GrinnellProposal

Participants

• Erik Simpson

Project description

I hope to attend the seminar in Santa Barbara this September on the encoding of contextual information. The project I want to develop, provisionally called Ashplant (after Stephen Dedalus's walking stick), will be driven by advanced undergraduate research on James Joyce and Ulysses. The project will strive to create a web interface that not only catalogs and adds to the scattered information about Ulysses that is already online but also integrates substantial portions of the scholarly conversation about Joyce with devices such as searchable annotated bibliographies that lead to library holdings.

I have already developed a project with similar ambitions to link online and offline scholarly knowledge. That work, The Transatlantic 1790s, featured content written by a team of six advanced undergraduates during the summer of 2004. I was the site's general editor and programmer. Building on a good deal of experience programming in HTML and CSS, I taught myself PHP and MySQL to give the site flexibility by having it generate dynamic, customized pages from a MySQL database.

As I undertake Ashplant and other projects in the future, I want to add two new dimensions. First, I will use the TEI as a way to draw students into the community of scholars working in the digital humanities. Second, I will develop with my students a theoretical context for the work they undertake, with readings ranging from foundational explorations of the potential of hypertext to the ongoing work of HASTAC and other organizations. After establishing that context, I will work with my students to consider the special limitations and opportunities created by our institutional context of the undergraduate liberal arts college.

Background and experience

I have only a little direct experience with text encoding. I have, however, followed the progress of encoding initiatives for many years. (Jerome McGann and Stuart Curran were my undergraduate and doctoral advisers, respectively, so exposure to the digital humanities has always been part of my training.) In preparation for this application, I have read a good deal of information from the WWP introductory seminars and the TEI. Because I have a reasonably strong background in computer programming (for the web and otherwise), I feel confident that I am ready to absorb and apply the seminar's materials.