our engagements with literature if we don’t stop to consider how technology and literature have already been shaping and constraining one another? The questions around how we might use our tools to create new forms of criticism and history are interesting to be sure, but I’m not sure that I can ask them until I have worked to understand how the tools have already created new critique and historiography."

Williams, Patrick. "Report from Early Modern Digital Agendas"

• The many ways in which the digital representations of the books themselves are incomplete; the hyper-public manner in which we as a community shared our discourse.