Please join us for the second session of our GRMN 700-301 Graduate Research Colloquium at 9:00 am – 10:15 am on Tuesday, October 1st.

We will meet in 440 Williams Hall (Language Research Center). Breakfast will be served.

 

Jehnna Lewis, PhD candidate, and David Nelson, PhD candidate,

Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

 

Here is the abstract for the colloquium presentation on October 1.

We have been working on creating a digital tool for navigating and working with Pastorius's Beehive Manuscript in the Kislak Center. This project has been ongoing since 2017, and we are preparing to launch our website in November during the SIMS symposium. We will also be presenting at the symposium. For our colloquium talk, we will discuss the process of digitization and the experience of  working on a large DH project. We'll also show you our website and are eager for feedback that might help us improve our presentation at the symposium. For preparation and some background on the project, we are providing our abstract.

 

From Hive-Dross to Honey: Towards a Digital Representation for Francis Daniel Pastorius’s “Bee-Hive” (ca.1696-1720)

 

In 1696, Francis Daniel Pastorius, the founder of Germantown in Pennsylvania, began work on an English-language commonplace manuscript, which he called his “Bee-Hive.” The manuscript, Ms. Codex 726 in the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center, represents a significant account of early Philadelphia. The complexities of Pastorius’s beehive metaphor are interwoven throughout the entire work, as he refines and redefines the ways in which the physical construction of a beehive informs the construction of his own “Paper-Hive.” Due to his comprehensive documentation of his source material, the manuscript has previously received scholarly attention primarily as a bibliography of printed materials available in early America, especially in the Quaker context. However, for Pastorius, documenting these materials was only the first step in the construction of the manuscript. In his hive metaphor, these books serve as flowers, the quotations he collects, pollen. His commonplacing reveals the work of the hive. The quotations are interwoven conceptually into discrete honeycombs, each of which is explicitly linked to other semantically relevant combs.

 

Starting with fine European paper and quickly settling for what early America could provide, Pastorius built his hive out of folios that he arranged and rearranged as the internal logic of the manuscript expanded. The largest section of the manuscript is comprised of so-called “Hive-Dross” (propolis), thousands of entries demarcated by single words or short phrases. Pastorius thus organizes this material into two large sections, one organized alphabetically by concept and one organized with arbitrary numerical headers. Yet this part of the manuscript also draws connections to its other sections, which are organized by diverse structural principles. In our talk, we will introduce a dynamic digitization project that presents Pastorius’s nexuses of entries, particularly in the “Hive-Dross”, as Linked Data. We will discuss not only how this project shows a static understanding of Pastorius’s cross-references between the entries, but also can be used to reveal Pastorius’s diachronic development of the Hive and his own network of information, within and beyond the manuscript. We will also discuss the particular challenges this project faces with regard to linking and interfacing diverse information structures both on paper and on the web.