• Bartłomiej Szleszyński

Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Digital collection Postmodern Sienkiewicz (http://nplp.pl/en/kolekcja/postmodern-sienkiewicz/) on New Panorama of Polish Literature platform was planned to be innovative in two aspects:

1) Scholarly content shows several new approaches to work and biography of Henryk Sienkiewicz (one of the most important Polish writers of all time, Nobel prize winner, known all over the Europe as an author of Quo vadis novel). These approaches include,
among others, analysis of spatial aspects of writers journeys to America and Africa, some gender perspective on his novels and its  connections to political theology and visual art.

2) Digital collection uses not only great number of visuals connected to articles and their fragments, but also the space of palace in Oblęgorek - high quality photos of front and back of palace, its rooms, items and paintings – to invent new ways of disseminating scholarly content and immersing users into life and work of Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Palace in Oblęgorek - today Museum of Henryk Sienkiewicz - was bough and redecorated for the writer between 1900 and 1902, using donations collected by the nation. Although It wasn’t the “writers residence” in traditional meaning of term (Sienkiewicz lived there mostly only during summer months until he left Poland in 1914) but it is  a very interesting example of building telling its own story. The extremely eclectic exterior was clearly made to fit the writers picture from nations imagination (including references to his books) while interiors were decorated by Sienkiewicz himself.

In my presentation methods of using interiors and exteriors of palace in Oblęgorek to tell scholarly story on Henryk Sienkiewicz and his work will be discussed, focusing on specific aspects of creating this digital collection such as: 

1) how photos of items and painting were chosen and prepared to match topics of articles and their fragments

2) how  narrative mechanics based on palace exteriors are connected to whole concept of Postmodern Sienkiewicz collection

3) how real spaces were prepared and modified in digital version to fit narrative and scholarly purposes of the collection.

Key words: writers residence, digital storytelling, Henryk Sienkiewicz

• Lisa Hermsen ,
• Rebekah Walker

Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester

Keywords: text encoding; job printers; undergraduate collaborators

This paper describes the use of TEI to markup the idiosyncratic features of rare manuscript material from a printer, stationery binder and account book manufacturer, William Townsend & Sons, located in Sheffield, England, 19th century. The collection consists of five objects, dated 1850-1920: a trade ledger, prices volume, work manual (Volume I and the topic of this paper), address book, and library catalogue. This collection is significant because, as Nicholas Pickwoad notes, information about bookbinding for trades exists primarily in secondary sources and trade manuals from the time period (i.e. J. Leonard Monk and W. F. Lawrence, A Text Book of Stationery Binding, 1912). 

Volume I is handwritten, with no logical order or typical layout. It includes inserted receipts, price lists, and leather samples amidst details about workday life, industrial connections, commercial transactions, labor, and unionization. Often script is written vertically, text is braced, or complex numerical measurements overfill tables. The presentation will describe the process by which students, a faculty professor, and digital librarian developed a customized TEI schema for a source that does not easily lend itself to representation by the Guidelines. Our project aligns with the work of the Digital Edition Publishing Cooperative for Historical Accounts and broadens the scope of materials the cooperative has for analysis. 

Since the project’s inception, funded undergraduate students have served as partners in decision-making, markup processes, and editorial documentation. The project provides students the opportunity to join our ongoing conversations in the TEI community and help determine what structural features ought to be captured in the encoding. Our project challenges them to pose research questions, consider methods for scholarly editing, and help create an accessible and comprehensive digital edition. The team’s goal is to publish an online indexed, fully-searchable transcription that will benefit researchers, contribute to the TEI community, and enrich the public’s knowledge of the work of book production.

• Deborah Leem ,
• Julianne Nyhan ,
• Antonis Bikakis

University College London

Keywords: Collections as Data, Text encoding, Early Modern

Abstract:

Digitisation and text encoding have produced large and complex humanities datasets over the past few decades. With a growing interest in working with big data amongst arts and humanities researchers, data driven scholarship presents us with unprecedented opportunities to shed new light on old questions as well as asking new ones. This is in addition to gaining new insights into innovative ways of working that have not been previously possible.

Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) bequeathed his collections to the British Nation upon his death where they became the foundation of the three national institutions in the UK: the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the British Library.

Five of the manuscript catalogues of Sloane’s collections have been encoded in line with the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) by a collaborative project between the British Museum and UCL. Building upon this project, part of my PhD (Sir Hans Sloane: A Data Driven Research), is to leverage the mark-up of these catalogues to computationally produce different outputs for data analysis.

This paper presents a case study that focuses on one particular manuscript catalogue volume titled ‘Miscellanea’ that is formed of seven different catalogues. This examines how amenable the TEI mark-up of the Early Modern catalogues is to computational methods and analyses the use of the Python programming language in extracting and converting targeted data from XML to CSV.

This has the potential benefits of contributing to the Collections as Data movement and adds value to data driven humanities research by showcasing how new knowledge and insights have risen from the use of digital methods in the context of Early Modern documents.

1. Sloane amassed a diverse collection and upon his death prints, drawings, books, manuscripts, herbarium, antiquities along with other treasures were offered to the British nation.

2. Digital editions available at https://reconstructingsloane.org/enlightenmentarchitectures/

3.  Always Already Computational at https://collectionsasdata.github.io/