Mapping Maupassant’s Bel-Ami is a collaborative project developed in the advanced undergraduate course, FR453Y: La Belle Epoque: Société et Culture en France de 1800 à 1914, taught by Dr. Willa Z. Silverman at Penn State University. This project is an example of literary cartography, following the example of similar projects, such as “Mapping St. Petersburg: Experiments in Literary Cartography” and “Mapping Mrs. Dalloway.”
Read moreDuring the week-long Digital Antiquarian Workshop (following the DA Conference), I had the honor of leading a workshop on digital scholarly editing practices, working with a fantastic group of around 20 researchers that made teaching TEI seem easy. I think the context of the session, situated among the other workshops taught by the phenomenal AAS staff and following Michael Winship’s Retrospective of Editorial Standards, was a great way to introduce the topic and I found it helpful to be able to refer back to earlier discussions on various topics such as structural and organizational intention in digital vs. in print, how the editorial process creates a new work, the idea of copy text and witnesses, and questions of editorial choices. Invoking these discussions from the other sessions helped us to ground the practice of TEI and digital editing to the long history of textual studies and to tie this in with questions and issues that come about from doing archival research in this digital era.
Read moreThis is a paper delivered at the 2013 Bibliothekartag in Leipzig, Germany. The abstract, slides, and PDF are available here.
When the ARL SPEC Kit on Digital Humanities1 came out in 2011, I hoped it might serve as a roadmap on the path to a digital humanities program at my library. At that time, we were attempting to build a new user community with our freshly minted Humanities in a Digital Age initiative, dabbling in various low-resource projects, and had eagerness to spare, but we needed direction and a destination – we needed a plan. The SPEC Kit, with its focus on the staffing models and infrastructure of existing centers and services, helped us imagine where we might want to go and what to think about when we get there; however, the examples covered were far removed from the decentralized, grassroots efforts with which we were experimenting. Most institutions, including my own, have no DH center (with no plans for one in the foreseeable future) and limited or no central infrastructure to support digital humanities work. The question remained, then, how do libraries such as these move beyond grassroots in their efforts to encourage and support new modes of digital scholarship?
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