Recently somebody I’m collaborating with on a project asked me if I had a GitHub repository. It came as a bit of a wake-up question for me. Why yes, I do, and I had mostly forgotten about it. In the back of my mind, I knew that my account was there, and I vaguely knew what was there, but I haven’t touched it for at least a few years.
But it also dawned on me that I could make GitHub more useful. I’ve regularly caught myself wondering where I can put data for projects I’m working on, and I usually end up just falling back on my Google Drive or sharing from what’s in my ever-synced Dropbox. But GitHub has so much more going on, especially for sharing data and seeking collaboration. So I’ve gone back to my account and I’ve done some cleaning up. You can find my GitHub here.
Some things you’ll find in my GitHub:
First, on the older side of things, is all of the data from my project titled “Studying Judith in Anglo-Saxon England.” (Read more in this piece in the Old English Newsletter and the blog, which hasn’t been updated in a long time.) This project hit something of a stopping point out a few years ago, partly because I had built an online archive that would continue to remain, and partly because I had done some research that I was able to put out into the world that said what I wanted to at the time. But also because I wasn’t sure exactly what to do next. Unfortunately, the online archive has now been taken down (because I’m no longer at the hosting institution, UConn, and they apparently needed to make room on their server). I’m still working on that last piece, and I intend to return to the project again. For now, all of the text data and other information is still available on GitHub.
I was also happy to find all of the data from my experiments a few years ago using OCR on medieval manuscripts. My post about those experiments has received a good amount of attention over the last few years, especially in the last several months, since it was featured on the Hacker News aggregator. Happily, that post also led to a collaboration with others that is just finished its first stages, and we’ll hopefully be putting our results out into the world before the year’s end. For now, you can read the original post and see the data for my results still in the original repository.
Finally, I just added two repositories specifically for the data behind my most recent work tracing the circulation and transmission of apocrypha. In one of the repositories, you’ll find the data that I used for chapter one of my book, Preaching Apocrypha in Anglo-Saxon England, which is all about networks of apocryphal texts in early medieval preaching collections. You can read more about my data and how I used it in this post.
In another new repository, I’ve put another set of data for my current research on the circulation and transmission of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. I’m doing similar work with network graphing to understand how this apocryphal gospel moved around, which manuscripts included it, alongside which other texts. In the first stage of this research, I’m mainly concerned with the earliest set of manuscripts for each of the four major recensions (A, P, Q, R). What can they tell us about how Pseudo-Matthew traveled around, how people understood it, what other texts it traveled with, and the manuscripts that contain it? I’ll be presenting some preliminary thoughts about this at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo) in May, so consider this data set a sneak peek.
Feel free to check out the repositories sometime–hopefully there’s something of interest there.
