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Support for this event is provided by:
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This one-day event is open to all interested parties and there is no conference fee, but it would be much appreciated if anyone intending to come would let Gabriel Egan <mail@gabrielegan.com> know in advance for catering and room booking purposes. Lunch and coffess will be provided free for all speakers and all non-speaking attendees who contact Gabriel Egan in advance.
The event will take place in rooms D006 and D007 of the Main Building of the Collegiate Campus of Sheffield Hallam University, on Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield. Here is a map of the area here and you may enter any UK postcode to get directions to the building. If you want directions from the railway station (about 20 minutes away on foot) enter its postcode S1 2BP.
9.30-10am Coffee on arrival
10-10.15am Gabriel Egan (Loughborough University) "Welcome and Aims of the Meeting"
10.15-10.45am Takako Kato (Leicester University) "The Virtues and Challenges of XML: Making a Digital Edition of Malory's Morte Darthur"
10.45-11.15am Paul Vetch (King's College London) "A Map for All Seasons: Experimenting with the Gough Map"
11.15-11.30am Coffee
11.30am-12noon James Cummings (University of Oxford) "Interrogating and Accessing Digital Scholarly Editions"-
12noon-12.30pm
John Bradley (King's College London) and Stephen Pigney (Goldsmiths College)
"Images and Text: Towards an Understanding of the Early Modern Illustrated
Book"
12.30-1.15pm Lunch
1.15-1.45pm Ari Friedlander (University of Michigan) "Are We Being Digital Yet?"
1.45-2.15pm Shawn Martin (University of Pennsylvania) "Images, Texts, and Records: Tools for Teaching in a Confusing Landscape"
2.15-2.30pm Coffee
2.30-3pm Eugene Giddens (Anglia Ruskin University) "The Death of Digital Editions"
3-3.20pm Ray Siemens (University of Victoria) "Beyond the Facsimile"
3.30-4pm Round Table involving all speakers
Confirmed non-speaking delegates
Orla Murphy (University College Cork)
Lou Burnard (University of Oxford)
Peter Kidd
Richard Wood (Sheffield Hallam University)
Anna Harper (University of Manchester)
Carrie Griffin (Queen Mary University of London)
Description of Topic
For many late medieval and early modern texts researchers have access to rudimentary digital representations. Virtually all books printed in Britain before 1800 are available as digital facsimiles via the databases Early English Books Online (EEBO) and ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online). The former also provides searchable electronic transcriptions for about a quarter of the corpus--via the Text Creation Partnership (TCP)--and the latter is completely searchable, albeit via unreliable 'dirty' electronic texts produced by Optical Character Recognition (OCR). For virtually all texts that may be considered literary we also have relatively reliable searchable electronic texts made by double-keyboarding for the Literature Online (LION) project. For a small number of texts of special interest there are digital editions of much higher quality. The Scholarly Digital Editions of Chaucer's poetry combine high-resolution colour facsimiles of multiple manuscripts with accurate scholarly searchable transcriptions of them, and the Shakespeare Quartos Archive project aims to do the same for early printed editions of his plays and poems that reside in major research libraries. However, with even the best of these enhanced resources, there remain important scholarly questions that cannot be answered without going back to the original documents, which is not an option for most researchers.
Facsimiles are good for seeing the surface image of ink inscribed or impressed onto paper or parchment, but not for taking accurate measurements of the size of the writing nor for examing the deformation of the surface caused by the impressure of the ink. (The only reliable way to tell which side of a sheet was printed first is to look for the bumps made by the type pressing into it.) Electronic transcriptions can accurately reflect the writing's letters and punctuation marks but not the competing hypotheses about the creation of a document that scholars may want to test using the transcription. For example, a print edition may have been typeset by two compositors, each expressing spelling preferences from which we may distinguish their work-stints. Where two scholars disagree about the division of these stints, an electronic transcription that encodes each hypothesis would allow questions of the kind "if Scholar X is right about the division of the stints, what is Compositor A's preference in the spelling of the word Lady/Ladie? And what if Scholar Y is right about the stints?". There remains a lot to be done in digitizing texts for the purposes of scholarly research on them.
This Digital Humanities Day at Sheffield Hallam University is an opportunity for those concerned with the use of advanced digital surrogates (whether as creators or as readers) to discuss the following:
* The state of the art in the creation of electronic versions of texts used by scholars in the humanities
* The advantages and disadvantages of particular technologies for going beyond the facsimile, for example 3D modelling of paper/parchment versus advanced textual encoding
* The kinds of questions that cannot currently be answered by the digital surrogates we have, and how best to produce surrogates that suit our needs
* Case studies of particular projects, their achievements and the lessons learnt
Those interested in attending or speaking should contact Gabriel Egan <mail@gabrielegan.com>.