Have been flying below the radar lately. Have drafted several posts but life kept getting in the way of properly editing them. I have spent some time tweaking the site’s theme (still not happy with it, but I’ve become quite the theme hoarder).
The summer has been passing more swiftly than I expected. Connecticut, then Victoria, then Cape May/Connecticut again have taken a big bite out of my plans to push my book proposal out the door and prepare for the job market extravaganza this fall. I have been writing (WOVENText draft, edition & research proposals) and conference panel organizing (SCSC and RSA), and working hard on imageMAT. The slippery slope just keeps getting more slippery.
Yesterday I decided to take a research day and work on the Tarlton Project. I’ve been quietly moving the wiki components into the WordPress interface, and have finally rolled up my sleeves to mark up Tarlton’s Jests in TEI (I’d forgotten more than I ever learned six years ago …) Considering my SCSC paper and RSA papers both have to do with mapping, I figured I had better start doing more than dabble, and yesterday turned out to be a kind of catharsis. I pulled all the data on the Queen’s Men for 1583-1588 from Patrons and Performances. It’s in an Excel document serving as a rudimentary database with limited record data and citation:
I exported data by year into formatted .csv files and uploaded them to ArcGIS Online. I have a lot of work to do, but have made preliminary observations and sketched out next steps on the Tarlton Project site.
On other fronts, I’ve been following along on a number of DH and DP threads. Bethany Nowviskie’s inspiring plenary speech, “Reality Bytes” at the RBMS pre-conference – coming as it did in the middle of the UVa meltdown – helped me better frame ideas of digital-material archives AND introduced me to Neatline, the Scholar’s Lab’s new tempero-spatial Omeka tool suite. Roger Whitson’s “Digital Pedagogy Round-up” bibliography was exciting not only for putting a narrative to what’s been going on in DP this year, but also because it demonstrates how academic considerations of digital pedagogy are moving from the margin to the center. And Katherine D. Harris’s reflections on negotiating the constraints of limited travel spending viz. “pay to play” conference participation, “Digital, RBMS & Bucking the System,” gave me food for thought about how I should rethink my own concerns about attending five conferences during 2012-2013.
I could go on, but I need to get some imageMAT work done today. Anon.