After almost a month of Digital Humanities events, I am finally back at my desk and am able to address the mounting pile of information in front of me that I must cognate and make sense of and then send out again to a further pile of information that will probably again come back at me some day in another form that I need to again make sense of. I feel like the salary man in the 1964 Japanese movie ‘Woman in the Dunes‘…keep shovelling or it will all cave in.
Still, what a wonderful time I have had over the past month; capped off last week by a symposium in Newcastle, Australia to honour the work of John Burrows; one of the pioneers of ‘stylometrics’ or the statistical study of authorship in text. This was possible one of the best DH events I have been to in recents years; certainly because it sits within one of my core understadings of the field (and arguably is the foundation of the field). Computing in the humanities is a form of method and analysis and through this analysis we may learn something new about authorship; disputed text, intellectual health, death, murder, love, plagiarism, and class war. I will pursue these last claims in a following blog post as I am more concerned at this juncture about why Firefox 5 killed my Google tool bar and now my spell-checker doesn’t work and everyone will be able to tell I went to a State School.
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