 Hello, so good afternoon. We are going to be talking about reviving 19th and 20th century epistolary conversations, but using digitisation. So my name is Helen and my background is in secondary and further education teaching, but I'm now doing a PhD and I've just completed my first year. And for the project I'm working with digital humanities and Graham is going to talk about how they've been helping and really developing this project. So the project is called Hardy's Correspondence and it's a collaborative PhD project that works with the University of Exeter and Dorset County Museum. And we're trying to digitise over 4000 letters that were sent to Thomas Hardy and they're currently held at Dorset County Museum, but we're working towards making them openly accessible online. What we found in doing this is that Hardy's letters, the ones he sent to people, have already been digitised online, but it's through subscription. So in really creating the other side of this correspondence in digital form, we're looking at ways to make it more accessible and more discoverable. So just briefly, some of the key concepts and terms that I guess a lot of people would be familiar with, but maybe not everyone. A lot of the work we're doing in encoding these texts is done using TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative. That's an XML schema instead of guidelines for encoding text. It's very extensive, it covers a very, very wide collection of texts. There are subsets for different types of documents. The markup that you're using in the individual project depends very much on the research focus. Some people will be interested in particular aspects of documents and so they'll approach the project marking up certain features. Let's say that very much depends on the research focus. One of the first things we do as part of the TEI project is sit down, discuss the research focus and agree what elements of the document we're going to, a text we're going to mark up and agree standard ways of doing that because within a single document there could be many different ways of marking up the same features. So obviously a project that's got more than one person working on it, you need to agree on how you're going to approach that. Obviously we're in a linked open data session, so I probably don't need to explain that. ExistDB, it's the web platform that we're using to put this content online. It's an open source, native XML database, and that's what we're using to make this content available. What data are we interested in and why? One of the, I mean obviously the key features is with this and I guess a lot of similar projects is we're interested in preservation. These letters are currently held, as Helen said, in the Dorset County Museum. A lot of them haven't been out of their boxes for a long time, so there's an element of checking the current condition of them. They have been catalogued in the past, but there are documents that have been missed, so we're finding extra documents that perhaps were known about but haven't been catalogued so weren't accessible to researchers, they wouldn't have found them. Obviously accessibility by digitising these, putting them online, putting the transcripts online and the marked up transcripts. We're making them more accessible for people to study and research, we're helping to add to the original source. Obviously it's making it more discoverable. We're aiming to have free open access to that, that's pending kind of a final agreement with the museum, so that's what we're working towards. Just to kind of briefly go through the process that we're following. So we're starting off the first days of projects, obviously digitising them, we've got high resolution cameras using to take photographs of the letters, we're then going through transcribing the text within those letters. That's something at the moment is being done on a fairly small scale within the project for letters of particular interest. We are hoping in future to bring in a crowdsourcing element to this project because as Helen said there's over 4,000 letters in this so there's no way within the project we could get all that transcribed, but obviously there's a lot of big community of interest around Thomas Hardy so we're hoping there's a lot of potential for crowdsourcing there. We then go on and TEI encode that. I don't know if you can see in any detail but this is the same letter with certain features marked up. So we're looking at the, obviously the date, we're marking up place names, people's names, names of sort of works of literature, that sort of thing that are mentioned. And again that's discussed at the start of the project and agreed and that's kind of an involving thing as we go through and discover new things. And then finally this is just an example of how it's looking at the moment. It's still in development, the web output, but that shows you there how the marked up text looks when you've displayed on the web. So obviously you've got the metadata appearing at the top, you've got links appearing within the text to link through to further detail about the people. So just to give you an example of how this technology and the digitisation is facilitating research interests. We started by looking at two correspondence Florence Henneke and Thomas Hardy. Florence Henneke was an English aristocrat, she was a friend to Hardy, but she was also a fellow writer. And we've selected these at the very early stage of the project because both sets of the letters exist in the Hardy archive at Dorset County Museum. But later in the paper we'll talk about how we can link two separate archives as well. And these two people met in 1893, that's when their correspondence also started, and it carried on for well almost 30 years. It only ended with Florence's