Jim

I’m Jim Ginther and I am the Principal Investigator for T-PEN.  I have been working in Digital Humanities for over a decade and T-PEN is my seventh research project in DH.  I am very excited about this project for two reasons.  First, T-PEN is one step closer to a major dream of mine to create an editing suite that assists the editor from the transcription stage; through editing, collating and annotation; to the final digital publication–all  in a digital workspace.   Given how many other teams are working towards this same dream, the T-PEN team is committed to interoperability:  we want to ensure that users can take their transcriptions and import them easily into other tools.  The second reason I am excited about T-PEN is that I am providing one of the regular use cases during development.  I will begin a critical edition of the Super Psalterium of Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1170-1253).  I have been studying the life and works of this English thinker since my doctoral studies.  Grosseteste was one of the few masters we know by name at the University of Oxford in the early thirteenth century  He was also a polymath. He was a leader in natural philosophy (in the areas we now identify as cosmology and mathematical physics), an outstanding theologian, and bishop of Lincoln.  His commentary on the Psalter is the last major work from his days at Oxford.  Editing this text is not without its challenges since its textual history is a complicated story.  During T-PEN’s development I will be transcribing one of the manuscript witnesses of this large text (well over 200K words in length!).  Given the unique character of the text, I will definitely be putting T-PEN through its paces.