Browsing by Subject "early modern"
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Item Beyond the Early Modern OCR Project(2015-04-27) Christy, Matthew; Grumbach, Elizabeth; Mandell, Laura; Texas A&M UniversityThe Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) is a Mellon Foundation grant funded project, nearing completion at the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) at Texas A&M University. eMOP’s goal is to improve optical character recognition (OCR) output for early modern printed English-language texts by utilizing and creating open-source tools and workflows. In addition to establishing an impressive OCR workflow infrastructure, eMOP has produced several open-source post-processing tools to evaluate and improve the text output of Google’s Tesseract OCR engine. Work on eMOP is nearing completion this summer, and the team is now looking beyond eMOP towards sharing its accrued knowledge and tools. As a Mellon Foundation grant funded project, eMOP is tasked with sharing the results of its work whenever possible. This is in line with the IDHMC’s stated goals of aiding Humanities scholars with conducting digital research and/or creating digital outcomes of their research. As such, we are pursuing a variety of methods to disseminate the various products of our work. We are creating open-source code repositories for all software created by, and for, eMOP. We are creating an open-source repository of all eMOP typeface training created for the Tesseract OCR engine. We are creating a publicly available database of early modern printers, publishers and booksellers based on the imprint metadata of the entire Eighteenth-Century Collection Online (ECCO) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) proprietary collections. We are making the recently released Phase I hand-transcriptions of EEBO by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), available for full-text searching via the Advanced Research Consortium’s (ARC’s) 18thConnect website. We are making the first-ever-produced OCR transcriptions of the entire EEBO catalog available via 18thConnect’s online crowd-sourced transcript correction tool, TypeWright. TypeWright will provide free access to the EEBO transcriptions, and a text or XML version of that corrected transcription for anyone who corrects an entire document. In addition, the eMOP team is committed to continuously improving the accuracy and robustness of our workflow. We are currently in discussion with, or actively engaged in, partnerships with teams at Notre Dame, Penn State, and the University of Texas to apply eMOP’s workflow to different collections. These partnerships will provide us with the ability to improve eMOP by: Adding more OCR engines to our workflow in addition to Tesseract, currently being used; Expanding our collected dictionaries beyond the current early modern English used with eMOP; Expanding our database of google-3grams beyond the early modern period to aid in post-processing OCR correction of documents outside of the early modern period; Expanding our printers & publishers database to include data from outside of the ECCO and EEBO collections. We are proud of the work we have done with eMOP and are eager to continue to find ways to build upon what we have accomplished. We feel that much of our work would be of interest to libraries and librarians. We look forward to sharing the outcomes of eMOP and our vision for future work with the participants at TCDL this April.Item Performing Women?s Speech in Early Modern Drama: Troubling Silence, Complicating Voice(2012-10-19) Van Note, Beverly MarshallThis dissertation attempts to fill a void in early modern English drama studies by offering an in-depth, cross-gendered comparative study emphasizing representations of women?s discursive agency. Such an examination contributes to the continuing critical discussion regarding the nature and extent of women?s potential agency as speakers and writers in the period and also to recent attempts to integrate the few surviving dramas by women into the larger, male-dominated dramatic tradition. Because statements about the nature of women?s speech in the period were overwhelmingly male, I begin by establishing the richness and variety of women?s attitudes toward marriage and toward their speech relative to marriage through an examination of their first-person writings. A reassessment of the dominant paradigms of the shrew and the silent woman as presented in male-authored popular drama?including The Taming of the Shrew and Epicene?follows. Although these stereotypes are not without ambiguity, they nevertheless considerably flatten the contours of the historical patterns discernable in women?s lifewriting. As a result, female spectators may have experienced greater cognitive dissonance in reaction to the portrayals of women by boy actors. In spite of this, however, they may have borrowed freely from the occasional glimpses of newly emergent views of women readily available in the theater for their own everyday performances, as I argue in a discussion of The Shoemaker?s Holiday and The Roaring Girl. Close, cross-gendered comparison of two sets of similarly-themed plays follows: The Duchess of Malfi and The Tragedy of Mariam, and A Midsummer Night?s Dream and Love?s Victory. Here my examination reveals that the female writers? critique of prevailing gender norms is more thorough than the male writers? and that the emphasis on female characters? material bodies, particularly their voices, registers the female dramatists? dissatisfaction with the disfiguring representations of women on the maledominated professional stage. I end with a discussion of several plays by women?The Concealed Fancies, The Convent of Pleasure, and Bell in Campo?to illustrate the various revisions of marriage offered by each through their emphasis on gendered performance and, further, to suggest the importance of the woman writer?s contribution to the continuing dialectic about the nature of women and their speech.