Interviewed and written by Helen Wu
Siobhán McElduff
Siobhán McElduff, an Associate Professor of Latin literature and Roman culture at the University of British Columbia, pursued a Master of Philosophy in Digital Humanities and Culture at Trinity College Dublin last year and is now working on digitizing cheap 18th and 19th century Irish ballads and the catalogues of the Temple of the Muses, a massive bookshop of the same period. Though specializing in Cicero and the history and concepts of translation in the ancient Mediterranean, McElduff has long been fascinated by and done research on how the afterlives of Greece and Rome resonate among the labouring classes of Ireland, England, and Scotland, in an era when few were literate, let alone able to get access to books. She adopted digital methods for the large amounts of data, which is rarely the case in ancient Greece and Rome. It allowed her to dig further and deeper into that research, which led her first to programming and spoke to her interest in languages of all types.
“I’ve always wanted to learn programming,” says McElduff. “I’ve always been interested in languages; programming is another language, and it’s useful for the things I do.”
This was particularly the case with learning how to – and often failing at – turning very messy data taken from the Temple of the Muses’ catalogues into something that helped understand the cost and availability of certain books in the early 1800s. Despite her limitations in coding, this taught her the intricacies of dealing with large amounts of data,
For her, classics is different from other disciplines like economics or modern historical studies. Scholars in the field of classics, who work mostly with ancient Greek and Roman materials, often lack comprehensive data or records that enable useful quantitative data analytics – records may be fragmentary or require a great deal of qualitative analysis to be understood. With texts, however, philologists have been very active in digitizing, extracting from severely damaged material, and, most significantly for her research, marking up a range of ancient works.
“A lot of people in my field have used markup languages for things like Latin texts. They digitize Latin texts or run text analytics on them to examine word usage, grammatical structures, literary features, or topic modeling,” says McElduff. The markup language she refers to is known as TEI-XML, an extensible markup language developed and managed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). What she is working on could be seen somewhat as a variation on that, but with very different texts, often of extremely dubious literary quality.
Although she never took formal classes on TEI, McElduff completed a thesis on it last year, working largely independently with guidance from an advisor and using a scholarly TEI template provided by the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA). Her goal was to create a digital edition of Irish ballads chosen for their wide range of classical references. With key elements encoded and highlighted, the digitized version provides context, interpretation, notes, and bibliography—making these texts more accessible and understandable to a broader audience.
Black letter ballad on the story of Diana and Acteon from the EBBA.
“I mark up all the references that are about classical figures, politics, or Irish heroes. These are from the 1820s, and the people writing them often didn’t have any formal education, but they are also really into classics in ways you wouldn’t expect,” says McElduff. “So, I’m trying to track what people actually knew, because these ballads were sold everywhere around Ireland, and people bought them a lot.”
In addition to encoding bibliographic information in the TEI header as well as semantic material, she encoded key elements such as names, places, and events mentioned in the ballads. To take names for example, these ballads often reference figures from Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, Irish and European history, and occasionally other cultural figures such as Aladdin. McElduff highlights these names and encodes relevant information about them. A sample entry for the historical Irish figure Brian Boru looks like this:
This not only provides biographical information for general readers but also helps scholars track references to specific individuals. “If someone were interested in tracking, say, a political figure in a text, you could tag all the mentions,” she says, “and then they could extract those and know where that figure appears.” As she concludes in her thesis, the “richness and extensiveness” of such references are revealed through the creation of name lists, which could inspire further research.
Beyond encoding Irish ballads , formally studying digital humanities has informed McElduff’s broader research approach: “It’s a different way of looking at things. I’m not interested in technology just for technology’s sake, but I do think that sometimes pulling yourself out there and examining stuff using different techniques is useful. Digital tools can help me manage large amounts of information.”
During the year-long program, McElduff experimented with many different technologies—enough to understand which are useful for her research and which are not. Although she doesn’t consider herself a specialist, this experience helps her better understand those who are. On the TEI Project, she has benefitted enormously from discussions with SFU Developer Joey Takeda, and the foundational knowledge she has learned both on her M. Phil and via UBC enables her to follow digital specialists in discussions. Takeda is offering limited TEI support to UBC faculty members in Arts through a collaboration between DiSA, UBC Library Research Commons and SFU Digital Humanities Innovation Lab.
McElduff likes to think of technology as something that has always been with us—it’s just evolving more quickly today. “For me, digital methods are just another tool. It’s the same as learning a language or reading a text—it’s a way to examine certain subjects,” she says. “I’m a Romanist, and I always think about the Romans. They valued and created new technologies, even though, because they were a slave society, very few of those improved people’s lives.”
As McElduff often tells her students: the book form (the codex) we use today is a technology. “It revolutionized how we read, combined, and approached texts – suddenly now most or all of the Iliad could fit into one codex instead of 24 scrolls, and you could easily plunge into the middle if you wanted. Now, it’s digital technology that is changing our engagement with texts and allowing them to ask and answer questions that traditional research methods do not easily enable. Haven’t you always wondered what the average price of a self-help guide on creating a horse ranch or medicating yourself in the late 18th century was?”
For scholars across academic disciplines, UBC’s Research Commons offers consultations on digital scholarship and other technology-related inquiries. Researchers are encouraged to request specialist support through the UBC Library’s Help page. In addition, on August 11 at 10 am, the Research Commons, UBC’s DiSA and SFU’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab are co-hosting the last TEI summer session, “Encoding Language, Speech, and Thought.” The public are invited to register and attend the free event here.