Transformative Undergraduate Research

Casey Dué wrote last week about the accomplishments of some undergraduates at Brown University who, given the opportunity and the “extreme academic freedom” to pursue original research using primary sources (namely, a book of Roger Williams’ containing some hitherto undeciphered handwritten notes), were able to solve a long-standing mystery. Their access to these primary sources and the freedom to work on a scholarly problem with them demonstrates the transformative nature of real undergraduate research, both for the study of these primary sources and for the students’ education.

Most of the primary sources in our discipline are not available at libraries in this country, and that is why the digital photographs of them are so important to the Homer Multitext project. The digital technologies of creating these images and making them available to all interested researchers is similarly transformative of how research in our discipline can be (and even should be) conducted. What’s more, digital technologies can change how research is shared, and therefore how undergraduate researchers can join the scholarly conversation on a topic. William Pannapacker wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education last month about how these digital technologies eliminate the “Indiana Jones Warehouse” effect that was the traditional outcome for undergraduate research. As Pannapacker put it, “There’s no guarantee that the world will beat a path to your online project, but at least it’s available, and updatable. It’s not a moribund, bound manuscript shelved in a university library’s off-site storage warehouse.” Perhaps the least expected and most gratifying part of the Homer Multitext project so far has been how it has changed how we work with students and get them involved in original research of their own within the project. Some of their initial work is already available here on the blog (search for the tag “undergraduate research” to see them all) and on the project website, but the next stages of the project will do even more to bring their work to the scholarly community.

Extreme academic freedom, or undergraduates decode mystery manuscript

An interdisciplinary team of librarians, professors, and Brown University undergraduate students working at the John Carter Brown Library have decoded some of the last known writing of Roger Williams, the religious dissident, abolitionist, and founder of the colony of Rhode Island and the First Baptist Church. The library had possessed a volume entitled "An Essay Towards the Reconciling of Differences Among Christians" containing Williams' hand written notes in the margins since the 1800's, but since the notes are written in an obscure shorthand, the writings had never been deciphered. An undergraduate math major, Lucas Mason-Brown, combined frequency analysis together with an understanding of the court stenography once used in England (in which Williams was trained) to work out Williams' system. The writings have proven to be of great historical significance, including twenty pages on the subject of infant baptism. You can read more about the decoding and what the team discovered in the Providence Journal and in the much fuller account on Slate.

We call attention to this remarkable project here as another example of the kind of interdisciplinary and intergenerational work that we have advocated in connection with the Homer Multitext. Next summer the Center for Hellenic Studies will host our third seminar devoted to training undergraduate and faculty teams of researchers, who will then help us to publish in its entirety for the first time the contents of the tenth-century manuscript of the Iliad known as the Venetus A. This years's seminar will include teams from six US institutions and one in the Netherlands.

I am proud to be an alumna of Brown, which is a University that has always exemplified what I would call "extreme academic freedom" coupled with an intense focus on undergraduate education. This project is a wonderful testament to what is possible in that kind of academic environment. Stay tuned for a forthcoming post on the place of undergraduate research in the realm of Digital Humanities, in which we will highlight more examples of this kind of groundbreaking work by undergraduates.

From graphs to applications

In 2012, the quantity of material collected by the HMT project has grown rapidly.  To cope with this, we have been developing an automated system to identify the relations among all citable objects in the HMT data archive (texts, images, artifacts like manuscript pages, to name a few).   In mathematical terms, these relations form a graph.

In the HMT graph, all nodes are identified by URN values (CTS URNs for texts, or CITE URNs for other kinds of objects).  This simple, consistent reference format made it easy for us to develop a network service  for working with the HMT graph:  supply the service with a URN value, and the service finds all links to that URN.

This is an important development for the long-term development of our digital multitext, and will certainly be the subject of future blog posts.  For today, I simply want to announce a test site with end-user applications built on the graph service.

Like our other services for retrieving HMT data, the graph service replies with a simple XML format;  as in our other service implementations, we can include XSLT stylesheets to format these graph descriptions as web pages for human readers.
We have written three sets of stylesheets that turn the graph data into three quite distinct applications:

• a facsimile browser, for reading diplomatic edition of texts alongside documentary images
• a multitext reader, for reading multiple versions of a single text
• a graph navigator, for exploring links in the HMT project graph

You'll find test versions of all three of these apps at our new HMT Apps test page:  http://beta.hpcc.uh.edu/tomcat/hmtapps/

If you're curious about how the graph service works, try viewing the XML source of one of the application's web pages.  If you just want to try out an app, feel free.  Expect that the test versions on this site will evolve rapidly over the next several months.  We'll post announcements on this blog when we install more static release versions elsewhere.

