NEH lightning talk
On 2016-09-16, the NEH Office of Digital Humanities convened their annual Project Directors Meeting at NEH headquarters in Washington, DC. A highlight of this meeting is the popular “Lightning Round”, an opportunity for attendees to share a three-minute overview of their NEH-funded project. The lightning presentation for our Institute is available at https://youtu.be/nIJZsIB3BKw?t=1h24m17s.
The slides are:
What is a digital scholarly edition?
More than just a reading text with notes and annotations (“silicon paper”)
- A workstation, an integrated dynamic platform to support user-directed interaction
The interface is scholarship, too
- The interface is part of the theory of edition and part of the interpretation of the text
The interface must meet the goals of the edition
- Choose, design, or build an interface for your edition
Why should scholars write code?
The target participant can edit in TEI but doesn’t know how to turn TEI into an edition (“How do I get rid of those angle brackets?”)
Research questions should dictate the tools, and not the reverse
- The interface is part of the theory of edition and part of the interpretation of the text
- Dropping texts into an existing framework stifles innovative theories of edition and interpretation
- If the tools that serve our research needs do not exist yet …
- … we should be prepared to build them
How about collaboration?
- Don’t call it collaboration if it’s really compartmentalization
- Not knowing what’s possible limits what one can envision
Structure of the Institute
Week 1: Bootcamp (optional)
- Working on the command line, understanding the hierarchical file system, basic programming, creating and sharing data sources, sustainability
Week 2: Philcamp
- Digital philology: conceptualization and preparation of a digital edition
- Designing the edition to meet the research goals
- What to do after markup
- Collation, annotation, analysis, transformation, etc.
Week 3: Pubcamp
- Front-end, Web interfaces, API, user-directed interaction, textual and graphical visualization, etc.
Sustainable training (“learning to fish”)