Who is Patrick? – Answers from the Saint Patrick's Confessio HyperStack. Supporting Digital Humanities, Copenhagen 17 - 18 November 2011, Conference Proceedings

Not everyone realizes that there are two Latin works, still surviving, that can definitely be attributed to Saint Patrick’s own authorship. On 14th September 2011 the Royal Irish Academy published his writings in a freely accessible form on line, both in the original Latin and in a variety of modern languages (including Irish). Designed to be of interest to the general public as well as to academic researchers, the Saint Patrick’s Confessio Hypertext Stack includes such features as digital images of the medieval manuscripts involved, a specially commissioned historical reconstruction that evocatively describes life in pre-Viking Ireland, articles, audio presentations, and some ten thousand internal and external digital links that make it truly a resource to be explored

Digital Editing of Early Modern English Handwritten Texts: Handling Scribal Errors and Corrections

An important philological question is how to edit texts. An edition always entails interpretation of the text and also of the socio-cultural context in which the manuscript was created and used. In new philological theory, and contrary to more traditional approaches, the individual manuscript versions, i.e., the textual witnesses, are regarded as valuable in their own right, as every textual witness tells us something about the culture of manuscripts (Carlquist 2004: 112). This is the approach followed for the digital editing of Early Modern English scientific writing in The Malaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. In this paper, we discuss the challenges that producing such type of edition pose. We will particularly focus on the issue of scribal errors and corrections and how the editor can treat and capture them in the edition. The texts included in the above-mentioned corpus will be analyzed for the purpose. The corpus includes manuscripts from the Hunterian Collection (Glasgow University Library), the Wellcome Collection (London Wellcome Library) and the Rylands Collection (University of Manchester Library). With regard to text types, these manuscripts hold specialized texts, surgical and anatomical treatises, as well as recipe collections and materia medica. References Calle-Martín, Javier et al. 2017. The Malaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose (MCEMESP). Málaga: University of Málaga. Available from http:// modernmss.uma.es/. Carlquist, Jonas. 2004. Medieval Manuscripts, Hypertext and Reading. Visions of Digital Editions. Literary and Linguistic Computing 19/1: 105-118.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A Catalogue of Digital Editions

Since the earliest days of hypertext, textual scholars have produced, discussed and theorised upon critical digital editions of manuscripts, in order to investigate how digital technologies can provide another means to present and enable the interpretative study of text. This work has generally been done by looking at particular case studies or examples of critical digital editions, and, as a result, there is no overarching understanding of how digital technologies have been employed across the full range of textual interpretations. This chapter will describe the creation of a catalogue of digital editions that could collect information about extant digital editions and, in so doing, contribute to research in related disciplines. The resulting catalogue will provide a means of answering, in the form of a quantitative survey, the following research questions: What makes a good digital edition? What features do digital editions share? What is the state of the art in the field of digital editions? Why are there so few electronic editions of ancient texts, and so many of texts from other periods? By collecting data regarding existing digital editions, and corresponding directly with the projects in question, we provide a unique record of extant digital critical editions of text across a range of subject areas, and show how this collaboratively edited catalogue can benefit the Digital Humanities community

Digital Humanities and Librarians: A Team-Based Approach to Learning

This chapter details the development and implementation of an Introduction to Digital Humanities course (ENGL 695) at Kansas State University (K-State). The course originated with a tenure-track professor with a research specialty in British Romantic-period Literature and the digital humanities. In conjunction with a host of librarians at K-State Libraries, a course was developed that drew on both library resources and librarian knowledges and skills. Over the course of the semester, the professor and the students worked closely with librarians in many areas of the library, including public services, technical services and special collections. The result was four innovative and sustainable digital projects that highlighted the resources and research interests at K-State. In addition to introducing students to the digital humanities, the course also served to establish a framework for future initiatives, including hosting a digital humanities symposium and establishing a digital humanities center

A Working History of Digital Zoom, Medieval to Modern

[Article draft from 2020: very of its mid-lockdown moment, but unlikely to be revisiting this, so here it is!] This article examines one of the most familiar elements of digital interfaces: the zoom tool. By tracing the conceptual, technical, and material histories of zooming from the late Middle Ages to the present day, it demonstrates how historians of the medieval book might turn their attention to the digital tools on which we increasingly depend not just in our academic work, but in all areas of life. It also considers some of the broader ramifications of looking beneath the screens of our smart devices: the complex and often discontinuous histories of information technologies, the hollowness of powerful corporations’ claims of “innovation” and “disruption,” the various forms of extractivism on which the digital realm depends, and the modern regimes of worker “flexibility” and “knowledge work.

Impalpable Hits: indeterminacy in the searching of tagged Shakespearian texts

In Shakespeare studies, as in the rest of early modern literary studies, the new information technologies have been neither rapidly nor effectively adopted in research. One reason is a misplaced attention upon the notion of hypertext and the seeking of spurious analogies with the early modern printed codex. This essay is concerned with machine applications of textual searching technologies, which is where we should be focussing our energies, and it argues that important recent products for Shakespearian research are weak, and more importantly non-standard, in their searching mechanisms. The desirability of adopting an existing standard, called 'regular expressions', is argued