Primary contacts: Stacey Triplette and Elisa Beshero-Bondar
Our long-range project is to document changes in structure and content from Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 1508 Amadís de Gaula to the 1547 Sevilla printing of Montalvo’s Amadís over three centuries and ultimately across three languages (Spanish, French, and English) from the 1500s to the early 1800s. This is a digital study of the transformation of a romance over centuries and across languages, and also a study in translation theory and practice, investigating how translators change texts as well as preserve them in their translations. It is typical to fault translators for adaptations of texts without recognizing the complex interaction between preservation and transformation involved in translation. With this project we seek to study translation and adaptation as complementary activities in the reproduction and transference of texts, activities that yield significant perspective on linguistic and cultural interchange. The project launched in 2015 with a study of Robert Southey’s 1803 translation of Montalvo’s Amadís. We have applied the XML language of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to test Southey’s claims and to investigate the kinds and extent of reductions he applied to the Montalvo text. We use the TEI to align Southey’s text with Montalvo’s and study the omissions, reductions, and semantic shifts applied in Southey’s translation process. Our TEI markup helps us to trace and extract, and analyze how much the text was altered in translation.
Primary contact: David J. Birnbaum
The Codex Suprasliensis, a Cyrillic manuscript copied at the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century, is the largest extant Old Church Slavonic manuscript from the Preslav literary school (first Bulgarian kingdom). It is one of the earliest testimonials to the reception of Orthodox Christianity among the Slavs. The manuscript contains twenty-four vitae of Christian saints for the month of March and twenty-three homilies for triodion cycle of the church year. In content it is a lectionary menaeum (or panegyric), combined with homilies from the movable Easter cycle, most of which were written by or are attributed to John Chrysostom. The Codex Suprasliensis has been listed in the UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register since 2007. This project is intended to unite digital images of all three parts of the Codex Suprasliensis, currently located in three different countries: the National Library in Warsaw, Poland; the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg; and the National and University Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In addition to reuniting the parts of the manuscript, the current project aims to develop an electronic version of the Codex Suprasliensis, together with critical apparatus, parallel Greek text, translation, vocabulary, grammatical analysis, and tools for searching. The Codex Suprasliensis project aims to make the manuscript, along with tools for its study, accessible to a global audience for the first time. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, curators, and specialists in informational technology, the Project gives everyone the opportunity to connect directly with this famous manuscript.
Linguistic Corpus Data Repository at the PSC
Primary contact: Na-Rae Han
With so much freely-available corpus data out there, conducting a corpus-based linguistic investigation has become ever more feasible. The problem, however, is the overhead of time and effort inevitably associated with pre-processing a corpus resource before proper linguistic inquiries can be made. This project aims to bring together many popular corpora to the PSC (Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center) platform, so that the data can be shared by Pitt linguistics community in various stages of processed-ness, along with handy “starter” code written in Python designed to quickly set researchers up.
Decomposing Bodies
Primary contacts: Alison Langmead and Josh Ellenbogen
Research Assistant, 2015-2016: Chelsea Gunn
Research Assistant, 2014-2015: Jen Donnelly
Research Assistant, 2014-2015: Nicole Coffineau
Research Assistant, 2013-2015: Aisling Quigley
Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2014-2015: Linda Lee
Undergraduate Technologist, 2014-2015: Daniel Goodstein
Research Assistant, 2013-2014: Alexandra Oliver
Late in the nineteenth century, Alphonse Bertillon, the French policeman, anthropologist and inventor, developed a system of criminal identification that sought to classify human beings on individual standardized cards, each containing a consistent set of biometric measurements and observations. He called this method “anthropometry,” and he conceived of this work as a key weapon in the fight against recidivism—an increasingly central criminological issue of the day.
This process, now known more familiarly as “Bertillonnage,” was essentially a system that disassembled the visual forms of the human body into small pieces so that the police could individuate, and thus identify, a single human body out of thousands, even millions. Each Bertillon card—one per human being—contained information about a series of eleven physical measurements taken from the body, along with photographs and a coded description of the visible attributes of the human form to create a summary, a hash, a digest, a decomposition of the human body into numbers, letters, codes and sparse images.
Although initially implemented at the Prefecture of Police in Paris, Bertillonnage spread to the United States in the late 1880s, when R.W. McClaughry, then the Warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, introduced Bertillon’s Signaletic Instructions Including the Theory and Practice of Anthropometrical Identification to American prison administrators. The system then spread to a number of prisons in the U.S., including significantly, Leavenworth, the first Federal Penitentiary.
