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I wear the hat of Head of Digital Library Programs at Case Western Reserve University. As well, I’m the Managing Librarian for the Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman Digital Library, Language Learning, and Multimedia Service center. Recently, the Freedman Center hosted the annual Freedman Fellows Program, which is a venue for getting faculty to not only use multimedia tools, but to think about how they can enhance their curriculum as well as the experiences of students; additionally, with a new gift from the Freedman Family, the Freedman Fellows Program is encouraging the use of digital tools for research. Good examples of this include the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH); and SIMILE at MIT.

Many of the offerings located at these schools allow researchers to visualize data in new and unique ways. There are many forms of data that lend themselves to visualization—obvious examples include GIS data or GPS data; any form of numeric or date data, really; but less obvious collections can be visualized, too. Examples of these include texts—entire texts. Using optical character recognition (OCR) documents now can be marked up quickly using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) processes. TEI uses a form of XML to mark-up documents. As a subset of SGML, it is very like HTML, but infinitely more flexible and descriptive. As a general markup, at TEI level two or three, you can just add paragraph tags, tables of contents, indexes, etc; but there is a level five which allows for very descriptive markup, including tears in manuscripts, margin notes, gps coordinates for place locations, and more. One thing that can also be done, is each word in a text can be marked and then tools at SEASR (pron. Caesar) can run text analytics (tokenize) and record not only the instances of words in a text, but the exact place of the words in the text. This allows for very comprehensive and complex relationships to come to the surface that may not have been ‘visible’ before.

Our ‘keynote’ speaker for the Freedman Fellows Program was Tanya Clement, from the University of Maryland, and she talked about various tools for text mining and text analytics that she used in her work on Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans with the MONK Project. Part of what she discovered is highly complex patterns of repetition that were largely dismissed by critics as non-sense or attempts at intentional confusion, examples from modernists abound, including Ulysses by Joyce or Finnegan’s Wake, where language itself is not only stretched to the limits of its ability to express meaning, but new words and concepts and meanings are created.

One tool that is freely available is HyperPo. HyperPo lets you analyze a text quickly to see word frequencies, word occurrences within sentences, you can remove “stop words” (and, the, or, it), and you can even visualize the frequencies. MONK Workbench lets you run various analytic routines on texts as well (I’m not a statistician, so I can’t speak to them all).

The overall point, is the tools that many universities and projects are making available allow for “reading” texts in new ways that can reveal more details about them. I, for instance, am looking at various images in Oedipus. Not only can I find the frequencies at which these images occur, I can also see the context in which they occur, what other words they appear near, and so on. I hope to report on what I find over the next several weeks.

So, this post is long past the performance run…but I still want to say something about it, as it was/is the first convergence show for 2009.

I don’t mean any disrespect to the other actors in the play, but this play clearly requires a strong female lead and it was very strongly delivered by Lucy Bredeson-Smith. In fact, it’s hard to conceive of this play working without her. When I see performances like the one Bredeson-Smith delivered, I am reminded of the stamina it takes to be an actor and I am forever in awe of it. I often think I’d like to give it a go, but doubt I lack that most fundamental of characteristics; the characteristic that makes it possible to deliver night after night after night. Eleven years ago I went to Stratford, Ontario to see some plays. The play that impressed upon me, the first time, this fact of the stamina required for theater acting was Tennesee William’s Night of the Iguana. For those of you unfamiliar with the play, a “reverend” and bus tour guide with a predilection for young women, has a nervous breakdown in Mexico. For the actor, Geordie Johnson, who played the reverend Shannon (and who needs a new design for his website), the intensity of almost constantly being on stage and the high energy required to portray a nervous breakdown is exhausting even to watch. And to think the man had to do performance after performance three to four times per week from April through November (and this just one play–he was also in two or three others). Needless to say, my admiration goes out to actors and, in this case, to Lucy Bredeson-Smith who delivered her role three nights a week for five weeks with no less energy and certainly not much less of a physical demand, given the frequent costuming changes (ah em, including some rather large knockers).

I won’t talk too much about the play, as it was not one of my favorites by Paula Vogel. I thought the concept of twins and their dual natures was interesting, as well as the dual nature represented in their sons. I though the use of nuclear holocaust as a metaphor was unique as well as the nightmarish dream sequences that were the apocalyptic visions of the twins. More to the political side is the diametrically opposed natures of the twins: one a rebel, hippie, anarchist, lesbian; the other a virginal, mother, conservative talk show host, mental case; combine to point out the schism in our national psyche.

The play was worth seeing though for Bredeson-Smith’s performance.