At the risk of incurring yet more angry letters from Ph.D. recipients we’ve (gently) mocked in the past (see: Michael Hightower’s response), it is time again for our recognition of dissertations sedulous UVA students have written that we admire but that we happen to have absolutely no interest in reading. This time around, John Ivor Carlson, Jr., Ph.D. has brought together a group we never thought possible. With his “The alliterative ‘Morte Arthure’: A hyper-critical edition,” finally classic lit nerds and computer coding geeks can unite! Promising to change the world of digital editing, Carlson’s piece sounds like a good alternative to Ambien—and with no addictive qualities!
Round Table 2.0: Using the XML document from John Iver Carlson, Jr.’s dissertation on the "Alliterative Morte Arthur," you can edit a 700-year-old Middle English text.
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Carlson’s 203-page dissertation uses the first 1,221 lines of the “Alliterative Morte Arthure,” a Middle English poem that recounts part of the King Arthur legend. Carlson encoded these 1,221 lines into XML, a programming syntax that is often integrated into Web design coding, among other uses. “Readers can use this particular XML document to view the poem with metrically deficient lines highlighted” and additionally can choose to have possible suggestions appear that would fix these lines, according to the abstract. Admittedly impressive, especially for its electronic editing capabilities, but we’d prefer to see it in action rather than read about it.
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