Announcing the Open Paleography project

The Homer Multitext blog is an appropriate forum to announce a new project growing directly out of experience with the Homer Multitext project, and developing technology that will contribute directly to future work on the HMT project.

For almost three years, the HMT project has been collecting in structured notebooks paleographic observations about the manuscripts we are editing.  With the announcement of the Open Paleography project, we aim to expand this work to a general crowd-sourced collection of paleographic observations.

The Open Paleography project differs from other projects with similar aims in its application of the CITE architecture.  Paleographic observations identify a physical artifact, a textual passage, and a region of interest on a documentary image using technology-independent, machine-actionable URNs.  In turn, each observation itself is identified with a CITE URN.  The openly licensed data set is exposed to the software and end-users in the following ways:

• because all the data sets are CITE Collections, they are available through the CITE Collections Service API
• because data are stored in Google Fusion Tables,  they are available both through Google's programmatic API and through the user interfaces to Google Fusion Tables

The Open Paleography project is currently testing and helping develop two generic applications that work with any CITE Collection. The first is a collaborative CITE Collection editor allowing authorized contributors to add to a CITE Collection from a Web browser.  The second is a general querying and viewing application for end users.  Both of these applications will find immediate application in the HMT project.

Home page of the Open Paleography project:  http://shot.holycross.edu/op

Homer Multitext related publication

In August 2011 Homer Multitext Co-Editor Mary Ebbott and Associate Editor Leonard Muellner joined scholars in many humanistic disciplines at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland for a conference called “From Ancient Manuscripts to the Digital Era: Readings and Literacies.” The proceedings from that conference, including our contribution “Multitextual Reading in Manuscripts of the Iliad and the Future of the Homer Multitext” has now been published in Lire Demain / Reading Tomorrow, available here: http://www.ppur.org/livres/978-2-88074-958-3.html. An e-book version will also be made available.

Undergraduate interest in manuscripts

In 2011-2012, an enterprising group of students involved in the Homer Multitext project worked through the lengthy administrative requirements to form a new Registered Student Organization at the College of the Holy Cross.  The Manuscripts, Inscriptions and Documents Club is, as far as I am aware, unique:  an undergraduate club with the stated mission " to further the study of ... paleography, codicology, epigraphy, as well as the study of languages" through collaborative research involving students and faculty.

They seem to be succeeding:  at the club's first general meeting of the new academic year on Friday, seventeen returning members and three faculty collaborators were joined by twenty newcomers.  Six of the club's most active members could not attend Friday's meeting because they are currently studying abroad, but they have already sent back photographs of inscriptions as part of a club project on the epigraphic sources for tribute in fifth-century Athens, just one of an expanded roster of projects the club is hosting this year.

A larger group working on the Homer Multitext project will also allow us to expand our work on manuscripts of the Iliad.  We are experimenting this fall with new methods to help automate parts of the process of creating normalized texts parallel to the more strictly diplomatic texts that remain our central focus, and will be able to supplement our ongoing work on the Venetus A and Escorial Upsilon 1.1 with new teams looking at the Venetus B.

While the work on the Iliadic manuscripts will directly contribute to the HMT project, it is gratifying to see the broader awareness of and interest in primary-source material that the project is generating.

Albert Lord Centennial

Albert Lord would have turned 100 tomorrow (September 15, 2012). The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition has published a variety of commemorative resources. For our part, I would like to link to a blog post I wrote last year. No scholar's work has influenced the methodology of the Homer Multitext more. As Lord wrote in his 1995 book, The Singer Resumes the Tale: "the word multiform is more accurate than ‘variant,’ because it does not give preference or precedence to any one word or set of words to express an idea; instead it acknowledges that the idea may exist in several forms." (Lord 1995:23). See also The Singer of Tales (1960), p.101:

The truth of the matter is that our concept of the "original," of "the song," simply makes no sense in an oral tradition. To us it seems so basic, so logical, since we are brought up in a society in which writing has fixed the norm of a stable first creation in art, that we feel there must be an "original" for everything. The first singing in oral tradition does not coincide with this concept of the "original."... It follows, then, that we cannot correctly speak of a "variant," since there is no original to be varied! ... Our greatest error is to attempt to make "scientifically" rigid a phenomenon that is fluid.

If you would like to learn more about the work of Albert Lord and his teacher, Milman Parry, I highly recommend the 40th anniversary edition of the Singer of Tales, edited and introduced by Gregory Nagy and Stephen Mitchell. You can also read more about Lord's work and see some video clips from lectures given by Lord at the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature.