Thanks to the CCSNH, I once again have access to the Oxford English Dictionary on line!  Onward, friends.

Word Fans, you can now listen to my thesis chat and watch the slides at the same time! ITunes U has a new course called Signum Sessions.  Among the many treats there, please find “Words That You Were Saying” and choose the free video download.  It’s a great little video for a dark and stormy night, friends, and I recommend a lovely accompanying pork pie and salad!

I’m packed and on my way to the Introduction to TEI conference of the Women Writers’ Project.  These folks are bringing pre-Victorian literature by women out into the digital age.  By careful planning, they are working collaboratively with scholars everywhere to establish the standards for text encoding protocols.  As an independent scholar, I’m grateful to be a scholarship attendee at the conference!  Will I see you there?

Last Saturday I tried to stump the audience – and the Tolkien Professor! – by asking them to guess what word was represented by a certain frequency graph.  The word was “Dwarf”, and there was no fooling a Signum University audience!  I have now updated the Concordance entry for “Dwarf” with the graph.

Last Saturday, I had a ball chatting with The Tolkien Professor and Dave Kale about digital humanities, scholarly collaboration, and words analysis of The Hobbit.  During our broadcast, we raised about $3K for Signum University, and I’m tickled pick that the folks in the audience enjoyed our word-geekery as much as Dave and I did.

Thank you for attending, sending in your questions, and best of all, participating in the little graph-guessing game that I created.  My next task is to put up those words we graphed and add them to the concordance.

Want to watch the show?

In preparing for tomorrow’s Hallowe’en Extravaganza, I tried out a new-to-me feature of Lexos.  I ran into a little glitch and, late-ish on a Friday afternoon, sent a question to the team of professors who run the project.  In 45 minutes I had an offer of help and within an hour found myself in a lovely discussion of how to make the graphs of Lexos easier to read and interpret.  Huge accolades to the gentlefolk of the Lexos Project!

Tomorrow is the Signum University Fundraiser’s Hallowe’en Extravaganza!  I’m preparing to chat with The Tolkien Professor and Dave Kale about my work in digital humanities – and Dave said something about pie.

Part of our plan tomorrow is for audience participation lexomics graphs – do we ever know how to have fun?  Yes, we do!  So let me know now in the comments if there’s a particular word or group of words you’re curious to know about in the text of The Hobbit. If I have a few delicious words ahead of time, I can prepare well, while still accepting on-the-fly requests.

Why only in The Hobbit?  Preparing a text for this kind of analysis takes many, many months of “scrubbing” the text.  I began with typing up the text myself so that no one ever worried about pirating issues.  That’s the .txt file I use when I run the Lexos software.  Then I marked the text up with paragraph numbers and little xxs to mark the ends of phrases.  In the end, my personal text of The Hobbit,  the one I use to run the concordance software, looks like this:

[01.001] xx In a hole xx in the ground xx there lived a hobbit. xx Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, xx filled with the ends of worms xx and an oozy smell, xx nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole xx with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: xx it was a hobbit-hole, xx and that means comfort. xx
[01.002] xx It had a perfectly round door xx like a porthole, painted green, xx

Word fans, have you registered for the Hallowe’en Extravaganza?  Dave Kale and I will join the Tolkien Professor to kick off the final day of the Signum University annual fundraiser.  We’re talking spreadsheets, wordstats, text mark up, and even more thrilling wordy things of lexical goodness!

I’ll demonstrate the Lexos software!

You – yes, you! – can request particular words to be mapped or added to the concordance!

Click the Hallowe’en Extravaganza link, register for free, join us at 10 AM Eastern Daylight Savings time, and enjoy a grand adventure from the comfort of your armchair!  Then, donate generously to the work of Signum U: world class post-secondary education accessible to all!

We salute the officers of Watertown, Massachusetts who have charged a man with “breaking and entering in the nighttime and possession of a burglarious tool.”  Thank you for keeping our friends and neighbors of Watertown safe and your formal charges classy!

Connors (Detective), “Breaking and Entering Suspect Arrested”. Watertown Police Arrest Log Press Release. October 1, 2015. Web.