Digital Humanities: Final Project - Project Description

Project Description

Our project, assigned by Professor Jockers of Stanford University, was to encode a piece of text entitled The Wilderness; or, Braddock's Times. A Tale of the West, Volume 1. The text, written by James McHenry in 1823, is to ultimately be published for the Irish-American West web site, and as such was prepared to be fully searchable for research purposes including concordance, keyword, quote, and "hypothetical" searches. A concordance search would be used to help a researcher view the number of times a certain word appears in our text, or to show how often one word may show up in comparison to another. Since concordance deals with pure numbers, researchers could use the data for various projects. A keyword search is different as it will show a researcher where in the text the word appears, given a few words of context before and after it. Searching by quote would be helpful to researchers interested in specific character dialogue, or the type of dialogue, whether it be spoken or thought within. The hypothetical searches were created by the group to include aspects of the novel such as songs, poems, thoughts, and all quote attribution.

Encoding, using both XML (extensible markup language) and PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), was written through the jEdit Text Editor. The DTD (Document Type Declaration) for our project was originally created using the TEI Pizza Chef. All corrections to our document and code, including the use of [sic], are included in the fileDesc (File Description) of our XML document.

Team Members