Category: Markup and Text Representation

Reassembling the Disassembled Book

Image of Pages being Scanned

There is a nice collection of essays on CH Working Papers on Reassembling the Disassembled Book. These are some of the papers that were presented under that theme at the Society for Digital Humanities meeting in 2007 in Saskatchewan which I blogged before. One paper I was pleased to read because it went by too quickly at the conference is Richard Cunningham’s Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing. This paper describes and theorizes a one day experiment Richard and others tried in taking apart an early modern book, scanning it, and reassembling as a electronic book. I love these “what can you do in a day experiments.”

Bad enough we had all agreed, before gathering in Victoria, to disassemble one book; in the end we discovered we would need to dismantle two books to achieve our representational goals. This need to use (or perhaps more appropriately abuse) two books rather than one was a direct result of the planning we undertook prior to entering the ETCL. We began with the basic idea of digitizing an early modern book and defining the project so that it could be completed in a single day. The opportunity for this project came in the form of a selection of early modern books that had been rescued from the discount bins of a couple of London’s antiquarian book stores. (Richard Cunningham, Dis-Covering the Early Modern Book: An Experiment in Humanities Computing)

There are links in the paper to a number of videos and images, including a long video that shows them cutting the pages. Not unlike my Text in the Machine series of photos, but for a far more important purpose.

Seminar: The writer and the society of communication

Domenico Fiormonte drew my attention to an interesting seminar coming up next week in Valencia at the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) on Editando al autor. El escritor en la sociedad de la communicación (PDF). The seminar brings together editors, authors, new media researchers and philologists on the subject of the writer in a society of communication.

Domenico has an interesting web site Digital Variants which makes available various the writings (and variants) of various contemporary Italian and Spanish authors. On the Digital Variants site they are experimenting with systems of frames to allow readers to compare variants. Here is one example of a Vincenzo Cerami Variants Machine
 created by Mario Macciocca.

Walter Ong on the Textual Squint

Image of part of PDF of manuscript

We know now that there is much more than text. “Texts,” as Geoffrey Hartman, has observed, “are false bottom.” The implications of scholars’ blindness to the nontextual and of their recent discovery of their own blindness have still not been worked out entirely. Textual squint is still with us, and, in some ways, with deconstruction has become more disabling in certain quarters at the very time that its diagnosis has become easier. The way to overcome textual squint is not to devise theories, which textualism promotes ad nauseam, but to call attention to reality, to the relationship of texts to the full human lifeworld, …”
Page 2 of “MLA 1984 Literacy Studies”

This passage is from the second page of a five page edited typescript at The Walter J. Ong Collection. The web site notes that “Ong’s notes indicate that this talk was part of the ‘What is Literacy Theory’ session (program item #190) of the 1984 MLA Convention.” I wonder what Ong would make of the Dictionary of Words in the Wild? I don’t think Ong had wild text in mind as a way of overcoming the “textual squint”; the hand notation “Alice Springs” in the left-hand margin suggests what he thought would be an example of nontextual human lifeworld.

Parallel Word Processing

Well, that’s what Textflow calls their not-yet-in-beta collaborative editing system. It certainly looks attractive, it even looks like it might be nice to use. I have only had a quick look, but it claims to offer more than just multi-user document editing; instead of requiring editors to check-in/check-out portions of a document (hence locking their edits), Textflow chunks the document down into a database of edits and revision pieces of arbitrary size and maintains all the pieces of a document simultaneously over many editors. Its killer feature might be the ability to import several versions of a Word file and build a revision history with a ‘final state’ copy ready to commit or roll-back edits.
Faces stiff competition from Google Docs and ThinkFree (among others), but they look to be raising the bar.

Personalized Online Electronic Text Services (POETS)

I just came across a group at the Kyoto Notre Dame University who are building small text utilities called, Personalized Online Electronic Text Services (POETS). They have a nice English Vocabulary Assistant (EVA) WordNet 3.0 Vocabulary Helper which takes a word, looks it up in WordNet and gives you an exhaustive entry. They also have a Eva Text Analysis service that will, for example, link all words in a text except for stop words, to the Vocabulary Helper entry.

Old Bailey Online

Image from Web Page
The Globe and Mail today had a story about a humanities computing project, the Old Bailey Online – The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 – Central Criminal Court. The story is titled, A crime time machine (Tuesday, April 29, 2008, Page A2) and is really quite nice. That the story appears on the second page of our national newspaper shows how humanities computing projects are of general interest (especially if they are about criminals.) The introduction on the web site reads,

A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

One thing that is interesting is that they have Google Ads down the left-hand side, which is unusual for an academic project.

Bravo to the team that developed it!

Prism and XUL

My favorite underappreciated XML language XUL (XML User Interface Language) could become more than a Mozilla utility with Prism. To quote the Prism site:

Prism is a simple XULRunner based browser that hosts web applications without the normal web browser user interface. Prism is based on a concept called Site Specific Browsers (SSB). An SSB is an application with an embedded browser designed to work exclusively with a single web application. It doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and accoutrements of a normal web browser. Some people have called it a “distraction free browser” because none of the typical browser chrome is used. An SSB also has a tighter integration with the OS and desktop than a typical web application running through a web browser.

In other words, with Prism you can write your own interface in XUL that shows and hides what you want. You can then use it, in theory, to create network applications without all the interface overhead of a browser. How far are we from the browser as OS?

Thanks to Peter for this.

FlowingData: 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe

Twitter Visualization

Peter sent me to a neat blog, FlowingData that is partly about visualization. Nathan, the author, posts longish notes like 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe. He also has a good one on 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox which has some creative ways to handle spam like Alex Dragulescu’s Spam Architecture that takes spam and generates “three-dimensional modeling gestures”! (I want to be a 3D modeling gesture!)

Ong: Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism

Wandering some more through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection blog I came across an intriguing note on Revising Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism. The Walter J. Ong Collection at Saint Louis University has PDFs of lectures including one on Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism (PDF). In the lecture Ong seems to be thinking about virtual reality as a form of secondary visuality just as radio and television are a secondary orality. If secondary orality is orality which is scripted (while appearing spontaneous like the oral), secondary visuality would be planned while being visually spontaneous. Perhaps the scripting or planning in this case would be the code that makes virtual spaces available rather than the scripting of the humans in the space.

Image of VRML Dream

Secondary visuality might be like the VRML Dream – a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was streamed over the Internet with VRML. According to a student who participated when he was younger, they had two sets of performers – the voice actors in one room and the VRML body actors in another. Or secondary visuality could be visualizations that transcode data from one sensory modality to another (from text to the visual.)