Digital Humanities and Yeats Poems and Classics, OH MY!

Okay. I'm a terrible blogger. I'm radically inconsistent and very rarely am I insightful. But I'm finally doing something that's pretty cool and I'm very excited about and hopefully will be a long range project.

The basic story arc begins with an email I received over Presidents' Day weekend in February. I was at the Museum of Science with my visiting family, messing around on my phone, when a Classics professor sent out a message to me and a few other undergrads about a digital humanities summer research project with the Classics Dept. and the Irish Studies Dept. I promptly frothed at the mouth and sent back an email roughly equivalent to, "Oh my god yes please I want to please please yes", and began the research application.

BU has a really great summer program called UROP that encourages and pays undergrads to do research. I, like many others, was aware of UROP, but dismissed it as a scientific/lab based program, which it mostly is, to be fair. (Example: my brilliant roommate for the past year did UROP last year working with baby rat heart cells to figure out what makes them die. Lots of science involved. I know she had to pipette a lot of things and dissect a lot of rats.) Humanities Research, while certainly very real, didn't seem like a UROP concern.

But, lo and behold, another classics major and I applied for a digital humanities project and were accepted together. Our basic premise is to create a compiled online academic resource on classical allusions in Irish literature. (No small task, we know.) Sarah, my partner in crime, is specializing in James Joyce, while I'm working on the poetry of W.B. Yeats. We want our website to be a dialogue between the reader and the text, with additional insights and comments added by scholars around the world.

The "digital" part of the digital humanities has been an adventure thus far. The Digital Humanities movement, for lack of a better term, is really cool. It's all about integrating technology with the stereotypically technologically stunted fields of the humanities. This can be anything from databases, archives, digitizing important documents to make them accessible all around the world. The focus is really on making various texts, pictures, and other media available to scholars who can learn from and interact with them.

Knowing basically very little about computer programming and website design, we started two weeks ago from the ground up. We were initially using a database site called Omeka, which is a wonderful platform that is great for creating digital archives of pictures and other media. The problem with Omeka for us, though, was that we are primarily working with texts rather than images. Sure, we want to get manuscript images involved (if copyright allows, which has been a thorny beast thus far), but our primary sources and our own analysis are made of words rather than images.

We're now working on setting up a Wordpress hosted site, which will give us the ability to get into the guts of the website and redesign it with our growing knowledge of HTML, CSS, and tiny bits of Javascript. We really want the site to be useful and informational, but also beautiful. The annotations that we make will pop up as mouseover text, noting that Yeats references Helen and Menelaus in such-and-such poem, and that he uses Irish mythology as a framework for his early works, and so on.

It's exciting. It's confusing. And we're working really hard to make an ergonomic and insightful,  analytical and digital piece of work. Wish us luck. More to come.