The first DH project I have chosen to address is called “Transcribe Bentham.” This project’s primary goal is to transcribe Jeremy Bentham’s (a famed philosopher and reformer) manuscripts. The challenge to attempting this lies in the fact that most of his manuscripts are labeled under either “moderate” or “difficult” handwriting, and are often times in a foreign language, such as French or Latin. This project is filed under Crowdsourcing, Digital Edition, and Textual Edition. This falls under the Crowdsourcing approach due to it being an internet-wide collaborative initiative. The method fits with the scholarly subject matter in that one would generally need a large group of people to transcribe 20,679 manuscripts. I believe this also falls under digital edition and textual edition because the contributors are converting Bentham’s work from a textual manuscript into a digital format.
The second DH project that I am addressing is titled “Belfast Group Poetry”. This project involves the Belfast Group, which started when Philip Hobsbaum created a writing workshop for poetry. These workshop meetings involved a group of poets discussing and analyzing a single poet’s work. Then, they would have a session where the members of the group could read any work that they wanted to. These routine meetings objectively contributed to the development of the poets’ writing, and some of the poets, such as Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, began to create a name for themselves all over Northern Ireland. Though they were spread out all over the country, they were still connected. Unfortunately, in 1972 the group disbanded. The primary DH approach to this project was mapping. As you can see in this diagram below, the locations of the Belfast Group were highly concentrated in the northern section of the country, making it more convenient to meet.
The secondary approaches are Network Analysis and Visualization. These approaches are prevalent to the subject matter as well in that a visualization and analysis of the networking between the poets proved essential into understanding how the group conglomerated.
I am a sophomore at Bucknell University, majoring in Mathematical Economics and minoring in Computer Science.