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is even more essential that the data they start their work with is clearly structured and well documented. We begin by discussing data management and the importance of version control, both for collaboration and for solo research, and then move on to the importance of sharing data and the related questions of credit and licensing. We will devote a lot of time in this chapter to the Git program, because we think it can provide a solution to many of these questions. We hope to convince you that, for that reason, it is worth learning even a little bit of Git
reference, but if you contact a keying company, they will tell you what kind of instructions they need or provide a template for you to customise. At this point you also need to agree the accuracy of the keying. Unless the text is particularly difficult to read, 99.9% is normally a minimum: this is the kind of accuracy that can be attained with human transcription but rarely with OCR. GIT AND VERIFICATION The first thing we will do on receipt of the keyed files is to put them under version control. How to do this is explained in detail in Chapter 6 . Version control
This book offers a practical introduction to digital history with a focus on working with text. It will benefit anyone who is considering carrying out research in history that has a digital or data element and will also be of interest to researchers in related fields within digital humanities, such as literary or classical studies. It offers advice on the scoping of a project, evaluation of existing digital history resources, a detailed introduction on how to work with large text resources, how to manage digital data and how to approach data visualisation. After placing digital history in its historiographical context and discussing the importance of understanding the history of the subject, this guide covers the life-cycle of a digital project from conception to digital outputs. It assumes no prior knowledge of digital techniques and shows you how much you can do without writing any code. It will give you the skills to use common formats such as plain text and XML with confidence. A key message of the book is that data preparation is a central part of most digital history projects, but that work becomes much easier and faster with a few essential tools.
expression support, and nearly all do. If you do not know where to start, we would suggest trying Sublime Text ( www.sublimetext.com ), which is free for evaluation purposes. While we are tooling up, there are two more free pieces of software you will need to follow along with what we cover in this chapter: a command line interface (CLI), and the version-control tool Git. See the appropriate text box for your operating system for how to get the CLI and Git. Mac or Linux . Good news: you already have the command line. On a Mac it is called ‘Terminal’; it is somewhat
amount of time on using the Git tool to manage your data, because we think this is simply the best option available. Further, a great deal of reusable data can now be found in the form of a Git repository, so a basic understanding of what that means and how it works is becoming essential. We also look at documentation and metadata. Chapter 7 , ‘Visualising your data’, gives an overview of visualising historical data with some advice on practical aspects, such as the use of colour. Here we use the Post Office data to create some visualisations of our own, in the form
practices, rituals, organisational forms and inventions, they rely on an underlying set of protocols, tools and workflows that focus on the problem of versions and versioning of code called git (Straube 2016). Github, started in in 2007, epitomises and has indeed been central to – as the suffix ‘hub’ suggests – a mass of configurational events associated with the development of big data practices in association with large technical ensembles. Like many social media platforms, Github has grown tremendously in the last ten years to around 55 million software projects (March
has ‘got plans to rise up to my full potential / be all i could be’ (Nwandu, 2018 : 11). He aims to ‘git my ass up off dis block’ and move forward to ‘dat promised land’ ( 2018 : 12). Moses and Kitch may be young, but they are not naive. They can see the evidence all around that they are trapped in a world designed to control, discourage, humiliate, incarcerate and potentially kill them. They recognise that, so far at least, they have been passed over for their share of the American Dream and suffer instead from the ‘red white blues’ ( 2018 : 74, 76
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
mother sitting up until the small hours to finish an item, ‘And she wid pit up dis black cloth so dat da neeboors didna see dat she had ta git dees finished. Dat she wis late ta feenish dis hosiery.’ When Jeannie herself was old enough to knit she recalled helping her mother. ‘Oh whin I wis maybe eight or nine you see. And den later on doing jumpers . . . You see, sometimes I’d be sitting – I’d be a bit older den – and I forget I’d daydream and she wid say, “You’re no knitting. Whit’s wrong you’re no knitting?” ’ 51 Hand-knitting, then, evokes vivid memories amongst
his sharp lemon-skinned Collected Poems57 GILMOUR 9781526108845 PRINT.indd 154 11/06/2020 11:00 ‘Passing my voice into theirs’155 This vernacular Londoner’s postcolonial self-mockery as a ‘right savage’ is overwhelmingly confident: soaked in cultural capital, ‘sozzled’ not on drink but on difficult poetry, he is, after all, the sort of person who reads the collected poems of Paul Muldoon on the London Tube. Yet this assertive self-positioning is set up only to be undone in a moment: when some scruffy looking git pipes to his crew – Some Paki shit, like, eee