Jason Boyd Lecture
"People, Talking : Using TEI to Analyze Information Transmission in a Biographical Corpus"
The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines contain a comprehensive set of elements for constructing structured semantic prosopographical or biographical entries on individuals. The case discussed here, the Texting Wilde Project (TWP), which comprises a corpus of early (pre-1945) biographical texts relating to Oscar Wilde, adds a number of additional components to the simple factoid model of 'this thing about this person is asserted by this source.' The TWP biographical corpus, like those concerning others of the nineteenth century and earlier, includes the originating sources of much of the information that comprises the Oscar Wilde we know today (primarily, as reiterated and reinterpreted in more contemporary biographical texts).
Jason Boyd is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University, and a faculty member in the Master of Digital Media and joint Ryerson- York University Communication and Culture Program. He is a Co-Director of Ryerson's Centre for Digital Humanities and an Assistant Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. He has been working on developing computer- assisted methods for the study of large corpora of biographical texts in his SSHRC-funded "Texting Wilde Project," which studies early biographical texts relating to Oscar Wilde.