The EDiT team have been very busy recently, now that conference season is well upon us. Bárbara has been shaking her Digital Humanities tail-feathers at a conference in Mexico City. Christian, Alicia and I have been promoting the project like nobody’s business at the EMREM Birmingham PG symposium last week. I have been to the Early English Text Society’s 150th birthday special PG editing workshop in Oxford (felt like I was cheating on the Estoria by looking at Old and Middle English texts). Aengus and Christian are off to the British Library to talk all things Medieval Spanish Chronicles next week. Lucky old Marine has spent a month in Madrid including lots of time in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, getting within sniffing distance of the Estoria manuscripts. And that’s only what I can think of off the top of my head. If the whole wide world doesn’t know about this project before the end of the summer then I will be surprised!
The EETS workshop in Oxford was very interesting. All of the speakers were eminent scholars and professors who have a great deal of experience in editing, so it was a great opportunity for me to see the problems editors of OE and ME come across and how they get around many of the issues that arise to enable them to produce their printed editions. Of course, many of the issues are similar to those which we have already encountered in the EDiT project, so it was interesting to see how other editors treat these issues, although we can often treat them slightly differently as we are producing an online edition. It was, nevertheless, extremely interesting for my own development as a new transcriber and aspiring editor, and also for my thesis. Many of the other PG participants at the workshop had little or no experience in editing yet, so I was able to get lots of ideas about what our project could do to help us get our crowdsourcing off the ground.
The Birmingham EMREM PG symposium was also a great success for all speakers and audience-members. There were 18 speakers from universities across the UK (and one from Brazil), including students from several departments such as English, History, Art History and Modern Languages. I was able to give my first full length conference paper, which is taken from a chapter of my thesis. One of the best things that came out of that for me was talking to a PhD student who studies Arabic texts of the same age as the Estoria who had some really interesting comments about my paper, and gave me ideas of what else I could look at. Many of the EMREM speakers and participants were very interested in the EDiT project, and Christian and I spoke to the EMREM team about the possibility of running a transcribing workshop in the autumn.
So, you can see it is all going on here at the Estoria de Espanna Digital project. Even today – a bank holiday (now that’s a level of dedication even Roy Castle would have been proud of). Not long now until we will release the CfP for our November colloquium to be held in Oxford, so keep an eye out here on our blog, on our Facebook page (facebook.com/estoriadeespanna) or our Twitter (@estoriadespanna) for details.
http://emremforum.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/emrem-symposium-2014-poster2.pdf
Christian, Alicia and me in the EMREM conference group photo last Thursday.
