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Maya Bielinski

Tag Archives: Digital Humanities

Phantasmagoria and Other Poems–the digital object

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LandingPage

The landing page for the digital object (which will hopefully be mounted online soon, and available through the Queen’s library catalogue).

After a bit of a search-around for a digital edition framework to help me mount the W. D. Jordan Special Collections copy of Lewis Carroll’s Phantasmagoria and Other Poems online, I came across this javascript application that mimics the functionality of a book. I customized the app, loaded in our images, altered the landing page to include the covers of the book, created a linked-up ‘table of contents,’  and slapped it all into a Twitter Bootstrap site that also includes (TEI-adherent) textual and (Emily Murphy-authored) extra-textual material.

Murph and I had very specific design goals for the object: we wanted a simple, clean, and intuitive layout that represented as closely as possible a reader’s engagement with the material edition. This ix-nayed scrolling layouts that vivisect the book by presenting the object more than once on a page. We wanted a visually cohesive object. The result is what you see below.

OpenBook

When a user clicks on the book, the booklet.js app is revealed. Here’s the inside cover of Phantasmagoria, with the advertisement for Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The ‘Contents’ sidebar, on hover-over, reveals a linked-up index of the poems. Hovering over the left or right edges of the book reveals a peek at the next pages in the book, and a simple click in this area of the representation turns the page (with an attractive, but hopefully not too distracting, animation).

TheTrystyng

Here’s the first page of Canto I of Phantasmagoria (navigated to from the sidebar).

TheTrystyngInfo

The javascript application allows for extra-textual information to be included with each page, which is revealed when a user hovers over the ‘i’ in the bottom right corner of the page image.

Footer

Emily and I have also included contextual information on the site: an introductory and historical essay, some information about the physical object, and a statement that outlines the reasons behind our various design choices.

Digital Edition Framework or Boilerplate?

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I’m working with Emily Murphy (who organized THATCamp Queensu 2013 with me) to image, transcribe, encode, and provide annotations for a Queen’s University Special Collections copy of the first edition of Lewis Carroll’s Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (check out this edition of the text, or the Gutenberg.org edition, which are in the public domain). It’s a charming text, and the Library’s copy is in good shape.

phantasmagoria

I’m looking for a framework that will allow us to publish our digital edition online. I love TEI Boilerplate (the main site seems to be down at the time of posting, but the source code is still available on Grant L. Simpson’s GitHub), but I’m looking for a something that allows me to load up images of the text we’ve encoded, and connect extra-textual critical apparatuses to the images and transcription. In an ideal world the whole thing would be easily navigable and searchable. I’ve just learned about the TEICHI framework, which I am currently looking into. Any other resources I should know about?

THATCamp QueensU 2013–a success!

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What a great day. Despite the heavy snowstorm–

Douglas Library, Queen's University. Photo courtesy Leslie Ritchie.

Douglas Library, Queen’s University. Photo courtesy Leslie Ritchie.

–we had a great turnout. Participants from Toronto and London weren’t able to make it because the 401 highway was treacherous, but our cozy unconference of about 30 participants was fun, exciting, and productive.

Here’s a quick shot from one of the sessions, led by Queen’s University archivists Jeremy Heil and Heather Home:

Heather Home and Jeremy Heil discuss the role of archives in DH projects at Queen's.

Heather Home and Jeremy Heil discuss the role of archives in DH projects at Queen’s. Photo courtesy Leslie Ritchie.

Bootstrapping DH

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What a brilliant talk from Dr. Melissa Terras from the Centre for Digital Humanities of University College London:

Dr. Melissa Terras: The Vision After the Sermon

She offers a great list for those who are interested in setting up a hub for digital humanities:

  • Eat your own dog food – (this includes using best practices and having an active digital presence)
  • Get a good team
  • Maintain high visibility – attend events, reach out
  • Invest the time
  • Invest the resources
  • Get institutional backing

The video is really worth a watch. Among the many gems is this poster promoting the Centre (this falls under “visibility”):

From the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities Flickr Feed

Cross-Hop!

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Though its preliminary successes got a warm reception at the CSECS conference last October on an intimate DH panel (with Alison Muri, coordinator of the Grub Street Project), the Cross-Hopkins Diary Project is still very much a hatchling. I dove into TEI encoding with zero prior knowledge, and have really been learning as I go.

The ambitious goal of the project is to have a database of information that allows users to both close-read and ‘distant-read’ the records: we want the tags anchored to locations on the image, but also a flexible database of which plays were performed on what day and how much cash each show brought in to the theatre (so that exciting statistical analysis can be performed). Marginalia is a large part of the Diary’s neato-factor, so it would be great to have the complete notes tagged intelligently, too: people, places, organizations, and dates.