Primary contacts: Alison Langmead (Technical Director) and Drew Armstrong (Academic Director)
Project Manager and Research Associate, 2017-present: Sarah Conell
Project Manager and Research Associate, 2016-2017: Lily Brewer
Technical Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2016-present: Vibeka McGyver
Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2016-2017: Laxmisupriya Avadhanula
Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2016-2017: Victoria Johngrass
Project Manager and Research Associate, 2015-2016: Meredith North
Project Manager and Research Associate, 2014-2015: Jen Donnelly
Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2014-2015: Elaina Zachos
Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2014-2015: Meghan Hipple
Code Caver, Spring 2014: Jocelyn Monahan
Project Manager and Research Associate, 2013-2014: Alexandra Oliver
Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2013-2014: Khadija-Awa Diop
Undergraduate Research Assistant, 2013-2014: Marybeth Moscirella
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Fall 2013: Karen Lue
Research Assistant, Summer 2013: Saskia Beranek
Research Assistant, Spring 2013: Rachel Miller
Travel played a pivotal role in the shaping of the intellectual and artistic culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. While the capital cities of Rome, Paris, and London had always served as major attractions for travelers, the increasing specialization and ease of mobility over the course of these centuries began to open remote areas such as Greece, Egypt, and the Near East to scholarly inquiry. Simultaneously, an interest in national landscapes and antiquities made other less highly-trafficked local regions the focus of new forms of tourism.
Visualizing, understanding and creating new knowledge about the changing patterns and objectives for these types of travel are the primary goals of Itinera. Designed to allow scholars and students to better comprehend the interconnected phenomena of travel, object collection and site documentation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Itinera will be a map-based, interactive, digital resource that overlays and juxtaposes these travelers’ movements alongside the objects of their study and their own creative output.
This digital environment has been proactively designed to collect and present historical data within a visual context of discovery capable of driving new research and generating new understandings. This system will not only represent the scholarly community’s pre-existing knowledge on the topic of cultural tourism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it will also serve to create an innovative academic apparatus richly and transparently structured enough to allow new interpretations to find their ways into and among the assumptions that underlie that structure.
To view the original Itinera wireframes, click here.
Meter, Rhythm, and Rhyme: The Computationally Assisted Analysis of Formal Features in Russian Poetry
Primary Contact: David J. Birnbaum
This project, developed by Elise Thorsen and David J. Birnbaum, is dedicated to the design and deployment of computational tools to aid the analysis of formal features in Russian poetry. These tools involve the detection of stress in Russian texts presented in native orthography and the subsequent derivation of meter and rhyme patterns from stress and orthographic information. The output of those processes is an XML document that can provide the basis for visualizations of formal features (see, for example, the verse tables of the sample poems below). Beyond these reports, the informational mark-up of poetic texts is intended to enable the characterization of formal features in large digitized poetic corpora to support research in sub-fields including quantitative metrics, genre studies, and diachronic studies of stylistics and influence
Primary contact: David J. Birnbaum
Genealogies have been constructed and used for hundreds of years to help families understand their ancestry and more recently to help scholars understand the relationships between medieval people and families. The Rusian genealogical database offers an update on this traditional discipline. The research underlying this database is new and is built on the primary sources in Old East Slavic, Latin, Greek, and Old Norse, as well as a thorough reading and understanding of the modern secondary literature. That information is then accessed through an XML database that allows the user to search through the variety of information presented here, including parentage, regnal dates, place of rule, and other data points. The end result is the most accurate genealogy of Rus′ yet developed, presented in an accessible and intuitive way for use by scholars, students, and others.
Sustaining MedArt
Primary contacts: Alison Langmead and Aisling Quigley
Sustaining MedArt investigates both the human-centered and technological (“socio-technical”) factors that impact the long-term preservation of digital humanities projects. Surprisingly little is known about how digital projects persist over time, or about project renewal and regeneration strategies that have been developed in the field. Even less is known about how scholars might responsibly retire a project, allowing for a graceful degradation or even the intentional removal of the project from academic circulation. For this project, we will conduct in-depth, original case-study research into a long-standing digital humanities project, “Images of Medieval Art and Architecture” (http://www.medart.pitt.edu). Begun in 1995, this website has long served a global community of scholars and has become a de facto reference standard for finding study images of 8th-14th century French and English architecture.
The present study seeks to understand the conditions of creation and persistence for this “time capsule” of a website, as well as the current functional expectations brought by its user community, in order to determine how human factors might best be combined with technical factors to inform a long-term preservation strategy for MedArt.
Primary contact: Benjamin Miller
Project leads: Benjamin Miller, Amanda Licastro, Jill Belli
The Writing Studies Tree (WST) is an online, crowdsourced academic genealogy for Composition, Rhetoric, and related fields, mapping relations of mentorship, collaboration, education, and employment among people and institutions. Combining a fixed data structure with open editing privileges, the WST aims to document and democratize our knowledge of the relationships among scholars and institutions. It does so by rendering such relationships as data that can then be visualized and interacted with across several scales: one person or institution, a family tree, a full or filterable network.
As part of its architecture, the WST includes free text spaces where users can contribute biographical sketches, anecdotes, references to websites and other sources of further material, and any other data not already accommodated by the WST’s more formal expectations. In this way, we hope to be as inclusive as possible of whatever users value and wish to share, and to make such material more discoverable by providing paths through the archive along “family” lines.
We believe that writing studies is a particularly interesting test case for studying academic genealogies because of the myriad contexts in which writing is taught: in addition to the usual professorial influences, scholars in our field receive training from (and as) administrators of writing programs and writing centers, as well as editors of scholarly journals. Many of these mentoring roles are not documented in the most common modes of scholarly self-presentation, such as the curriculum vitae, professional profile, educational transcript, or citation trail. This makes writing studies both a challenging and rewarding network to build and visualize.