death in 1922. Amid a kind of interest, renewed interest in the 1970s in biographical approaches to Hardy, one side of the correspondence, Hardy's was published as a single correspondent volume, and it was entitled One Rare Fair Woman, which was a line from his poetry. And for me that creates and shapes a particular narrative of this correspondence. It's the narrative possibly of unloquated love. And when you flick through this published edition, then there is evidence you can look for it and find it in the early stages in the 1890s when they're talking to one another or writing to one another. So for example here Hardy is writing in 1893 and he does seem to be very keen to spend time with Henneke, but he's also at pains to cover that up and say that it's purely for artistic reasons that he wants to go to a play with her. So that's there. But for whatever reason the editors, Evelyn Hardy and Frank Pynion, didn't include Henneke's side, they didn't include her letters. There are fewer, so that may be one of the reasons, but for me I feel that it possibly silenced Henneke and kind of propelled that particular narrative of a male writer deeply in love with somebody who was married and therefore unattainable. And what I'm interested in is saying well letters have lots of different topics in them so surely we can find lots of different narratives. I also want to restore her voice. So they summarised her letters in the book just in two pages and they said that she had this passionate heart and it was drawn towards anti-vivisection and amelioration of animal suffering. But I just think it's so much better for us to understand the intensity of her passion and her interest in something like that by reading her letters, so bringing back her voice and reviving the conversations they were having. So this is one of my favourite quotes basically because she's disgusted with Prince A of Cynought for opening the new physiological laboratory at Cambridge and she's looking for some mad woman to burn it down. She's not going to do that herself but you know a more radical version will hopefully. Hardy is a little bit more kind of muted and controlled in his response and it shows how there's that weighing up of their opinions and their decisions. So I really think there's historical value in looking at what she's saying because at that time the kind of animal rights movement was really closely intertwined with first wave feminism. So that's really kind of focus that I think can come out of this and so what we need to do is think about how we can bring this dialogue out and whereas with more established traditions it would be to publish an entire correspondence of a single author with digital collections we've got the opportunity to recreate lots of different epistolary dialogues and that then for brings out the form and social practice of letter writing. It restores it through creation of a digital open access archive which allows these new interpretations to come out. And therefore I think we will be going to hopefully a live demo of that. So just briefly this slide again showing some of the TEI markup as showing how we've encoded the contextual relationship between one letter and the subsequent and previous letters in the exchange. Within this as Helen said it's quite unusual in that both sides of the conversation are held in the same collection so that makes this a particularly good example for us to start working on to kind of experiment with this idea. But there's no reason at all why if other the other side of the conversation held in separate collections and was marked up similarly in a suitable way that this backwards and forwards kind of correspondence couldn't be reconstructed across separate archives. So just bear with me a second. So this is showing the ExistDB kind of web output as it exists at the moment as I say it's still kind of under development so there might be a few sections that aren't quite as they should be but again you can see here we've got the metadata that's encoded for the letter the letter itself and then we've got this series of links that are following through showing you from one letter to the next and you go backwards and forwards through that conversation and as I say this particular example we have both sides of the conversation within the same archive but there's no reason why it couldn't be set up to work across different collections. Obviously this is at the early stages and when you could see the encoding I've been learning the very basics of that so when you could see little red bits that's because I'm still in the process of picking up TEI and everything but I've found that there have been some successes and also some challenges so I'll start with the successes. In terms of restoring conversations it involves more than just the two sides of the conversation there's more to the context so many of the letters have enclosures it might be newspaper cuttings photographs in one case there's a hundred-year-old leaf from Shelley's grave that one has stayed with the original letter and it's quite lovely to be able to see that but in many cases they become separated and so if we're looking at digitisation we can actually start to bring back some of that context fill the gaps and make some of those original connections and we can do that with TEI so a success has been that it is coming up to quite small but Hardy said to Henneker in one of his letters that he was enclosing two little poems that she might like to see he doesn't say what they are he doesn't say the names of them but reading Henneker's reply she describes them and she describes one in detail where she talks about a couple who walked in wind and rain and from that we can kind of deduce that it's a poem called beyond the last lamp. For the online reader then