I’ve been working intermittently on a project to create a digital catalog of the personal library of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who died in 1950. Her sister inherited her house and kept all her books (pretty much), and the house became a small museum in 2010. There’s a draft of the catalog up at www.zotero.org/groups/steepletop_library and a project description at dhcommons.org/projects/edna-st-vincent-millay-personal-library-catalog

One of the things I want to do with the catalog is put in a lot of tags creating links between the items, things like which books were written by women. If anyone wants to sit around with me and tag items for an hour or so (there are about 1000 item) with whatever you like, and incidentally learn more about Zotero group libraries if you’re into that, that’d be a big help. It’s kind of fun, I think, to see what she had. Lots of obscure poetic monographs from the 20s and 30s.

Anyone interested in helping create an XML schema (customized TEI?) for encoding bibliographies for the web? We are working on a “black box” solution for scholars wanting to publish bibliographies to the web and the first step is to create a schema that can serve as the input and storage base for the data. We are wanting to create a schema that can accommodate all types of bibliographies and their “added value,” including annotated bibliographies, linked data, and descriptive bibliography. We may not leave the session with a complete schema, but may be able to come up with a substantial list of elements that need to be included. No knowledge of XML needed — just an interest in putting bibliographies on the web!

What are the DH tools and methods used to study literature? How are these being used and to what end? I’d like to talk with others about the forms that digital literary studies have taken and the underlying methodologies. This could take the form of a “Make” session where we draft an inventory of DH tools and methods used in literary studies with notes on application, context, skills, methodology, etc. For example, what can mapping (topic modeling, text mining, digital editions) do to further scholarship and/or teaching? What is needed to complete a project?

I spend a lot of time in literature classes doing class discussion. Often, we spend the entire 90 minutes of any given class discussing our reading (often a novel or group of poems), and these student-directed discussions move in very unpredictable ways (I don’t script discussions). I’m often disappointed that these discussions disappear into the ether, just like any everyday conversation, and what remains are fragments of memory and a diaspora of notes. I’d like to introduce technology into our class discussions (starting with Twitter) as a way of documenting the class meetings, but also finding other uses for it. Here are some ideas I’ve been kicking around:

1. Assigning students to Tweet class discussions. But what are some different ways to structure this? Can a version of inner/outer circle work? How many students should be doing this? A small group or anyone who has the desire? How do you archive and are there unforeseen problems with archiving? I’ve been running this through my head quite a bit, and I see a lot of initial structuring that has to be done.

2. If there is a successful and consistent way to accomplish the above, how might technology outside of Twitter give further life to that record? Storify is one obvious option, but are there other ways our class discussions, via technology, might become usable/interpretable texts of their own? Might they, instead of being relegated to the past, be reintroduced into the class in interesting, even creative ways? (For example, how might those discussions be used to “perform” the issues of our reading, rather than document them? Could something like a Timeline be incorporated?)

3. What might some advanced end point be? Is it possible to imagine a visualization that in some way documented an entire semester’s worth of discussion, made it a text of its own, much in the way people are visualizing social network interaction?

One final note: I’ve read all the proposals posted thus far and am interested in all of them. If this is too basic of a proposal, trust me, I’m ready to participate in other things!

I have an idea for a research project that brings together visual images – paintings and magazine and book covers – the written (archive) correspondence between collectors, galleries, and museums that tie them together, and the scholarship (and popular writing) that has been done on both.  It has to do with pulp magazines and novels of the early 20th century.  I’m thinking of turning this into a course where students (undergraduate) help with original research and writing, and ultimately publication – traditional book form or not – of all this.  I need help getting started – how to shape this into an ongoing project.

After taking a MOOC in Social Network Analysis (SNA) this past Fall, I’m interested in exploring network analysis further in the digital humanities. I not only wonder in what other ways the tools and theories of SNA might be extrapolated to examine literary networks (paratextual and intertextual), but I’m also interested in exploring social network analyses of digital humanities, so that we might analyze the myriad of growing networks. A careful analysis of such networks could show how networks grow, why, and help us determine why some networks fail to interact and impact with other similar networks in our field.