Issues In the Digital Humanities

La Trobe eCoffee

Dr Craig BellamyVeRSI, 5 November, 2010

http://www.versi.edu.au/

Key Issues

What are the foundations of computing in the humanities?

Text, Markup languages and the TEI Data reuse and analysis

Roberto Busa

Early developments (SGML, TEI, XML)

Since 1949; Roberto Busa developed the first literary text encoding project (concordance of Thomas Aquinas 1225-1274), tension over standardisation

TEI developed in 1987 in conjunction with the Association for Computing in the Humanities (ACH)

Nearly every major text-based digital humanities project uses TEI

What is TEI?

“Before they can be studied with the aid of machines, texts must be encoded in a machine readable form. Methods for this transcription are called, generally, ‘text encoding schemes’; such schemes must provide mechanisms for representing the characters of a text and its logical and physical structure...ancillary information achieved by analysis or interpretation (may also be added)...”

Michael Sperberg-McQueen (1990)

History of TEI / markup

(Machine readable texts: Creating, archiving, and sharing, textual data)

GML (Generalised Mark-up Language) 1960s SGML (1986) HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) Berners-Lee, 1991 TEI (Text-Encoding Initiative) 1987; a tag schema for marking

up humanities texts (ordered hierarchy text model) XML (re-worked in 1998 from SGML: a metalanguage for

defining descriptive mark-up languages (in part by Michael Sperberg-McQueen)

Case Studies:

Fine Roles Henry III HESTIA: Herodotus SETIS (Basic library TEI) Transcribe Bentham project (crowd-

sourcing) People and Place (La Trobe)

Fine Rolls Henry III (1216-1272)

Latin on parchment A fine was essentially a promise of money to the

king in return for a concession or favour (key to understanding the Magna Carta and the development of the Parliamentary State)

Complex associations of people encoded http://www.finerollshenry3.org.uk/home.html Facilitates scholarly analysis http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk/resources/case

study10.html

HESTIA

Books of Herodotus texts contained on the Perseus Project

Used TEI encoded texts of Herodotus’ ‘Histories’ (place and time)

http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/hestia/outcomes/index.html

Herodotus time-map http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/hestia/herodotus/

basic.html

SETIS

350 Australian texts (Text encoded...Federation, ‘Classics of Taxation’, Australia Studies collection)

Rendered as print on demand, .pdf (library environment so delivery important)

http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/oztexts/index.html

Transcribe Bentham

Founder of UCL (philosopher, social reformer) 150 manuscripts to transcribe Transcribing all the details (including deletions,

marginalia etc.) http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/

Transcribe_Bentham (transcription desk)

http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk/td/Help:Transcription_Input_Form

(guidelines)

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)

People and Place La Trobe

Use of historical records in a database Encoding the semantic structures of a text ‘Crowd sourcing’ transcription

Further Research/ training

Digital Humanities projects, methods, tools http://www.arts-humanities.net/ TEI by example http://tbe.kantl.be/TBE/ Digital Humanities Summer Institute

(Canada) http://www.dhsi.org/

Concluding comments

Digitisation (Perseus, TLG, Old Bailey, Tasmanian convict records); the foundation ‘scholarly infrastructure’ of the Digital Humanities

Good stewardship in the digitisation of significant archives (heuristics) promotes new forms of scholarship so new research questions may be asked (or old ones in new ways!)