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 […]
Tag Archives: rant
How should you cite a book viewed in EEBO?
Earlier today, there was a discussion on Twitter on citing Early Modern English books seen on EEBO. But 140 characters is not enough to get my view across, so here ’tis instead. The question: how should you cite a book viewed on EEBO in your bibliography? When it comes to digitized sources, many if not […]
The reliability of “Winwood’s Memorials”
The three-volume Memorials of affairs of state in the reigns of Q. Elizabeth and K. James I, collected (chiefly) from the original papers of … Sir Ralph Winwood, edited by Edmund Sawyer, published in 1725 (2nd ed. 1727), is a hugely convenient work for those working on late Elizabethan and early Stuart State Papers, since […]
Woo, palaeography! (argh)
So, I’m transcribing bits of documents I photographed at the Staffordshire Record Office and the William Salt Library in Stafford last September. Most of the docs are older than the ones I usually deal with, which means I have to struggle a bit to read the handwriting. Today’s post is a celebration of the idiocy […]
more on the vexing matter of assigning dates to documents
TNA SP 94/12 ff.144-147 is a 4-page document entitled: “Note of my letters of aduertisments from spayne, Italy & other parts from Jan 1605 vntill [missing]” In other words, it is a list of letters received during 1605. It was compiled by Thomas Wilson, secretary to Sir Robert Cecil, in charge of intelligencing relating 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 […]
Digital Humanities* and “Digital Humanities 2.0”
Back in June, I attended the Digital Humanities 2008 conference. Digital humanities, for those not in the know (although I’m sure the term is hardly opaque), is the ridiculously wide field covering all humanities disciplines which use computers. So it includes everyone from corpus linguists to software engineers interested in solutions for humanists, and from […]