For the past few months or so, when I've had the chance in between teaching, research, and my own work, I've been assisting the Early Modern Conversions project here at McGill in building a corpus tool for Early English Books Online using the data from the Text Creation Project (EEBO TCP). It's been interesting: the objective is to create texts that have some measure of orthographic consistency so that large scale text-analysis tools can be used on them - things like topic modelling for instance. Because of the variants in spelling, scholars normally can't do much with these texts. We've been using a tool call VARD2, which uses statistical analysis to alter variant spellings in early modern
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I'm constantly looking for ways to combine my sensory history research and digital humanities. SensoryStudies.Org has a great resource - a list of researchers who are working in the field, and tags which they use to describe their work. It seems like a good thing for a D3 visualization, no? So I did one. The method was pretty straightforward - grab all of the data from the HTML page and transform it. I used php and loaded a saved version of the page into simple_xml, parsed it, and dumped the scholars' names and tags into a simple MySQL table. I then collated all of the unique tags that had counts above 2, grouped them by scholar, and looped through so that we could see which tags appear wit
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For a number of years now I've long wondered if we could use digital tools that handled events and dating in the history classroom to help teach both historical methodology and construct a course's basic historical narrative. Last fall I grabbed the bull by the horns and did just that: crowd-sourced a timeline for my 170-student History 214 'Introduction to European History' here at McGill. It was an interesting experience - from ramping up a prototype web-app, to managing the classroom, to the overall reactions of students to a novel way of thinking through history as a collective endeavour. In the end the tool allowed for a different approach to teaching the fundamentals of historical sch
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This week I'm off to Tours, France to participate as an invited lecturer for the Summer University on Food hosted by the IEHCA. Here's the brochure. I'm presenting on the use of honey in religious polemic in the English Reformation. It's a paper I've wanted to work on for a while, and I see it connecting quite a bit with my article on Holy Oats in fundamental ways. It's also adding much new material for my ongoing book project on empiricism. Watch out for a new article soon!
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I'm working through the men's pieces of the Wanley Partbooks (Bodleian Music School MSS e.420-422) this summer with the men of One Equall Musick. It's pretty interesting stuff - musicologically and culturally. It's a mixed bag, even when it comes to the four-part anthems we're trawling through. There's plenty of homophony, interwoven with first-species counterpoint, and some more complex Eton-choirbook-like counterpoint (in one of the Amens - Lord Jesu Christ, son of the Living God). And there's some harmonic / cadential oddities like ending on a 1st inversion of a D major chord, where the Basses have a 6th into the final note... But there are also other things - some counterfeited pieces to
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Happy to announce that I've landed a several year contract here at McGill as an Academic Associate in the Department of History and Assistant Director of the proposed Centre for Digital Humanities. The position however is due to the gracious support of the McGill Library, where I'll be running digital humanities workshops and assisting with the development of the new Research Commons, the Faculty of Arts where I'll be helping run the proposed Centre, and the Faculty of Religious Studies where I'll be lecturing in the winter terms. Lots to do, but overall some stability and clarity for a few years doing what I've been doing for a number of years already - being a digital historian and humanis
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So this afternoon has been a nice surprise - finding out about my first non-English review of The Senses and the English Reformation in Sehepunkte and finding out the Holy Oats article is currently ranking the top read article for JMEMS from 2013. It's at #42 on the hit-list, but considering everything above it has been out for two years or more, that's not all that surprising. Happy to see it's making the rounds. Now on to write the article on honey!
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This past weekend One Equall Musick presented a concert that traced the development of English Choral Music between 1530 and 1580. It was a great opportunity to work through some of the repertoire that often gets overlooked because it lies in between the two pillars of 'Tudor' church music - Eton and Byrd. It's also the period of Thomas Tallis, so it made for a good musical adventure. The concert went quite well; we were pleased, and so was the audience from what we can gather - which is the best outcome. I did up the notes - we used a shorter version, but here's the full draft, for the record. Music in the Time of Tallis The Transformation of English Choral Music, c.1530-c.1580 There's
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I've been running a very short two-session Visualization Workshop this week at McGill. We needed data-sets built on Open Access resources for Open Access tools. I opted for some Mark Twain novels from Project Gutenberg. More on the workshop (and other things - I'm so behind in writing blog posts it isn't even funny), but this is by far the most interesting thing to me:
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