Posts with tag Digital Archives

It’s not very hard to get individual texts in digital form. But working with grad students in the humanities looking for large sets of texts to do analysis across, I find that larger corpora are so hodgepodge as to be almost completely unusable. For humanists and ordinary people to work with large textual collections, they need to be distributed in ways that are actually accessible, not just open access.

There are programming languages that people use for money, and programming languages people use for love. There are Weekend at Bernie’s/Jeremy Bentham corpses that you prop up for the cash, and there are “Rose for Emily” corpses you sleep with every night for decades because it’s too painful to admit that the best version of your life you ever glimpsed is not going to happen.