Study in a Second Discipline: Digital Humanities

English Professor Roxanne Eberle has been awarded the opportunity to work in the Provost’s Office Study in a Second Discipline program to learn more about the methods, issues, and tools in the Digital Humanities:

The main focus of this endeavor is to gain skills in TEI and XML with the goal of creating a digital edition of Amelia Alderson Opie’s letters. Opie was a well-known poet, tale writers, and novelist, whose work appeared in print from 1790-1844. She was contemporaries with Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Lord Byron.

This project stems from Eberle’s decades long interest in Opie. Her research has led her to countless archives looking for Opie’s correspondence and she has transcribed hundreds of handwritten letters. Now, with this collection in hand, she has been working in the DigiLab to digitize these transcriptions and mark them up using TEI. The final project will be encoded in such as way as to identify Opie’s correspondence networks and her unique language use.

Eberle has now completed a schema for encoding her letters, and in the Spring (release date June 21, 2017) she will create a prototype for her digital edition using a subset of 16 letters that best exemplify Opie’s larger body of correspondence. She hopes to connect her set of TEI encoded letters with other archives of correspondence from the Romantic Period including the Romantic Circles project and the Shelley Godwin Archive.

TEI refers to the Text Encoding Initiative, a consortium which collectively develops and maintains a standard for the representation of texts in digital form. This is where the rubber hits to the road, so to speak, in the digital humanities. Standardized encoding methods for machine-readable texts is the key to making them broadly available, searchable and navigable across all the devices people actually use. That seamless, end result requires a specific set of skills, training and knowledge to allow these texts to represent realiably and beautifully in a digital context. Congratulations to Dr.  Eberle and the DHI at the UGA. 

Image: via George Washington U.