Projects
Dickinson College
The House Divided Project
Professors Matt Pinsker and John Osborne, History
Daily Report
An historical archive of materials relating to the American Civil War, convering the period from 1840 to 1880. Uses Dickinson College as a both a window and a starting point, given the prominant role of Dickinson alumni in the years leading up to the war, such as President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Justice Rager Taney, and Virginia abolutionist Moncure Conway. My contribution to the project was to move it from a collection of files on a shared drive to a full-blown Drupal application with an advanced information architecture. The site incorporates Professor Matt Pinsker’s design ideas and the theming work of Ryan Burke.
Princeton University
The Charrette Project
The late Professor Karl Uitti, Romance Languages
Professor Sarah-Jane Murray, Baylor University
Professor Gina Greco, Portland State University
Materials Page
The Princeton Charrette Project was created to support the philological research of the late Professor Karl Uitti (Romance Languages, Princeton) on the manuscript tradition associated with Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot, ca. 1180). My contribution was to create a database to manage the extensive visual, textual, grammatical, and rhetorical content of the project, as well a suite of web tools for data entry and visualization. Workingon this project also led me to see the strengths and weakness of using XML to store and manipulate text. See Figura under “Software” on this site.
The Geniza Project
Professor Mark Cohen, Near Eastern Studies
The Princeton Geniza Project seeks to extend the methodologies available to Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic, and Arabic scholars working with the documents found in the Geniza chamber of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the late 19th century. The project is dedicated to transcribing documents from film copies, photocopies, draft texts typed by S. D. Goitein, and printed editions to computer files, creating a full text retrieval text-base of transcribed documents, developing new tools such as dictionaries, semantic categories and morphological aids to further the study of Geniza texts. My contribution to this project was to create a general purpose application framework to store and organize the digital materials of this project. See TextGarden on the “Software” page of this site.
The Shahnameh Project
The late Professor Jerome Clinton, Near Easter Studies
Professor Charles Melville, Cambridge University
The Princeton Shahnameh Project was created to support the Persian literary research of the late Professor Jerome Clinton on the Persian Shahnameh, “The Book of Kings,” written by the Iranian poet Ferdowsi around 1000 CE. My contribution was to write a suite of web-based Perl applications, in collaboration with Peter Batke and Audrey Wright, using ModPerl, Embperl, and MySQL to organize the information about the folios and miniatures (images) in the manuscript held by Princeton’s special collections, as well as secondary source material, such as Arthur and Edmond Warner’s nineteenth-century English translation of the poem and an index of iconographic content associated with the miniatures. This project involved extensive collaboration, involving mutual visits, with Charles Melville and his team at Cambridge University.
The Omiti Project
Professor Emmanual Kreike, History
To support Professor Kreike’s ethnographic research in rural South Africa, I wrote a web-based Perl application using ModPerl, Embperl and Oracle (later migrated to MySQL) to support the conversion of some 300 paper surveys into digital form. The core application allowed students to enter and revise data online. Other features include the ability to normalize spellings and vocabulary items without destroying the integrity of the original data. In building the application, I created a very generalizable framework for encoding complex survey questions as well as a data model to support a heuristic approach to extracting an ontology from the encoded data. The application is currently being used behind a firewall at Princeton. Professor Kreike is now working on integrating these data with GIS and aerial photographs of the area from two time periods, one set taken shortly after WWII and one more recent.