To give you an idea of what I’ve been doing so far, here’s a snippet of an image of the manuscript with its accompanying XML:

 

<row xml:id="r49">
      <cell role="production">49</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-11-27">Fry 27</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><title ref="#VEN">Venice preserv'd</title> + <title ref="#LOT">Lottery</title></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="150">150</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <row xml:id="r50">
      <cell role="production">50</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-11-28">Sat 28</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><title ref="#PRW">P: Wife</title> + <title ref="#LOT">D<hi rend="superscript">o</hi></title></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="170">170</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <row xml:id="r51">
      <cell role="production">51</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-11-30">Mon 30</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><title ref="#ORP">Orphan</title> + <title ref="#ANA">Anat</title></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="100">100</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <add place="inline">
     <milestone unit="month"/>Dec<hi rend="superscript">r</hi>.</add>
     <row xml:id="r52">
      <cell role="production">52</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-12-01">Tus 1<hi rend="superscript">st</hi>:</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><del><title ref="#ORP">Orphan</title> + <title ref="#ANA">Anatomist</title></del>
     <add place="below"><title ref="#STR">Stratagem</title> + <title ref="#LOT">Lottery</title></add></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="120">120</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <note place="opposite" type="aud"><name ref="#PRN" type="person" role="royalty">Prince</name> + <name ref="#PRS" type="person" role="royalty">P.</name></note>
     <row xml:id="r53">
      <cell role="production">53</cell>
      <cell role="date"><date when="1747-12-02">Wed 2<hi rend="superscript">d</hi>.</date></cell>
      <cell role="show"><del><title ref="#STR">Stratagem</title> + <title ref="#LOT">Lottery</title></del>
     <add place="below"><title ref="#REC">Recr: Officer</title> + <rs type="ent">Dancing</rs></add></cell>
      <cell role="take"><measure type="currency" unit="pounds" n="120">120</measure></cell>
     </row>
     <pb/>

It’s definitely not perfect, and I’m not even sure it’s totally TEI-adherent! I’ve adapted aome tags to suit my own purposes until I find out how to express what I really need (I’ve been using <milestone/>, for example, to identify holidays and months), and the structure doesn’t really give the reader a sense of the layout of the manuscript (particularly with the “note” that mentions the Prince and Princess’s attendance, which is on the opposite page in the diary but refers to the December 2nd performance – I know XSLT is my friend, but we’re still unacquainted). It’s far from anchored to the facsimile, anyway. Other problems include my dodgy uses of the ‘del’ and ‘add’ elements, and my somewhat blind use of the ‘ref’ element.

Anyway, it’s a work in progress. From my code so far I’ve created an OpenOffice spreadsheet of the tabular data, and have from that been able to extract some pretty interesting statistical findings (which my supervisor and I presented at CSECS). All this to say that I’m looking for a hardier option (Scripto or Scribe may fit the bill).

 

THATCamp@QueensU?

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Around this time two years ago, I was gearing up with my good friend Ashley Williamson to give a presentation about teapots at Inquiry@Queen’s, an undergraduate research conference.

It's a manifesto for psychic automatism, duh. What, don't you get it?

This was my first foray into truly independent research, apart from any assignment or academic guidance. It was a real personal success. I discovered very interesting things about the implications of teapots for early 20th-century artists — but I also got a much more thorough knowledge of the workings of the Queen’s library system than I ever got researching a project for class. The conference got me interested in research for knowledge’s sake, and, I could argue, put me on a path towards working as a research assistant for Leslie and getting interested in the information sciences.

The ‘sixth annual’ I@Q conference is now fast approaching, and I’ve been thinking of topics to present. My interests as of late have been in the digital humanities, and my correspondences with research librarian Mary Claire Vandenburg and my supervisor Leslie Ritchie have each circled around the idea of getting a THATCamp organized at Queen’s.

What’s a THATCamp?

THATCamp stands for The Humanities and Technology Camp. It’s an informal, collaborative unconference for anyone interested in the humanities or in technology, looking to meet others interested in the humanities or in technology for skill-building and networking. THATCamps have been popping up all over the globe from Melbourne to Kansas, and it seems to be a growing phenomenon.

There’s a wealth of help out there for people like me to run a THATCamp: there are how-tos, forums, and available knowledgeable contacts, and lots of encouragement. As I’ve learned, although DH scholars come in many varieties, there is one thing they all seem to have in common: an enthusiastic desire to collaborate.

At Queen’s?

DH@QueensU isn’t really a thing yet, but with a bit of work and continued collaboration, I think the community has a lot of potential to grow. Mary Claire sent me a list of projects already on the go at Queen’s, including Dr. George Bevan’s Reflectance Transformation Imaging project in the Classics department and Mark Fortin’s Collaborative Canadian Literature Project. Queen’s grad Kevin Kee, now the Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing at Brock University, has developed a number of DH projects, many of which were started while he was here as a student.

Feel free to leave a comment below if you know of or are a part of any other projects, or if you would be interested in attending at THATCamp@QueensU.

I’ve recently joined twitter to get my toes wet in the DH community (@mayabielinski), and I’m keeping my eyes peeled. (Forgive the infrequency of tweets; I feel like I’m still feeling out the vibe!)