Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

1. 

   MelissaTerras
   Member

   Hi Folks,

   A friend of mine (PhD in philosophy, but now in the financial sector) announced he had decided to learn Old English, so he could read Beowulf, etc. He said he had been searching for digital teaching tools but was "really disappointed by what there was on offer" and wondered what us Digital Humanities types had been up to.... so of course, I want to prove him wrong, and provide him with lots of interesting links. Old English, however, is really beyond my ken.

   I asked the twitterverse first, and got some good suggestions including
   - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6072484486 for online teaching resources for Old English (via @hurricaneally)
   - The electronic beowulf CD-ROM (via @dougreside)
   - teachers upload Beowulf guides & other Old English resources to Woruldhord community collection http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/ (via @RunCoCo)
   - recommend search for Stuart Lee Old English lectures on iTunesU & Oxford podcasts http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ (via @ltgoxford)
   - Peter Baker's electronic intro to OE: http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/index.html (via @Rwelzenb)
   - Not sure how accessible it is: http://www.wordloca.com/ (via @iridium)

   Is there anything else I've missed that I should pass along?

   Thanks

   Melissa

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   Posted 8 years ago Permalink
2. 

   Carin Ruff
   Member

   Replying to @MelissaTerras's post:

   Peter Baker's intro really is the way to go. It's as logically-structured as any textbook out there and is well set up for self-teaching, and Baker is a reliable expert. The online grammar includes links to Baker's OE Aerobics, which has self-testing exercises and readings. Definitely the way for your friend to go. Baker has done great things in font development for Anglo-Saxonists and in making his OUP grammar freely accessible online and we should support him.

   The Electronic B'wulf, sadly, is ooooold technology, a CD you have to buy and pretty opaque to anybody who isn't already immersed in the study of the manuscript.

   Posted 8 years ago Permalink
3. 

   Patrick Murray-John
   

   HWÆT!

   As a former Anglo-Saxonist, I'm bummed to say that I really can't offer much more than what's already been suggested. The only thing that I might add is that there are some pages in Wikipedia in Old English. As beginning reading exercises, those might be a place to start, at least to get used to some of the morphology. Clearly, much of the vocabulary won't overlap much with poetry, though.

   A non-digital resource that I'd suggest is Barney's Word Hoard. It's a nifty summary of the etymology and background of some of the most common words in OE. The really helpful thing about it, besides giving super-interesting etymology and relationships to other words in various languages, is that after browsing through lots of the entries it starts to help you see the patterns of how OE words became Modern English words (things like "stān" -> "stone")

   Good luck to your friend!

   Posted 8 years ago Permalink
4. 

   Carin Ruff
   Member

   I just wanted to pipe up again in defense of Anglo-Saxon studies, if not in answer to your question. We should note that Anglo-Saxonists were among the *very* early adopters of DH, back in the late 80s-early 90s, and long before that, if you think of the digitization of the Dictionary of OE corpus starting in the 70s! (DOE website here: http://www.doe.utoronto.ca/) My sense is that now, there is some cool and important digital scholarship going on in the field, but much of it involves texts and manuscripts not of direct interest to beginners in the language – Latin sources, commentaries, etc. The Boethius Project http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/eBoethius/inlad.htm and here http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/boethius/ is a great example. The maturation (or maybe punctuated equilibrium?) of DH in Anglo-Saxon studies might be an interesting case study in how the profile of digital methods has ebbed and flowed in what one might imagine to be a very, very traditional branch of humanities scholarship.

   Posted 8 years ago Permalink
5. 

   Elizabeth Glascock
   Member

   Replying to @MelissaTerras's post:

   Melissa,

   A professor at my university did the following site: http://www.anglo-saxon.net/

   It is two different sites of original anglo texts with translations.

   Posted 8 years ago Permalink
6. 

   MelissaTerras
   Member

   Thanks all, for your contributions! very helpful.

   Posted 8 years ago Permalink

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