Encoding Names for Contextual Exploration in Digital Thematic Research Collections

FAIN: HD-50320-08

Brown University (Providence, RI 02912-9100)
Julia Hammond Flanders (Project Director: October 2007 to April 2010)

The advancement of humanities text encoding and research by refining and expanding the automated representation of personal names and their contexts.

The Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) seeks Level II funding from the NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grants program for a new project to explore new ways of representing contextual information that will support advanced kinds of user interaction with thematic research collections. In this project we will be focusing on the representation of persons and personal names. We will first examine methods of representing names and the persons they denote, considering in particular the kinds of scholarly work that such representations can support. We will next develop an experimental data representation of the names and persons found in our published collection, Women Writers Online (WWO). Finally, we will build a prototype interface that exposes this data for reader interaction and exploration. The result will be to embed the primary sources in an extensible web of contextual information that can support interface features such as searching, exploration, and pattern visualization.