I am the VHL Project Director, on a two-year leave of absence from my PhD program in Humanities Computing here at Brown. My dissertation, RolandHT, explores a semi-fictional character’s* development all over Europe and the Americas over the last thousand years or so. As you can probably imagine, that’s a lot of material originally created in a diverse set of media. Consequently, it was unthinkable to combine all of this material and research the Roland corpus until relatively recently. I am encoding the Roland corpus semantically in XML, tracing the themes and imagery that recur throughout this corpus.

My collaborator Ethan Fremen and I have developed a prototype of RolandHT. It will be made public shortly. Incidentally, Ethan has been instrumental in helping us set up the versioning system for VHL work, and is graciously providing server space and a repository for us to work in until we set up our own. For this, I and the rest of the team are very grateful.

My broader research interests will hopefully be clear from the posts I will be making; I am particularly fascinated with scholarly encoding “from the hip,” from the details that got us interested in the first place outward to the broader structures, using encoding as a notetaking device and then systematizing it. I’m a big fan of playing with our texts first and keeping track of the larger encoding system that emerges, instead of trying to impose an unrelated encoding system first and then tweaking it to fit the primary source. This approach is proving especially useful in the beginning stages of tackling a text as large and multifaceted as the Esposizioni.

     *The Wikipedia article should be taken with a grain of salt, but is a good introduction.