Updated: 13 February 2000

Spring 2000
ENG 771: Special Topics in Humanities Computing



Project Proposals


Mary of Egypt in Old English:
Building an SGML-DTD for Encoding an Old English Glossary

Originating in sixth-century Greece, the story of Mary of Egypt, a repentant Alexandrian prostitute-turned-saint, has been translated into many languages. In English alone versions include Old English and Middle English saints' lives, two early printed editions by William Caxton, a retelling by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, and a late-twentieth-century British opera.

The Old English version of the story is one of twenty-three fragmentary texts surviving in BL MS Otho B. x, an eleventh-century manuscript Kevin Kiernan is currently editing for an electronic edition as part of the NSF-DLI-funded Digital Atheneum Project. My informatics project focuses on the creation of a searchable SGML glossary for the Old English Mary of Egypt. Unlike the glossaries of most critical scholarly editions written in modern English that generally gloss only unusual or selected words of the text, the glossary of an Old English text tradionally glosses every word and every form of every word in the text. One reason for this is that spelling rules were not clearly defined in the Anglo-Saxon period; thus one word could have multiple spellings, all of which would have been perfectly exceptable to a Anglo-Saxon reader. Another reason for glossing every word is that Old English is a highly inflected language; the endings of words define the case, number, gender, and person of the word -- in the instance of verbs. In addition, some homographs have totally different meanings, simply based on the endings used. Since "rules" concerning word order were also fluid, the endings of words were essential for distilling the meaning of the text. A comprehensive glossary provides the modern reader -- from novice to learned scholar -- with an invaluable tool for interpreting the content of the text, comparing variant usages, and, in some cases, instigating intellectual and linguistic debate among scholars.

The components of my project include:

  • designing an SGML-DTD for encoding an Old English glossary.
  • encoding every word in the electronic edition as well as the glossary itself.
  • writing a perl script to convert the encoded text and glossary to HTML for browser display.
  • writing a perl script to facilitate searches of the glossary for specific details of words or groups of words.

If my project produces successful results, it may serve as a prototype for encoding the glossaries of all the Otho B. x texts. With this in mind, I intend to create a DTD that can be used for encoding either a single text or an anthology of texts.

Linda Cantara
Department of English
January 2000

Proposal for a Digital Collection of Religious Writing in Early English

The University of Kentucky has a substantial collection of microfilmed images of medieval English manuscripts. Using this microfilm, I plan to create a digital collection of Middle English miracles of the Virgin. Miracles of the Virgin are tales of miraculous intercessions attributed to the Virgin Mary. These tales were quite popular in medieval Europe and survive in Latin as well as the vernacular languages. I will be collecting extant miracles written in Middle English. The purposes of a digital collection are to increase scholarly access to the miracles, some of which are available to scholars only in microfilm, and to facilitate the examination of the miracles in the manuscript contexts in which they were transmitted to medieval readers.

The first stage of my informatics project will be identification of manuscripts containing miracles of the Virgin. Subsequent stages will include digitization of the microfilm images, transcription of the manuscripts (aided by computer tools), preparation of a document type definition, SGML encoding of the documents, and development of an electronic environment in which to study the documents--an environment that will facilitate the storing, accessing, presenting, and searching of data such as manuscript images, transcripts of manuscripts, and possibly other witnesses to the texts. My goal for the informatics project is to take a limited number of manuscripts through every phase of the development of a digital collection. After the course, I will continue to expand the collection and use it to pursue further study of miracles of the Virgin and perhaps other popular medieval religious tales, leading, I hope, to my dissertation and other scholarly work.

Demorah Hayes
Department of English
January 2000

Misplaced Gender in Victorian Literature-A Web Resource

For the final Informatics project, I would like to develop a Victorian Literature Web Resource for scholars interested in the study of gender, specifically the idea of misplaced gender as it relates to Wilkie Collins' Armadale. I became interested in Collins during my Victorian Popular Fiction and Gender course last semester. Eve Sedgwick's Between Men became an important source for my work in that course, for her discussion of masculinity and the relationship/function of women in a patriarchal society suggest a great deal to us about pre-conceived notions of masculinity, femininity, and stereotypes. The complexity of this issue is that Sedgwick's argument fails to acknowledge that often the woman's function is much more complicated than simply securing the bonds between men. Often, women, while on the surface appear to be securing this bonds, they are in effect failing to perform their expected role (as Sedgwick defines it). Herein lies the complexity of this argument about the triangular relationships of women between men and the starting point for my research. There is little scholarly work on the novel; thus, I hope to emerge from this class with a project that is both interesting and innovative.

I plan to include many different resources and materials (i.e. links to other websites, articles for further research, newspaper clippings, etc.), but my primary goal for this project is to provide researchers with an electronic source for specific information on the life of Wilkie Collins and his works. I will use HTML to develop the website. Also, I will use SGML to encode some of Collins' small essays and periodical publications for search purposes.

Kelly Jennifer Lawson
Department of English
January 2000