TAPOR

On Friday, I went to a digital libraries symposium sponsored by the library. One of the things that was interesting to me was how well the English dept. and the ILA were represented. On the English side, not only were graduate alums like Erika Farr and Rebecca Sutton Koeser there, but also Prof. Schuchard and I. Just think of this: If you look at Prof. Schuchard's research profile and mine, it's hard to think of two different positions within the field of English. Yet there we both were at the symposium thinking about the way that digitization is changing the shape of knowledge. The point: If Prof. Schuchard and I both think something is important, it probably is.

Anyhow, the keynote by Geoffrey Rockwell -- a digital text and humanities scholar -- was terrific. Rockwell was talking primarily about TAPOR, the Textual Analysis Portal for Research. It's "platform" that allows you to import texts and then apply various tools to them -- and will hopefully allow others to develop more tools. I've played with it a little; one of the interesting things at the site is a set of "recipes" that show some of the ways that this can be used. Anyhow, it's still in development, but it's worth a look. One of Rockwell's points was that these electronic tools don't necessarily change what we look at, or what we look for, but can change the ways we generate data.