Holly Connor, Gerald Gannod, and Laura Mandell

Collaborating with other departments is a goal of Miami’s Computer Science and Software Engineering department, says associate professor Gerald Gannod. Senior systems analysis major Holly Connor took that goal to heart with her Undergraduate Summer Scholars project: creating a processing tool to help solve a problem in the humanities. While “Techniques for the Automated Transformation and Manipulation of Literary Works” may not sound, well, “humanities friendly,” client Laura Mandell is enthusiastic about the project. “There is a lot of technophobia in the humanities,” explains Mandell, associate professor of English and director of Miami’s digital humanities program.

Mandell wanted help to develop a computer program that would enable humanities scholars to use Microsoft Word to encode text that is represented in digital form used for online research, teaching, and preservation. The system would be an alternative to the more technical Text Coding Initiative (TEI) guidelines currently used. Connor and Gannod, her faculty mentor, are working with the Poetess Archive to develop a Word-based tool.

There is an online archive database housed at Miami that contains image files of 19th century historical texts. The format is great for preserving and sharing documents, explains Mandell, but image files must be “tagged” in order to be used effectively for searching and archival purposes. Many users do not want to do this tagging by hand.

Connor’s goal is a user-friendly tool in Word that scholars can use to fill out basic information about the texts. A software program will process the information and create a smart tag, which will allow for many different ways of searching, ordering and using the information, says Gannod. The program could ultimately be made available to other scholars, too, as an open source program. Mandell says the project could, ideally, “revolutionize the way (humanities) scholars do their work.”

Connor, from Batavia, OH, had been looking for an internship when Gannod asked if she would be interested in working as a summer scholar. Connor has also worked with Benton Information Technology Solutions (B1TS), a student-run technology consulting business that provides computer solutions to on- and off-campus clients.