So the lid is off on the new platform - http://www.nanohistory.org, as a manner of speaking. I've taken down the .htaccess to the site, allowing the outside world to take a look (finally) at the public side. It's preoccupied much of my time since mid-November, as I'd been focused on the internal layout and migration of tools, etc. from Making Publics from this summer until then. We decided to go ahead and open it up as Nano-History is part of two grant applications currently under consideration by SSHRC: we needed to have something for the assessors to look at. Equally, I wanted to start writing about the data I've been working on, and test drive the platform. We're still very much in beta,
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Over the past year I've spent some time recreating the metadata of Phase 1 and 2 texts from the Text Creation Partnership's hand coded SGML files of Early English Texts Online for the Early Modern Conversions digital humanities project 'Distant Reading Early Modernity' (DREaM). It's been an interesting process working through the 44,418 texts of the TCP corpus (McGill has access to phase 2 as a TCP partner). Though it first involved marrying the TEI metadata headers with the text bodies, to create a master file for each text, subsequent work, has focused on each part, in turn. Last year I extracted elements from each file where the "lang" attribute contained "eng" as a value, in order to cr
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While there are an increasing number of Digital History projects out there, I'm constantly caught by the larger 'So What?' question that always seems to come up. I don't mean 'so what' in terms of specific content of a given project or field, or area of study. Rather, 'so what?' for history itself. Literary scholars have had much more success in wrestling with this question it seems. In part I suspect it has to do with the very fundamental epistemological and hermeneutic conditions of their interests, as opposed to historians. Both disciplines prioritize the position of the text as the basis of their work - albeit there are literary scholars and historians alike who use other media, but pr
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