Once upon a time in a faraway land – or to be exact, some 550 years ago in England, a non-native English-speaker from Flanders who was a compositor or typesetter for the printer William Caxton, decided to add the letter <h> into the word ghost. Or so the story goes, as per e.g. and i.a., […]
Category Archives: digital humanities
Datamoaning
At the beginning of this week, I attended the two-day Big Data Approaches to Intellectual and Linguistic History symposium at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki. Since Tuesday, I’ve found myself pondering on topics that came up at the symposium. So I thought I would write up my thoughts in order to unload them […]
Did English spelling variation end in the 1630s?
1. Early Modern English spelling variation Yesterday, rather late in the evening, I followed a link on Twitter: So there's an EEBO-TCP spelling variation google ngram browser http://t.co/OLxUv5NLBQ (via @dr_heil) — heather froehlich (@heatherfro) April 24, 2014 This led to the great Early Modern Print : Text Mining Early Printed English website where there was […]
The Permissive Digital Archive
Samuli Kaislaniemi (University of Helsinki) [This is the paper I gave at The Permissive Archive conference at UCL in London on 9 November 2012. This versions includes sections that I skipped when giving the talk – these are indented in the text below. My apologies to those whose images I cribbed: I have linked to […]
Rant about code (“MS Office uses XML”)
The new .docx etc formats of the newer versions of Microsoft Office are done in XML. Hence the -x in the extension. The problem with this, however, is something we all know: all MS programs are bloated pieces of shit. Those of you who occasionally fiddle with HTML will probably have experimented with the oh-this-is-convenient […]