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IMC 2019: Sessions

Session 1214: Medieval Vernacular Corpora and Digital Textual Analysis, I: Text Creation - A Workshop

Wednesday 3 July 2019, 14.15-15.45

Sponsor:Open Medieval French
Organiser:David Joseph Wrisley, Department of English, American University of Beirut
Moderator/Chair:Gustavo Ariel Fernández Riva, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Universidad de Buenos Aires
Abstract

These two workshops are addressed to an audience of medievalists with little or no exposure to digital methods in the humanities, as well as to medievalists interested in learning about and participating in an international digital humanities project. Each workshop will have a theoretical segment, in which the workshop leaders will present the subject and discuss with participants, followed by 'hands on' exercises in which participants will apply the skills acquired. The first workshop is more oriented toward the theoretical (building a digital resource), while the second is more practice-oriented (using a digital resource). The two workshops are interrelated, but also autonomous, which means that participants could benefit from attending either, or both, of the sessions.

Session I: Text Creation
This workshop will provide a theoretical framework for, and a critical overview of, text creation projects in pre-modern studies that take different approaches to archival materialities. Different existing research corpora with varying features will be considered (Early English Books Online, Open Greek and Latin, Open Islamicate Texts Initiative, Archivio della Latinità Italiana del Medioevo). We will pay particular attention to the Open Medieval French (OpenMedFr) project: its workflows, its ethos of openness and reuse, as well as the design of the corpus for the international scholarly community (30 minutes). For the hands on segment, participants will be exposed to different approaches to encoding metadata, to collaborative project management using 'git' - a method for versioning and code-sharing - and to basic features and challenges of optical character recognition (OCR) methods (60 minutes).