Elisa Beshero-Bondar PRO
Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
A chapter or "chunk"-level survey of the novel Frankenstein, showing how chapter, letter, and other structural boundaries align with each other across five different versions. Some versions introduce extra chapters and some portions are longer than others. This is a "bird's eye" view on one screen in SVG of the structural variation. Mouse over the black squares for the text of each edition at that specific point.
The word by word, comma by comma, and sometimes tag by tag comparison of manuscripts and editions (called “collation”) is notoriously tedious and error-prone. But computer-aided collation is like a power loom that inevitably tangles up threads caught in the machinery. We need new tooling to help us unsnarl the threads. To this point, we aligned variant passages in the Frankenstein Variorum project using a Python script to feed collateX. Now we are experimenting with the Text Alignment Network’s tandiff XSLT to handle the string comparison completely with XPath and XSLT. How far can we take XSLT and Schematron in automating the preparation, collation, and correction of electronic editions?
For the DH 2022 conference we seek to share our efforts in the Frankenstein Variorum project (hereafter referred to as FV) to automate corrections to machine-assisted collation and thereby to refine our collation pre-processing and post-processing algorithms.
We have been working on a challenging experiment with automated text-collation to compare and visualize five distinctly different versions of the novel Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley. Working with computer-aided collation involves much testing and refining as the process inevitably does not run smoothly. In our case, the collation process is complicated by our comparison of very differently-encoded digital editions: the Shelley-Godwin Archive's diplomatic TEI edition (encoding page-by-page surfaces and zones as well as marginal insertions and deletions), together with simpler encodings of four other editions mainly representing print publications and their semantic structures (encoded in chapters and letters). I will discuss how we organized the collation process by “chunking” the documents along parallel structures marked in each text, and also how we involve the TEI markup of paragraph and chapter boundaries as well as deletions and insertions in the process to make the markup part of the collated edition. Most importantly, I want to discuss the necessity of good, clear documentation to guide our testing of collation methods and analysis of what can go wrong and how to resolve it.
This presentation shares how a fortunate find of Mary Behrend's loose-leaf 1909 calendar sheets at the Penn State Behrend Library archives helped provide a wonderful teaching on-ramp for students to learn digital humanities over a 100 years later!
presentation for the 2021 Association for Computers and Humanities (ACH) Conference, also for the 2021 Keystone DH Conference.
An orientation to the shell commands for working with git and GitHub.
presentation for the 2021 Association for Computers and Humanities (ACH) Conference, also for the 2021 Keystone DH Conference.
presentation for the 2021 Association for Computers and Humanities (ACH) Conference, also for the 2021 Keystone DH Conference.
Slides to help with learning CSS
Slides to help with learning HTML
presentation for the 2021 Keystone DH Conference
paper for Balisage 2021 Conference
presentation for the 2021 Association for Computers and Humanities (ACH) Conference, also for the 2021 Keystone DH Conference.
presentation for the 2021 Keystone DH Conference
An orientation to the collation preparation work of the Frankenstein Variorum project.
an exploration of network analysis applied to mythical and mappable locations as placed in scientific epic poems at the turn of the 19th-century. Featuring Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and Erasmus Darwin's The Temple of Nature (1802).
About a pedagogical experiment introducing the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to my Text Encoding students in Fall 2020.
An orientation to the Digital Humanities via the early history of computing.
introduction to navigating and organizing computer files at the command line
slides for Balisage 2020 virtual presentation, 28 July 2020
An orientation to the Digital Humanities via the early history of computing.
A panel presentation for the 2019 TEI Conference in Graz Austria
An attempt to track all changes in image snips.
a slide presentation on Mary Russell Mitford's Rienzi as it was altered for performance for Drury Lane theater in London in 1828.
slide presentation for the DH2019 conference, July 9-12 2019 at Utrecht University.
an exploration of network analysis applied to mythical and mappable locations as placed in scientific epic poems at the turn of the 19th-century. Featuring Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and Erasmus Darwin's The Temple of Nature (1802).
presentation materials for Balisage 2018
presentation materials for introducing Digital Studies and the Center for the Digital Text at Pitt-Greensburg
a presentation for the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh for 2 April 2018
presentation on the Pittsburgh-MITH Digital Frankenstein Project for Frankenstein Week at Missouri Southern State University, 5 March 2018
draft of slides to be included in roundtable slide deck for the Bicentennial Bits and Bytes: Digital Frankenstein Roundtable Panel at MLA 2018.
slides for roundtable presentation on the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Frankenstein project at the MLA convention, 2018.
presentation for 13 November 2017 at the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) 2017 Conference: http://hcmc.uvic.ca/tei2017/schedule.php
presentation for 13 November 2017 at the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) 2017 Conference: http://hcmc.uvic.ca/tei2017/schedule.php
presentation for 8 February 2017 at the Methodologies in Digital Humanities (Text Encoding Initiative Public Day) http://www.ff.cuni.cz/methodologies-in-dh/