Related to my other proposal—a sort of general discussion of text encoding—I wonder if anyone would be interested in trying to put ideas about text encoding into practice by trying to imagine into existence a small mini-edition of some interesting but neglected text.¹ We would need to thing through the entire process: questions of textual scholarship (what state of a text to represent; what annotations or apparatus does it need to be useful to readers; in what formats should be encoded; what outputs can/should we provide; how/where could it be hosted).

We probably wouldn’t have enough time to complete such an endeavour, but we would have enough time to get started.

1. As a starting suggestion for a text that could benefit from such an edition, I don’t think Hope Mirrlees’s early twentieth-century poem Paris has a good digital representation on the web right now—though a rather raw looking PDF is available.)

I continue to be fascinated by the fundamental problem of representing texts—I’m thinking of literary texts in particular (and, lately, poetry, especially), and the many solutions (all variously imperfect) that people use. I have in mind all the various technologies that folks use to represent texts (whether remediating historical texts or authoring their own). This could include complicated, semantically rich models like that of the TEI, to that most ubiquitous of markup formats—HTML, or the lean, simplified “markup” of Markdown. We could also think about the related tools (from XSLT or Pandoc… or, my latest favorite and a real dark horse in this race, Pollen), which can make such texts usable in different ways.

I’d be happy to meet and talk with people of any level of experience (seriously! if TEI/HTML/Markdown are all equally befuddling terms, this could be a session to hash what they mean!) about the passion and perils of text encoding.

Collaborative world building is a process by which students learn to think critically about social forces at play in a given place at a specific moment in history and how these forces influence the lived experiences of the people who live in the world. Students write a metanarrative describing the governance, economics, social values, and cultural influences and then populate a wiki with entries for people, places, and things and pin them to a map. Collaborative world building is useful for creative projects such as creating post-apocalyptic futures, alternate histories, or fanfiction in preexisting worlds and could be used in courses in literature, history, or other humanities. Participants will learn about the pedagogical theories underlying collaborative world building including its roots in role-playing games and will participate in the creation of a brand new world of their choosing.

Do you have research or archival finds that you’re ready to take online? Whether it’s making public a collection of objects or sharing a more developed project with others in your field, Scalar, a free and open-source online publishing platform, is one of many available options for creating a dynamic and engaging presentation of your materials.

In this session, we’ll work with some of Scalar’s basic features to not only introduce any newcomers to the fundamentals of the platform but also engage those somewhat familiar with it in discussions of what projects might be best suited to it. Particular emphasis will be placed on the incorporation of media files—one of the Scalar’s strengths—in areas as diverse as annotating sound or video files, importing images from collections already linked to the Scalar platform, and, perhaps most importantly, placing and linking these files throughout a project. We’ll also look at a number of works created using the platform, ranging from the pedagogical to the critical to the exploratory and artistic.