Over the past month or so I've had to prepare for the coming expiration of the makingpublics.org domain. Though the project officially concluded in 2010, a remainder of funds was allocated to re-imagine its website, and see whether discussions could continue. In short, though we received some traffic initially, and some requests for new user accounts over the years, the new site did not take of on its own. Nevertheless the work done on it acted as a good leaping point for the new NanoHistory site which launched this last fall. When I arrived at McGill to take up my position as a postdoc and webmaster for MaPs, I made it a priority to archive and preserve the work of my predecessor, Jen Drou
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Building parsers for Nanohistory has involved quite a bit of thinking about what's in a name. I'm going to leave organizations, places, and things and outline how I've approached the issue for prosopographical data. Let's get some basics out of the way first - just so we're clear on what's going on. A "name" is essentially a label; whether it as attached to anything in particular is secondary in practical terms. In short, a name is a descriptor for something that can exist in reality or be completely fictive. This is important to note because unlike a cataloguer in a repository, historical scholars are interested in the movement and shaping of identities: names are the lynchpins, but do not
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Open Data is great - despite the fact most historians have no idea what it is or how to use it. It uses standard vocabularies, namespaces, and taxonomies to describe data, allowing researchers to move data from one context to another easily. Yet it's also rather complicated for the average humanities scholar (let's be honest here) since it also requires familiarity with data types and formats like XML, JSON, Turtle, etc. These aren't always usually picked up for those with mind towards prose and manuscripts, though they're not difficult, really. When it comes to the bibliographic world, we now have excellent tools for quickly creating lists and generating metadata as needed - Zotero, EndNote
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I'm releasing a revised version of the EEBO-TCP Phase I metadata mashup I created last fall. There were some issues with nested elements in the which needed addressing. These new headers will soon make their way into DREaM. Here is the revised version: EEBO TCP Phase 1 DREaM Metadata Headers - May 6, 2016 (~43MB zipped). For more on the full process and EEBO-TCP policies for using Phase I, see my earlier post EEBO-TCP Metadata Mashup
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I've been busy migrating two new tools for NanoHistory. Both are geared towards making life easier for users, as the main problem for NanoHistory is the density of data entry and connections which need to be made quickly, easily, and accurately. This work focuses on rapid creation of new events or connections between existing nodes or entities, and the transcription or documentation of entities and events from online source materials that aren't well suited to automated processing - mainly manuscript sources. Like existing NanoHistory tools, I've given these them one word names - Weave and Scribe. Weave In Making Publics, in many ways NanoHistory's progenitor, we created a workbench tool c
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Is it possible to build a kind of fingerprint of a given historical source or text using discreet parameters, and compare it with others? Radar is an experimental tool that seeks to do just this. Whereas text analysis tools and software allows scholars to extract named entities, parts of speech, or identify elements of a given text, NanoHistory's model requires users to do so in order to create evidentiary trails through the historical record. In essence this establishes a different kind of typology for text analysis as entities are mentioned, referenced, or cited in a thing, imbuing the resulting data with a critical characteristic - an assertion of meaning. Radar allows users to compare th
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NanoHistory's use of graph or network models immediately lends itself to creating the usual force-directed representations of networks that we've grown accustomed to over the past decade or so. For the inhouse network visualization tool, which I'm calling 'webs' for lack of a better name, I've opted to adapt D3's well known force directed example. I've mashed it up with some later versions by other D3 designers, and tweaked it for our use. Two issues related to scale affected the development of this core tool. The first was building an effective query engine that would allow for users to create visualizations of data as needed from the overall NanoHistory collection. The second was handling
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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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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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On Dec. 5th one equall musick and McGill's Centre for Research on Religion (CREOR) co-hosted a Restoration Evensong to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. It was a great success - we had c. 100 people in McGill's Birks Chapel at 530 on a cold wednesday night at the end of term. Quite the turn out considering it was the middle of the week - in some respects a bit of a gamble, but one that paid off immensely. The musical line-up was fairly accurate we thought, without going into too much precision on what might have actually appeared in a Chapel Royal Service c. 1667. The choral music was as follows: William Smith, Preces and Responses Psalm tunes from British
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Just back from Sixteenth-Century Studies 2012 in Cincinnati, despite the Sandy / Frankenstorm. On the whole a good conference; my plenary panel on Thursday night went well considering that we really didn't have an idea about the format. At the end of it, it became clear however that there is a theme of connecting the senses and the emotions in a much more nuanced and robust manner. In numerous panels and papers the experiential, the sensuous, the emotional, and the role of practice were front and centre! quite a happy turn of events I think, considering these define my work in so many ways. Solid outcomes - seeing the Religion and the Senses in print for the first time (out on Oct 23 2012!),
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I decided (during my lunch) to see what Stefan Sinclair and Geoff Rockwell's Voyant Tools would tell me about my monograph. I guess some kind of self-discovery over a sandwich is OK - especially when it combines two aspects of your own work. Here are some visuals generated by Voyant: So my book is about the senses and religion. I'm genuinely surprised though at how low the raw count is on the senses themselves - then again, it's about the sensorium as a whole, not each individual sense per se. Another view is rather interesting I think - word trends that more or less follow what each chapter is about. Knowing how I intended my argument to flow, this graph is comforting - it actually sh
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We survived - it was intense, but actually quite productive. And I think that we didn't have to wrangle as much about terminology and miscommunications between c. 4 distinct academic cultures as much as I had thought. Perhaps that speaks volumes for me nagging my student researchers all summer about thinking outside the box and to try and grasp where other students on the RDF project are coming from. Of course the biggest gap is between the humanists and the computer scientists, but even this was bridged quite easily. The excitement in the room about some of the questions we've been wrestling with - the nature of how we might map social processes as networks - was palpable, and there was int
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It looks like the holy oats article is going to make it into the 2013 open issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies: fingers crossed, it's going through post-revision reviews at the moment. If it makes it in, I'll be extremely happy. The project has been a long haul from finding some indications that Aquinas thought grace had intentional being as a quality, through the work at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto, and the submission of the LMS paper version, to the complete redrafting and rewriting of the research as a paper for McGill Medievalists in the winter of 2010. Finding the oats recipe was a godsend as it let me deal with the complex issues, I think, in a slightly hu
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Most of my attention at the moment is on finalizing the draft chapter on The Senses and Religion for the forthcoming volume on The Senses in the Renaissance (Berg). Wrestling with these two vast topics is proving interesting for a chapter length piece. I'm happy to say that previous research interests on the continent are proving assets!
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I've received a SSHRC Grant for the coming year! I'm quite pleased about this - it will give me funds (shared with four co-applicants) to pursue developing the new Making Publics website into a RDF resource. In short, the work will examine how humanities research might be disseminated into the world of Linked Open Data using the standards and forms associated with the Resource Description Framework. For most humanists this sounds a bit technical - it is - but in short, it's a way of getting archival and humanistic research out into websites and other data formats.
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The Holy Oats article is finally submitted to the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Fingers crossed it will be accepted for their 2013 open volume.
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