H9808A 2009 06 Markup

Return to UWO History 9808A Digital History Fall 2009

Many search engines work by creating indexes for full text, data structures that pinpoint the location of almost every word. While generally very useful, this has the consequence of increasing the number of irrelevant items in search results. (”Radisson,” for example, can refer to the explorer, a hotel and resort chain, towns in Quebec and Saskatchewan, and so on.) Markup adds disambiguating information within texts.

• "A Conversation with Allen Renear," Fox News (Nov 1999).
  

• Cohen, "Digital History: The Raw and the Cooked," Rethinking History (Jun 2004).
  

• Cohen and Rosenzweig, "Getting Started," Digital History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
  

• Gralla, "Ch 17 How Web Pages Work (Ch 19 7th ed.)", "Ch 18 How Web Browsers Work (Ch 20 7th ed.)", "Ch 19 How Markup Languages Work (Ch 21 7th ed.)"
  

• McDonough, "XML, Interoperability and the Social Construction of Markup Languages: The Library Example," Digital Humanities Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Summer 2009).
  

• Ray, "Markup and Core Concepts," Learning XML: Creating Self-Describing Data. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2001.
  

• Renear, "Text Encoding," in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
  

• Unsworth, "Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this?" Humanities Computing Symposium, London (13 May 2000).

• NINCH Guide to Good Practice: Digitization and Encoding of Text in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials, National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (2002).

Getting Started with X: A Guide to Online Resources. In this assignment you are going to choose a topic that interests you, and write a short, introductory guide to some of the tools and sources that are available online. The topic could be anything with a historical dimension: a sub-field of history, a surname, a genre of literature, a methodology like palynology or paleography, the history of durien fruit or Dark Avengers comic books. I don't care, as long as it is something that you are excited about. The main challenge, of course, will be to limit yourself to a discussion of the resources which really are essential for beginners, and not merely to list everything that comes up in a Google search. Be sure to include some Technorati tags to make your guide more findable.