2017-01-23 - Questions 2 (Dylan)
Week 3 Discussion Thoughts & Questions
- First of all, I just wanted to say, I thought this quote from the Busa reading was fantastic:
“Speaking must thus be taken seriously; it is sacred, as is every human person. We are far from having exhausted the precept inscribed on Apollo’s temple at Delphi, “Know thyself.” It seems, therefore, that the problem must be attacked: in its totality – with comprehensive, i.e., global, research; collectively – by exploiting informatics with its enormous intrinsic possibilities, and not by rushing, just to save a few hours, into doing the same things which had been done before, more or less in the same way as they were done before.”
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In “Developing Digital Mappaemundi,” I thought it was great how they implemented Unsworth’s work on scholarly primitives into their design. This thing looks great! Only problem is…where is it? How do I use it? I tried to find the actual tool and came across a bunch of broken links–nothing beside remains. Has it since been supplanted by a more useful tool? Is there a standard tool people are using today for map annotation, analysis, etc., and will it too be replaced?
- I really like the fact that mistakes, too, are recorded in manuscripts, and we can find evidence of them in the dots under certain phrases, or letters indicating corrected word order,etc. It gives a very human quality to the text, which you don’t get with the ability to just “backspace” everything.
- We’ve also seen how true it is that many historians (et al.) are more interested in the margins than the text itself.
- I wish I could have syntactical glossing for any written Latin. It’ be very useful.
- It seems like the meanings of the marks hd and hs changed meaning over time; from hic deorsum and hic sursum to hic deficit and hic supple. This reminds me of what I believe is one of the main questions of this course and the field of digital humanities: How do we establish standards?