Ray Siemens

A Companion to Digital Humanities

This Companion offers a thorough, concise overview of the emerging field of humanities computing. Contains 37 original articles written by leaders in the field. Addresses the central concerns shared by those interested in the subject. Major sections focus on the experience of particular disciplines in applying computational methods to research problems; the basic principles of humanities computing; specific applications and methods; and production, dissemination and archiving. Accompanied by a website featuring supplementary materials, standard readings in the field and essays to be included in future editions of the Companion.

Toward modeling the social edition: An approach to understanding the electronic scholarly edition in the context of new and emerging social media

This article explores building blocks in extant and emerging social media toward the possibilities they offer to the scholarly edition in electronic form, positing that we are witnessing the nascent stages of a new ‘social’ edition existing at the intersection of social media and digital editing. Beginning with a typological formulation of electronic scholarly editions, activities common to humanities scholars who engage with texts as expert readers are considered, noting that many methods of engagement both reflect the interrelated nature of long-standing professional reading strategies and are social in nature; extending this frame work, the next steps in the scholarly edition’s development in its incorporation of social media functionality reflect the importance of traditional humanistic activities and workflows, and include collaboration, incorporating contributions by its readers and re-visioning the role of the editor away from that of ultimate authority and more toward that of facilitator of reader involvement. Intended to provide a ‘toolkit’ for academic consideration, this discussion of the emerging social edition points to new methods of textual engagement in digital literary studies and is accompanied by two integral, detailed appendices, published in Digital Humanities Quarterly under the title ‘Pertinent discussions toward modeling the social edition: Annotated bibliographies’ (http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/1/000111/000111.html): one addressing issues pertinent to online reading and interaction, and another on social networking tools.

Implementing new knowledge environments: building upon research foundations to understand books and reading in the digital age

In this paper, we present an overview of the first year work and plans for the second year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance - specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour - and the concrete steps to be undertaken in our second year of the project.

Codex Redux: books and new knowledge environments

In this paper, we present the work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance.

The Value of Plurality in ‘The Network with a Thousand Entrances’

This contribution reflects on the value of plurality in the ‘network with a thousand entrances’ suggested by McCarty (http://goo.gl/H3HAfs), and others, in association with approaching time-honoured annotative and commentary practices of much-engaged texts. The question is how this approach aligns with tensions, today, surrounding the multiplicity of endeavour associated with modeling practices of annotation by practitioners of the digital humanities. Our work, hence, surveys annotative practice across its reflection in contemporary praxis, from the MIT annotation studio whitepaper (http://goo.gl/8NBdnf) through the work of the Open Annotation Collaboration (http://www.openannotation.org), and manifest in multiple tools facilitating annotation across the web up to and including widespread application in social knowledge creation suites like Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web annotation)

Introduction: Reinventing Shakespeare in the digital humanities

It is of course axiomatic that all poetry, and particularly all Shakespeare, was meant to be read aloud. So many teachers are incapable of reading Shakespeare aloud . . . that classroom renditions are doomed before they start. There is a considerable and growing library of phonograph recordings which are tremendously helpful. Gielgud, Barrymore, Ainley, and Forbes-Robertson readings of many Shakespearean parts are available. Columbia has now recorded almost a complete version of the Mercury [Theatre]’s current production of Julius Caesar. This type of material has found wide use in speech classes where, because of presumably expert instruction, it is little needed. It has failed to reach into the thousands of English classrooms struggling with murdered pentameter. This is a pity. (468)

Bridging the Gap Between a Simple Set of Structured Documents and a Functional Digital Library

Digital Libraries are complex systems that take a long time to create and tailor to specific requirements [1]. Their implementation requires specialized computer skills, which are not usually found within humanities text encoding projects. Many encoders working on text encoding projects find they cannot take their work to the next level by transforming their collections of structured XML [2] texts into a publishable web searchable and browsable service. Most often these teams find the way to encode their texts with a high degree of sophistication, but unless they have funds to hire computer programmers their collections remain on local disk storage away from public access. \({\bf\it }\)is a novel tool designed with the aim of bridging the gap between simply having a collection of structured documents and having a functional digital library for public access via the web. The goal of this project is to build the tools to manage an extensible, modular and configurable XML-based repository which will house, search/browse on, and display documents encoded in TEI-Lite [3] on the World Wide Web. \({\bf\it }\)provides an administrative interface that allows DL administrators to upload and delete documents from a web accessible repository, analyze XML documents to determine elements for searching/browsing, refine ontology development, decide on inter and intra document links, partition the repository into collections, create backups of the entire repository, generate search/browse and display pages for users of the website, change the look of the interface, and associate XSL transformation scripts and CSS stylesheets to obtain different target outputs (HTML [4], PDF, etc.).