Quinn Dombrowski

Birchbark letter XML

I have at least a first pass at the names-in-context data for documents 1-23, to supplement the proof-of-concept data I put together previously.

Medieval Slavic wiki

I’ve put together a work plan (subject to change) with the articles I’d like to try to incorporate into the wiki by October. After starting to go through the articles, it seemed reasonable to first work through the first chapters of Zaliznjak’s 2004 Древненовгородский диалект to have a framework with some general overview content that I can then flesh out with details, arguments, points and counter-points from the articles. To this end, I’ve added pages on the Old Novgorod and Old Pskov dialects, along with related pages as necessary.

As a way of setting an actual deadline for myself to make some progress on the Medieval Slavic wiki, I submitted an abstract to the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistic Society, which follows.

The rise in scholarly materials accessible through Internet (JSTOR, SpringerLink, and/or PDFs published by individuals) has facilitated the research process for scholars worldwide. For Slavic linguists, however, many of the major reference works were published over 50 years ago, and are unavailable electronically. The success of Wikipedia as a general reference source for laypeople illustrates the potential of wikis as a way of organizing information from diverse sources. This paper aims to make the case for developing a separate wiki as a shared reference resource for Slavic linguists.

While on­line publication of materials lowers one barrier to access, the research process itself has largely remained the same. It is often necessary for scholars to seek out information from areas where they are less familiar with the literature. This can involve consulting a reference work and tracking the topic through bibliographies. The amount of time necessary to look up facts takes away from the time the scholar can devote to the intellectual content of their research.

A common approach to solving this problem is scanning materials. However, a tremendous amount of tedious work is involved in this process, and copyright is a non­trivial concern. A specialized wiki, compiled by Slavic linguists and Slavic linguistics graduate students, would reduce both tedium and copyright concerns, as the facts and conjectures contained within monographs and articles are not themselves subject to copyright.

A test case is currently being developed, limited to topics relevant to medieval Slavic linguistics. The wiki contains two kinds of content: article/monograph summaries that lay out the major claims of a particular work, and topic-­based pages that bring together both undisputed facts and various conflicting scholarly claims on the topic, drawn from articles and monographs. Both kinds of wiki pages include copious, specific footnotes referencing the source material­­ both to enable fact­-checking and to allow the scholar to cite the original material rather than the wiki if desired.

Mediawiki, the wiki software developed for Wikipedia also used for this test case, includes a number of features aimed to both encourage contribution and prevent abuse. Each user account comes with a page linking to that user’s contributions on each of the pages where they have added (or removed) something. Even scholars without any specialized technology skills can contribute to the wiki, and include the link to their contributions on their CV to show their involvement in a digital humanities project. Every change made to a page is tracked in the database, and can be viewed, discussed, and/or reverted in cases of blatant abuse. The common graduate student assignment of writing article summaries could be redirected slightly towards writing summaries for articles not currently on the wiki, and breaking the information in those articles down into specific claims that can be added to topical pages encourages students to develop their analytic skills.

In addition to arguing for the benefits such a wiki could provide the Slavic linguistics scholarly community, this paper will present a live demonstration of the Medieval Slavic linguistics wiki.

For the NITLE Summit 2010 poster session, I combined my Medieval Slavic wiki with the work I’ve been doing as part of Project Bamboo. You can download the poster I put together here (PDF, 650 kb); the abstract is below:

Even in a time when digital information can be accessed, searched, and filtered quickly, a number of academic disciplines rely heavily on print-only reference works and associated articles, many of which are not available on-line. Pulling together various scholars’ assessment of any topic is painstaking work, taking up time that could be better spent on analysis. At the same time, article summaries are a common class assignment, but the students’ work may never be seen by anyone other than the instructor. What if we could reduce the amount of scut work necessary for scholars, while making student assignments more meaningful?

Medievalslavic.org is designed to be a working model of what such a system might look like. Using the Mediawiki platform, I am in the process of dissecting commonly-used reference works in medieval Slavic studies into cross-linked articles, and incorporating dissenting views, supporting evidence, and other insights fromWikifying Reference subsequent scholarly articles. Heavy page-level citation of the sources, just as one would find in a scholarly article, both ensures that all the information can be verified, and allows the scholar to cite the source–rather than the wiki–to avoid criticism from traditionally-minded colleagues. I also plan to illustrate how this project aligns with the future directions for digital scholarship mentioned during the Project Bamboo workshops, with the hope that someone in a larger field might be interested in trying something similar with a class of current students.