Blogosphere 14 November - 20 November

Last week was a fascinating week in the blogosphere indeed, which is not only reflected in the number of the posts but also in the variety of genres. The "Early Modern" group contains posts demonstrating that the authorship debate rolled on last week with six posts, from serious to really funny ones. Beyond the debate there are two more posts about aspects of the Shakespearean oeuvre, plus I found a snippet on William Harrison and a database on 16^th-century Scottish letters. In the “Digital Humanities” set I have included posts on geo-spatial data, JSTOR, traditional editing and/versus per-review, furthermore on TEI, theory and practice, and video-presentations on digital tools in the literature classroom. The "Others" category features two ProfHacker posts.

Early Modern Studies:

1. The Shakespeare authorship discussion witnesses posts with an immense sense of humour. An example for this is Shaul Bessi’s post “Anonymous Venetian” at Blogging Shakespeare. This post should be read from beginning to the end, as the turn comes at the end!

2. Another related post is entitled “Chronological List of References to Shakespeare as Author/Poet/Playwright” which speaks for itself. The webpage lists painstakingly the early references to Shakespeare. This may be a useful source for those interested in this problematics.

3. Brian Dunning’s post, “Finding Shakespeare” at Skeptoid argues for the Stratfordian cause.

4. Pat Donelly in her “William Shakespeare, as Anonymous as Réjean Ducharme?” also argues for Shakespeare being Shakespeare. She does this from the actor’s perspective, and also is happy to say that the authorship debate, though superfluous, does good to the less known Elizabethan authors.

5. Eric Idle’s “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” in The New Yorker is just a great piece of writing: both a funny take in the authorship debate, but at the same time a bitter criticism of the anti-stratfordian camp.

6. To round off this week’s posts on the authorship question, let me finish with “Shakespeare tops list of symbols giving Britons pride” at BBC News UK. This article nicely winds up the debate as it claims that “Some 75% agreed with the sentence ’I am proud of William Shakespeare as a symbol of Britain’,” referring to the interrelatedness of Shakespeare and patriotism.

7. Another Shakespeare related post, by Liz Dollimore this time, at Blogging Shakespeare is about King John and its relation to Holinshed’s Chronicles. The post is entitled “Shakespeare’s Sources – King John.”, and is one among the many interesting source posts with quotations from both the source and the play as well.

8. Stanley Well’s illuminating post explores the theme of “eyes” and “seeing” in the Shakespearean oeuvre: “Shakespeare and the Senses: The Pain of Seeing.”

9. Dainty Ballerina’s snippet at Shakespeare’s England entitled “Witches are hanged, or sometimes burned” quotes from W. Harrison’s A description of England as far as crime and punishment were treated in 16^th-century England.

10. This week I came across with The Breadalbane Collection, i.e. a collection of letters written in the 16^th century revealing “Scottish everyday life” in the given period.

Digital Humanities:

1. Stefan Sinclair’s post “The (Nearly) Immediate Gratification of Playing with Geospatial Data” presents the way how he created an interactive map: “XML to CSV, CSV to BatchGeo to add geo-location data, and there we have a map. An amazing transformation from static XML data to an interactive map.”

2. JSTOR released for free the Early Journal Content for the sake of data mining, as their “Early Journal Content Data Bundle” announces. “The data bundle for EJC includes full-text OCR and article and title-level metadata.” This should make the database rather invaluable for those researching the early phase of journal production.

3. I highly recommend to everybody Mark Sample’s and Shannon Mattern’s video presentations exploring the theme: Digital Humanities in the Classroom, or maybe digital projects at literature classes instead of seminar papers.

4. Dan Cohen’s post, What Will Happen to Developmental Editing? meditates about the future of editing, insomuch as developmental editing and peer-review are concerned. I also recommend the comments as well, coming from publishers. Hopefully, there is going to be either a golden mean between the two opposing views or a radically different solution. Nevertheless, Cohen’s position is rather innovative and rather forward-looking.

5. Hugh Cayless’s post “Scriptio Continua: TEI in other formats; part the second: Theory” is the second in the series exploring the uses of TEI. The post presents a difficult case when a damaged text was amended, and this is signalled with the TEI conventions. Reflecting on the capabilities of TEI leads to revealing theoretical underpinnings, or governing principles. One of the statements that I liked the best is this one: “There is no end of work to be done at this level, of joining theory to practice, and a great deal of that work involves hacking, experimenting with code and data.”

Others:

1. Anastasia Salter’s post, “Breaking out of Triage Mode” at ProfHacker is a consoling paper, really. Most of the time, facing big tasks to deal with, it is just consoling to be reminded that shadow-work can be, should be overcome to get down to projects: “Small goals,” “Keep projects visible” and “Control your time-killers.”

2. Lincoln Mullen wrote an informative post, “Fix PDFs Quickly with pdftk,” again at ProfHacker, giving thus help to those who intend to play and work with Pdf documents. The choice this time is Pdf Toolkit, a command-line application running on Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux etc.