Novels in Context: A TEI Database of Primary Resources for Teachers, Students, and Scholars

Novels in Context: A TEI Database of Primary Resources for Teachers, Students, and Scholars

Howe
Tonya

Marymount University, United States of America
thowe@marymount.edu

2014-12-19T13:50:00Z

Paul Arthur, University of Western Sidney

Locked Bag 1797
Penrith NSW 2751
Australia
Paul Arthur

Converted from a Word document

DHConvalidator

Paper

Poster

TEI
eXist-db
student-faculty research
open access

archives
repositories
sustainability and preservation
databases & dbms
xml
digital humanities - pedagogy and curriculum
copyright
licensing
and Open Access
English

In this poster presentation, I hope to share the (evolving) product of a recent grant to create a free and open-source database of curated, excerpted, and annotated primary source materials useful for the study and teaching of the 18th-century novel in English. The Novels in Context (NiC) project combines my interests in DH with my scholarship in 18th-century studies while creating a pedagogical opportunity for student-faculty research and publication. The goal of the NiC project is, most immediately, to provide an agile and accessible alternative to (1) the costly and proprietary Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, (2) the single print anthology on the subject, and (3) the free but scattered and often unreliable resources available on the Internet.

NiC is built on TEI-formatted XML in an eXist database, an open-source native XML platform. To ensure that the project remains free and ethically unencumbered by proprietary concerns, all the texts are transcribed and marked up individually and page images secured through library collections holding first editions. The XML is both structural and critical, including key themes and topics—this is primarily in anticipation of the time when NiC can incorporate MALLET topic modeling and other modes of visualization. The project will incorporate an editorial board to publish user contributions more broadly, including student-faculty collaborations. In the long term, I hope to create a portable platform that instructors can use to generate coursepacks of quality, reliable material (headnotes, reading questions, and so on) that could potentially stand in for the ubiquitous, proprietary, and costly textbook, engaging students in a broader conversation about intellectual property and the public good.

NiC is currently in the working prototype phase, and a copy of the current build is available for technical collaboration on GitHub (https://github.com/tonyahowe/NiC
); I am also eager to find collaborators among the world of coders, scholars, and teachers of literature.