Research without Borders and the TEI

Last Friday (20 of January) I have been invited by Marjorie Burghart to give a lecture in Lyon as part of a two days DH event, called L’édition électronique dans tous ses états : évolution des pratiques, évolution des besoins (details of the event here and poster here).
It has been lot of fun, in particular because I have organised a role game and everybody was very involved.
I have also had the opportunity of investigating one of my favorite topics: why on earth people spend time (and money) to work for the TEI when all this work is not credited i.e. the name of who got the idea is not recorded anywhere, it is just represented as the collaborative effort of The TEI (a.k.a. the Technical Council + the SIG + TEI-L + etc. etc.)? This si not what academics normally do, right? And even more so, why on earth Institutions accept this to happen?
On a personal level, the best answer to these questions is, in my opinion, because working to improve the TEI is fun, you have the opportunity of meeting with exceptionally gifted researchers from all over the world and, even if you cannot immediately quantify or point at something specific, your research is affected by this. Mine has: I think I am a much better researcher as a results of my past 10-odds year of work with the TEI, as part of the SIG, the Council and now the Board.
At institutional level, the reason is that the TEI is recognised as one of the foundational bases of DH, of which we are all collectively responsible.
Yes, the TEI has a lot of open issues (last summer putsch is a luminous example of this), but, as always, I think the best way to solve the problems is to get involved. So, au travail mes amis!

Here are the slides of the presentation, in French though... apologies to all non-French speakers and to all French speakers as well (quality of the language is, well, you'll see!).

Recherche sans frontières: la Text Encoding Initiative et la coopération internationale dans les Digital Humanities

Medievalists on the making and the digital

For the past few years I have been lucky enough to be involved in a wonderful training course, MMSDA, i.e. Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age. This course is offered for free to UK PhD students which have to work with medieval manuscripts and are interested in the digital stuff. We have now run the course for three years with an exceptional success which we mesure in the number of applicants  (65, in the first year, 42 the second and 28 the third) and their enthusiasm and commitment. The main brain behind this initiative is Peter Stokes (yep, my Peter Stokes).
The course was initially funded by the AHRC, so we were forced to offer it only to UK-based students, but, from the very first time we run it, we were aware of a much larger interest out there. This is the reason why we have sought alternative funding and we were finally lucky enough, thanks to the hard work of Charles Burnett form the Warburg Institute, to secure some substantial funding from a COST Action project,   IS1005, 'Medieval Europe - Medieval Cultures and Technological Resources'.

So we have opened the application to European Countries. Results? we had 90 applications (yes 90!!) from 18 countries for 20 places. The quality of the applicants where outstanding, I have never had to make more difficult choices, really! We have just been through them all and sent the list of successful candidates to the COST office for approval, then we will communicate the results.

This experience is telling me a few things:

1. There are some amazing young researchers out there, we will have some stiff competition quite soon.
2. Many people that have to engage with manuscripts lack appropriate training. Even at PhD level for many a manuscripts is little more than a support for a text. 
3. Young researchers are desperate to acquire essential digital skills (we teach XML, TEI, imaging, so nothing very sophisticated, but very desirable, as it seems)
4. We (i.e. the organisers) have willingly left out from the course soem essential topics: Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Glagolitic, Cyrillic... all of this languages and scripts and traditions and manuscripts are part of our common European culture, but we tend to, quite conveniently, forget it... In our case it was mostly due to lack of time (there are just so many things you can fit in 5 days, you know), still there is something to keep in mind here, I think

Food for thought...

European-Flavoured Digital Editions

As it happens, I'm the co-chair of a working group on Digital Editions of NeDiMAH.

All clear? In case it is not so clear, NeDiMAH is the European Science Foundation Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities. The network groups representatives of 13 European countries (in no particular order): United Kingdom, Danemark, Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Croatia, France, Portugal, Norway, Switzerland, Bulgaria and Germany (yes, Italy is missing... and this is a huge problem as it seems we cannot involve many Italian colleagues or held event there... and I'm not commenting on the european dissemination of Italian research, no I'm not) .

This network is organised in six working groups, and one of them is on Digital Editions, which I happen to co-chair with Matthew Driscoll.

We met in Copenhagen on the 5 December and it has been great fun, I met people I haven't seen since long time (Hilde Boe, Peter Boot), seen some dear friends (Malte Rehbein, Marjorie Burghart) and met people for the first time (Mats Dahlström, Michael Stolz).

