Jean Daniel Fekete

Jean Daniel Fekete gave a talk to a combined audience from MITH/HCIL here yesterday. Fekete discussed and demonstrated various tools to assist scholars working with electronic renditions of both “clean” and “draft” manuscripts (the former fairly linear and neat, the latter more complex with overwrites, erasures, etc.). These tools, including Compus, InfoZoom, and Concordance, are all available on his Web site.

There was some good discussion afterward revolving around what scholars do with manuscripts, what kinds of questions they ask (coming from the HCI people), and how humanists respond to quantitative research methods (I pointed out that humanists don’t like black boxes; it’s not helpful to suggest to them that Hamlet wants to be instead of not be just because the computer says so). Some useful interdisciplinary encounters I thought.