Research questions
What is the relationship between non-fiction and fiction ghost stories in 19th-c. British media? How do traces of literacy acquisition appear in non-fiction stories in early 19th-c. British media?
To draw this comparison and tease out the ties between these two ideas, we focus on collecting, digitizing, and annotating source material for non-fiction text. Within archives, the materials are relatively easy to locate, but to begin tracing patterns and ideas that may appear in later fiction, we require significantly more advanced tools.
If we understand writing as a function of physical space (Ong), how can we use mentions of place in this corpus to situate cultural movement away from primary orality, towards a more textual culture?
We must attempt to understand, as closely as possible, how the writing we see today translated to physical space in the past. We can do this by encoding geodata for places mentioned, referencing historic maps and illustrations, and reading other primary sources about or in reference to these places. Digital methods can help us organize this information, and when and if we choose to visualize the geodata we collect, it can expand our understanding of place and the decisions we made about our models.
How do bespoke digital editions support research goals more generally? How can we use this as a sample edition to teach development concepts, technical skills, and editing theory?
We’ll answer this together as a group in the coming weeks.
Research goals (in pursuit of our research questions)
- Answer research questions (or perhaps, understand more about our questions and refine them further).
- Publish a digital edition that serves as a digital workstation for researchers to interpret these texts.
- Publish a digital edition that serves as a laboratory edition for IATDH 2022 “Advanced digital editing” participants.
Research non-goals (in pursuit of research questions)
- Publish exhaustively, or draw very broad conclusions
- Machine to machine API accessibility
- High volume traffic
- Images of source material
- User annotation or collaborative encoding
- Long-term project sustainability (outside of laboratory edition documentation maintenance)
What kind of edition works for you? What will make it easier for you to answer your research questions?
- encoding informs your research questions and goals
- this is iterative…maybe you started encoding differently than you should have, or you need to revisit and revise
- how do i write exploratory code to discover my edition goals in the first place?
Edition goals (in pursuit of our research goals)
- Create a reading view that exposes encoded contextual information.
- Create a search interface with facets and full-text search.
- Create data visualizations, including visualizations of geodata.
- Build iteratively and document decisions.
Tasks
from there - the work break down structure