In the next 4 years we will be looking into many issues connected with digital editions, such us:

• Theory of digital editions
• Production of digital editions
• Delivery of digital editions 
• The role and changing nature of the editor
• Long term issues (preservation, impact, sustainability)

We have in the radar a few events (an expert seminar and few workshops) and publications such as a few articles in journals and a print publication.
The first two topics we will concentrate on are the skill set for editors and the role of technology in the editorial work (stemmed somehow from my presentation at the TEI Members meeting which is the object of another post on this blog), and new approaches to critical apparatus and textual scholarship, which should be embodied in two articles.

Well, can I say I can't wait to get my greedy hands on this? We will have so much fun!

Tablets Apps, or the future of the Scholarly Editons?

I was yesterday at a very interesting symposium entitled The Future Perfect of the Book organised by the Institute of English Studies. It has been an interesting mixture of people and of presentations. One in particular I would like to discuss (i.e. Elaine Treharne's keynote adress The Numbered days of the Page), but not now, in another post.
In this one I would like to report about the presentation I gave with Miguel Vieira and that builds on the research conducted by Patricia Searl for her MA dissertation on Digital Humanities at Kings' College London. Here is the abstract we submitted to the conference organisers:

The last 20 years have seen a rise of scholarly digital editions, which offer new, unexplored dimensions and depth to textual scholarship. The new possibilities opened up by the pioneering work of Peter Robinson and Jerome McGann’s charmed editors to the point that at the beginning of the millennium they seemed ready to switch to the digital medium. However, this promised switch did not happen and while many universities have adopted eBooks for course readings, digital textual scholarship seems not to have reached classrooms at all. In fact, an unpublished survey of twenty-two undergraduate syllabi in the US and UK has revealed that not one class had a single web edition as an assigned reading material. On the other hand, in commercial publishing the last couple of years have seen a boom in eBooks and eReaders. It is true though that eBooks look like very poor relatives of digital scholarly editions: in most cases they include the raw text with no additional features other than string searching. As such, eBooks look somewhat regressive, representing an evolution of the codex but not the revolution of the way we read texts which was promised by the advent of computers. Usability studies have demonstrated that reading on tablets is more enjoyable than reading on the screen of computers and, in some cases, more than reading print. But this is for general reading: does it also apply to highly sophisticated digital scholarly editions? Is the sophistication of such editions, as we have conceived them so far, the enemy of accessibility and user-friendliness? Are tablet apps a possible way to enhance the appeal of Digital Scholarly Editions? These are some of the questions that this paper will address.

and here are the slides we have used for the presentation

Tablet apps, or the future of Digital Scholarly Editions?

Comments? The presentation was very well received and we got plenty of nice feedback.
Early this week Miguel and I rehearsed the presentation within the DDH internal seminar and Raffaele Viglianti wrote a very nice summary of this event.

I will get back shortly on this topic, so stay tuned.

To Market! To Market! Academia in the Marketing Age

The 80's were supposed to be the decade of marketing and PR. Ah! Amateurs! They thought that doing a little bit of ads on the telly an on the newspapers was enough...

These days I seem to be spending most of my time organising marketing activities, advertising activities we can use for marketing, talking to people about marketing, writing advertising material, using all possible social networks to share all of the above and now blogging about it (meta-marketing?).

One of the most important duties of a Head of Teaching is, it appears, ensure that there are enough students around to justify the existence of a teaching programme and the job of colleagues. Quite scary, it you think of it. I'm not complaining, mind you, only reporting the fact and reflecting on it.

In the past we (Centre for Computing in the Humanities -- now Department of Digital Humanities -- at King's College London) have not been very good in letting people know what we were up to, in particular from a teaching point of view. We had thought (or so is my reading of the situation, as I was not involved in this thinkings) that our outstanding record of research would have been enough to attract students. We were wrong, so wrong. Students are not aware or not interested in research, as it happens, they are interested in knowing that there is some teaching going on and that they can gain a valuable qualification out of it. Funny that! So, now this trend has to change and here is the list of the initiatives I have undertaken these days:

• New marketing printed materials is being developed.We will start with foldable leaflets, then we will see
• A video will be produced early next year: I will need to have my hair done for the interview!
• Three virtual open days will be organised for potential MAs and PhD students
• An event on "Become a Digital Humanities PhD student" has been organised for the 1st of December
• The PhD seminar has been moved from our gloomy Seminar Room into the Anatomy Theatre Museum and Opened up to the public. Next week Seminar will be the first of the new Era!
• A lot of contacts are going on with King's Agents in Asia and in the US
• Our 2011-12 Students have organised a Facebook group from where they broadcast all our initiatives
• Social Media, in particular Facebook and Twitter are intensively used (by me, mostly) to spread the word about our activities

Will I be successful? Will our MA programme survive the wild cuts operated by the less illuminated cabinet Englad has seen since WWII? Stay tuned and you will have an answer!

At the TEI Technical Council: Genetic Criticism Encoding

I have to say that today I feel very pleased with myself: the TEI Technical Council has just approved the proposal for encoding modern manuscripts and genetic criticism. This will be available for all TEI users with the next release of TEI (sometimes around Christmas).

I have worked on this material for a long time now, and all started with a paper I presented at the Digital Humanities Conference in Ann Arbor, in 2007 (attention! if you click on it, it will open a 26MB PDF, so you want to be cautious). The paper has been published later as a chapter of a book:

E. Pierazzo. 'Digital genetic editions: the encoding of time in manuscript transcription'. Text Editing, Print and the Digital World, Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. M. Deegan and K. Sutherland (eds.), Ashgate: Aldershot, 2008, pp. 169–186.

After, within the MS SIG, a formal working group (chaired by Fotis Iannidis) was organised and then, after an exciting workshop held in Paris in 2009, a draft proposal was submitted to the Council in 2010 (it seems about right is that the Council is actually meeting in Paris, what a coincidence!).

In particular this proposal includes the possibility of transcribing the text page by page, line by line (instead of, say, chapter by chapter): I have discussed this, with Peter Stokes, in an article:

E. Pierazzo, P. A. Stokes. 'Putting the text back into context: a codicological approach to manuscript transcription'. Kodikologie und Paläographie im Digitalen Zeitalter 2 - Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 2. M. Rehbein, T. Schaßan, P. Sahle (eds.) Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2011, pp. 397-424, available from http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/4337/

The final approval for the proposal arrived after a night of readings and comments (see the thread in the Council mailing list) and some last discussions about grouping surfaces to encode leaves and in general multi-surfaced objects. But there we are: it is done.
This is of course not my work only, quite the contrary: if this model will be usable by real people in real projects it is because many have contributed generously. Here is the list of some of the people that contributed (I may be forgetting some... forgive me!): Fotis Iannidis, Malte Rehbein, Gregor Middell, Lou Burnard, Moritz Wissenbach, Gerrit Brüning and all the people in the Council: thank you all (and not only from me). Now I can't wait for the next release!

Oh Happy Day!

On Blooks and other oddities: the DH abstracts' Season

Last week I was preparing a lecture for my course on Digital Publishing on the Web 2.0 and Scholarly Publishing (this alone deserved a post...). I ment to talk about the relationship between Blogs and formal publications and I remember the case of the Julie/Julia project, a blog that was first turned into a book, then to an Hollywood movie. While I was doing my online enquiries, to my horror, I found out that, apparently, a book that is based on a blog is called a Blook: not kidding and not irony, look at this, there is a Blooker prize, nothing less (my partner in life declared he feels sick every time I mention it, and I'm not that far off either).

Now, this happen to be the DH abstracts' Season: every year, around the end of October, in a striking coincidence with Halloween, a small army of DHers get in an extraordinary excitement, with emails firing across countries and time zones, all trying to write as many abstract as possible to submit to the forthcoming Digital Humanities conference. Again, my partner in life is no exception. It just happens that this year submission draws on some thoughts expressed on his project blog. It just occurred to us, than, it might be a case of a Blabstract, an abstract based on a blog. In case his blabstract get accepted, he might even end up and giving a Blaper (which, by the way, is not a new coinage, even if it has a slightly different meaning), not to mention the possibility of publishing a Blarticle (again, not a new word!) in the proceedings! Oh well...

The points I was trying to make are two:

1. in the digital age, genres and media tend to cross-breed and melt one into another
2. When one gets a linguistic creativity attack, the risk is not knowing where to stop...

Happy DH abstracts' Season!