Research Time!

24. January 2023 · Write a comment · Categories: Digital Humanities, Textual Scholarship · Tags: , , , , ,

For the first time since I started in my current position in 2020, I have officially asked for and got approved for 20% of my work time to be used exclusively for research. In 2023, I will mainly work on two projects:

Norwegian Correspondences: eMunch

An article accompanying a dataset of all correspondence metadata collected from the digital scholarly edition of Edvard Munch’s Writings, eMunch.no. I will write this article together with the chief philologist of the eMunch edition, Hilde Bøe, at the Munch Museum in Oslo and with the research software engineer Loke Sjølie at the University of Oslo Library, who created the code to extract correspondence metadata from eMunch.no and combine it with a yet unpublished dataset containing corrected and updated dates, places, and names. The metadata of 8527 letters to and from Edvard Munch are already incorporated into CorrespSearch, the search engine for scholarly editions of letters. The dataset we created will be archived on Dataverse.no, an open repository for research data in Norway. For the publication, I want to aim for a data paper: either a short data paper describing the data and how they were created or a research article focusing on the methods and challenges when extracting and consolidating the data. I plan to publish with the Journal of Open Humanities Data.

Digital Scholarly Editions Plattform: A Sustainable Solution for Long-Term Archiving, Accessing, and Maintaining Digital Scholarly Editions as a Library Service. Pre-study: The Landscape of Digital Scholarly Editions in Norway

I am also preparing a larger research project on aspects of sustainability of digital scholarly editions (DSE). I am focusing solely on Norwegian academic and cultural heritage institutions. For 2023, I aim to start the pre-study, mapping the landscape of digital scholarly editions in Norway. I will gather a small team of experts and practitioners and design a survey to be sent to all Norwegian research and cultural heritage institutions that create, host, maintain, or archive digital scholarly editions of any kind and from any discipline. The results of this survey will inform a recommendation for long-term archiving, accessing, and maintaining DSEs in Norway and serve as a starting point for an infrastructure grant application with the Norwegian Research Council.

2017 End of Year Recap

06. December 2017 · Comments Off on 2017 End of Year Recap · Categories: Research Dissemination · Tags: , , , , , ,

The attentive reader of this website will have noticed that I haven’t been publishing a blogpost since March – ouch! I have been busy doing other stuff, mainly finishing and handing in my doctoral thesis in analytic philosophy of edition philology, delivering an extensive descriptive bibliography of early modern prints of a famous book on etiquette, reviewing a 1000+ pages edition of the writings of Charlotte Schiller and reviewing the online resources in the Austrian Baroque Corpus. I have also been taking a postgraduate training in university pedagogy and did some teaching with the Software Carpentry initiative at University of Oslo.

I’ve had the pleasure to be invited to a workgroup on Digital Humanities teaching in the Nordic Countries in which I will continue my survey on DH at Norwegian higher education institutions. I went to the Nordic eInfrastructure Collaboration conference in Umeå, a presentation on virtual and mixed reality for industry in Oslo, the bi-annual conference of the Nordic Network for Edition Philology in Espoo, Finland and a small-scale Digital Humanities conference in Tromsø, Northern Norway (incl. northern lights) and will give a guest lecture at the University of Stuttgart in December. I’ve worked as a board member of DHN and as a representative of DHN at the EADH associated organisations forum with conceptualising and starting a journal metadata aggregator for non-english content digital humanities journals; in this capacity I have initiated the preparation and edition of the entire run of the first Norwegian ‘DH’ journal, Humanistisk informatikk (1973–1991).

For the next year plans have already been made: I will teach a master seminar at the University of Oslo on Digital Humanities within the European languages program and guest lecture in the master seminar Europe as a Knowledge Community. I will co-teach a full-day workshop in programming with Python and version control with Git at the DHN2018 conference in Helsinki. Apart from my teaching here in Norway I will give a talk in Frankfurt/Main at the bi-annual conference of the German Association for Edition Philology and introduce the newly established commission for DH and edition philology at the AG’s members meeting. I will also take part in the DHd2018 conference in Cologne and the IGEL (society for the scientific study of literature) conference in Stavanger in summer 2018. I’ve submitted abstract to two more conferences and – acceptance granted – present my research in Copenhagen and Prague, too.

I have four articles in the pipeline that are to be submitted in 2018 as well as the continuous work on my digital edition (including a collaboration with the Norwegian National Library’s digital scholarly edition series). I’m also working on an application for a research grant.

However, I have dialed back on my presence in social media (esp. Twitter) and deleted my Academia.edu account. I’m still maintaining my ResearchGate profile and sporadically post something to my Google+ account. I mainly disseminate my work via my website and the Greflinger weblog as well as the website for the master seminar.

Nordic Network for Edition Philology – Gothenburg, 2–4 October 2015

13. November 2015 · Write a comment · Categories: Conference Report · Tags: , ,

“Textkritik som analysemetod” (textual criticism as a method of analysis) was the title of this years conference of the Nordic Network for Edition Philology (NNE), held in beautiful Gothenburg in the first week of October. The NNE gathers bi-annually editors, edition philologist, book historians and literary scholars from all the Nordic countries to discuss developments in recent research and editorial method, and present scholarly editions.

This year’s conference was the 14th in a row of successful gatherings in the North and the 20th anniversary of the NNE – with 60 participants (and an amazing 50/50 gender distribution!) and 12 talks in three languages (Swedish, Norwegian & Danish) on various subjects more or less closely tied to this year’s topic. The talks will be published in the NNE-book series and made digitally (XML-TEI P5 encoded!) available afterwards.

What became obvious in the discussions and debates not only here at the NNE meeting but generally in edition philology, is, that the scholarly editions we editors prepare in a very sophisticated manner and with a special eye for detail are not really suited for computer aided corpus analysis like topic modeling, text mining, stylistics etc. The issue is not under-complexity of the (digital) scholarly editions, but rather their complexity and depth of encoding and enrichment. In a corpus of 100.000 books, a textual error is statistically insignificant – no need to make the effort of emendation or provide an explanation and possible rectification. – I think it has to ‘sink in’ that especially quantitative (digital) literary or text studies ask very different questions from those commonly anticipated by edition philologists (that is: those of traditional literary studies). And since editions are not an end in itself but user oriented, what do we have to change in order to meet the needs (also) of those literary scholars who are interested in quantitative, corpus-based analyses & distant reading?