March 9th Bodleian Libraries Hosts EEBO-TCP Hackfest

Readers may be interested in the following announcement of an upcoming hackfest:

The Bodleian Libraries are hosting a one-day hackfest on 9 March to celebrate the release of 25,000 texts from the Early English Books Online project into the public domain. The event encourages students, researchers from all disciplines, and members of the public with an interest in the intersection between technology, history and literature to work together to develop a project using the texts and the data they may generate.

The EEBO-TCP corpus covers the period from 1473 to 1700 and is now estimated to comprise more than two million pages and nearly a billion words. It represents a history of the printed word in England from the birth of the printing press to the reign of William and Mary, and it contains texts of incomparable significance for research across all academic disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, linguistics, theology, music, fine arts, education, mathematics, and science.

Prizes will be given to the best of the day’s projects.

Participants in the day’s event are encouraged to consider entering their ideas into the online Early English Books Ideas Hack (http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/get-involved/competitions-and-projects), which seeks to explore innovative and creative approaches to the data and identify potential paths for future activity. Submissions for the Ideas Hack close on 2 April.

Tags: EEBO, Hackfest, TCP

This entry was posted on February 23, 2015 at 10:48 am and is filed under EEBO, TCP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “March 9th Bodleian Libraries Hosts EEBO-TCP Hackfest”

Anna Battigelli Says:
February 26, 2015 at 7:05 pm | Reply
Thanks for this, Eleanor! It would be interesting to hear more from people who attend.

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Eleanor Shevlin Says:
February 26, 2015 at 10:07 pm | Reply
Yes, I am hoping that we’ll hear from attendees. I was also interested in this effort in the wake of EEBO Interactions–that is, the effort to draw scholars and students together to make use of these tools.

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Anna Battigelli Says:
March 2, 2015 at 1:25 pm | Reply
I’ve pasted the criteria from http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/get-involved/competitions-and-projects below. The winning prizes might attract proposals!

“To enter, simply submit your idea via our online form. Submissions will be judged on the following criteria:

Evidence of innovative and creative technical approaches to the data (e.g. through use of text mining, corpus linguistics, visualizations, audio engineering, geospatial analysis, n-grams, subject diversity, etc.)
Identification of potential paths for future activity
Imaginative approaches to text or subject matter, especially those which include an element of ‘surprise’
Effective methods by which to expand the potential audience for this data beyond its traditional academic audience

The competition opens for entries on Monday 16 February 2015 and closes at midnight on Thursday 2 April 2015. Please read the terms and conditions before entering.

Entrants will judged on the creativity and feasibility of their proposals, and the winning entry will be the following prizes:

1st place: £250
2nd place: £150
3rd place: £50

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- Eleanor Shevlin Says:
  March 2, 2015 at 1:49 pm | Reply
  Thanks for this, Anna. I am also seeing parallel ties with outreach to academic audiences as well as the general public for crowdsourcing projects and other sorts of public humanities outreach–in some cases promoting attention to materiality even as we advance in the digital. The Folger’s decision to put the first folio on a public book tour serves as a ready example.
  
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Early Modern Online Bibliography