Electronic Piers Plowman: Implementing an Edition of a Six-Hundred-Year-Old-Poem for Twenty-First Century Students

Terry Brooks (iSchool) and Miceal Vaughan (UW Textual Studies) are collaborating on producing a digital version of Piers Plowman, a fourteenth century English poem that is the subject of textual studies and whose interpretation is taught to undergraduate and graduate students alike. The goal of the project is to make the variety of interpretations and versions of the poem digital accessible. Terry Brooks has developed and is refining an XML schema that is capable of encoding the different versions of the text and accompanying annonations to it.

In today’s talk, he presented the XML Schema as well as an XML editor that allows a scholar like Miceal Vaughan to add alternate versions of a word, write annotations, and, in essence, to create a master copy/archive of Piers Plowman in a digital format.

Note: [link to the Electronic Piers Plowman project page]

Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making

Meghan Dougherty, PhD Candidate, Communication

(guest blog by Shaun Kane)

Wayfinder: A tool for tagging to equalize opportunities for sense-making in a collection of archived objects

This week Meghan presented her work on the Wayfinder project (http://www.wayfinder.webarchivist.org). This project is part of Meghan’s dissertation work, and is part of the larger Web Archivist project presented previously.

The Wayfinder project continues the exploration of representing digital scholarship digitally. By moving beyond traditional paper- based formats, we may explore alternate representations for scholarly information. Different media present different affordances, and may expose different social and epistemological issues. Wayfinder leverages the affordances of the web to enable new interactions with scholarly information. On the web, readers are able to act as content producers themselves, and can engage in a recursive dialogue with authors. The project also enables new modes of accessing and understanding scholarly information by allowing users to navigate and annotate data, and to create their own paths through a data set.

Representing Digital Scholarship Digitally: Creating the Web Campaigning Digital Supplement

Kirsten discusses the affordances and trade-offs associated with her research group’s decision to share their research (on impact of the Web on elections) through the Web. (They use a modified Wiki that exposes both 60% of the book text and all the data archives, field notes, memos, and notes).