we can actually link it to a copy of the poem that's on a reliable website it's one that kind of gives you contextual information as well so in that way we can restore that context. Where it's been harder to do that is where Hardy obviously is a very public figure he's had a lot published in newspapers and he wrote an open letter for performing animals and he was saying you know about the cruelties of that and that was published in the Times. For Henneker he cut that out and put it in an envelope with a letter so she was able to see it. If we're going to look for it then we actually have to use university or institutional login then it becomes quite straightforward you can go on to the Times archive but if we're really in the spirit of kind of open access and making this like a street corner university where anybody can find out about it then we've got to think about ways do we link to the Times or is it that we can't restore that part of the context so that's kind of how the letter would appear if we had access to that archive. The other challenge which is really quite engaging for me is the heterogeneity of the letter form so actually we're going to get lots of different topics coming up in one letter and we have to be able to kind of highlight that as a real characteristic of the genre whereas in the past you might get kind of a catalogue and it'll have one entry for each letter saying what it's about we're looking at ways that you can actually use TEI to tease out different narrative threads so we can encode names of places of people and of hardies literary works we can include places and geo locations and these fictional places as well and we can other we can include other points of reference within the texts we're also looking for a greater semantic encoding which would actually help a researcher to understand a letter on a topic by topic basis so that's what we're working towards and then we'll just talk about how that's going to feed into guidelines so as we're working on a collection of correspondence I mean as I mentioned before that the TEI guidelines are very extensive they're still being developed and it's kind of an evolution the special interest group around correspondence so what we're hoping to be able to do is feed into that and feed into the TEI guidelines on marking up correspondence based on the challenges and experiences that we've discovered as part of this project so one of the challenges that we've encountered with this is this feature is quite common getting to the end of a letter and then running out of space and then adding a little bit more at the top often written vertically like that that's apparently I mean I'm not the expert on the correspondence but I understand that's quite common practice in the 19th century and 20th century letter writing so in order to encode that in such a way that the letter continues to make sense in terms of the structure of the letter that hasn't been coded so that bit of text actually appears at the foot of the letter there in the underlying XML that is marked up so to indicate that that bit of text was actually written as part of page one or on page one of the letter so it's things like that within the project we've had to kind of make decisions on how best to do that and that's the kind of thing that we're hoping will feedback into via the special interest group into the guideline so other people facing similar situations in the in the future have got that as a kind of starting point that they they may wish to use as Helen said before we're looking to obviously link into to other sources of data and information that that are relevant and connect our project with others in another of the letters they make reference to the Browning letters which are already online as a collection in this particular case there's no reference to a specific letter it's it's the collection as a whole so by including a link to that as a as a sort of separate data source it enables the reader of our website to see those letters the same as Hardy and Henicka would have been able to. Other ways we're using link open data obviously within within the site we've got various people and places mentioned we're linking through to authority lists to provide data on on those people and places at the moment as I say it's still in development we're just linking out to those sources but we are also eventually intending to kind of draw that data in obviously since we've credited so we're we're building on and linking to existing sources of data and archives. The intention with the project as I mentioned earlier is for it to be openly accessible we're we're looking to make the data that we're kind of collating for this project available as linked open data the idea being that future projects that are looking at other collections of letters from other archives will be able to build links with this that's obviously enhancing the discoverability of our project and and allowing it to be used as a building block for future projects. Where do we need to finish so we'll just flick through this slide and just say that this is kind of one of the future projects hypothetically where we could link up with a very separate collection so we have Lady Hall's letters and they and in her library in Starhead there's Hardee's so kind of we can achieve that hopefully and that's what we're looking towards so just to kind of finish there is education application we're getting students involved in this as well it's helping them to take on researcher roles and we can discuss that in more detail if anybody would like to know more about what we're doing that. You can also contact us so if you'd like to find out about the project that's the first link and the other one is if you just want to talk more about digital humanities. Thank you.