This week, TANDEM plowed full speed ahead. While I’ve been steadily working on setting up my computer to follow along with our development (Chris and Steve’s impressive progress), aided hugely by GC digital fellows Evan Misshula and Patrick Smyth, I have been making concerted efforts to hone my outreach rhetoric for DHers and non-digital scholars alike.

Last Wednesday, I attended Steve Jones’s lecture at Columbia. While we had seen the research in a talk last fall, I took the opportunity to network. GC digital fellow Erin Glass had many insights to offer and also introduced me to Aaron Plasek, an NYU student who had lots of useful ideas about better OCR for TANDEM. After his suggestion, Chris emailed Berg-Kirkpatrick, creator of Ocular, which we may incorporate.

I emailed Lev Manovich and we have a meeting set up for Wednesday to get some help with the feature extractor components of TANDEM. Meanwhile, after meeting with Steve and Chris on Friday, I’m setting to sorting out more specifically which elements of our light NLTK we aim to implement. Lots of research to do. I have initiated outreach to children’s literature faculty Amy Pattee and Cathy Mercier at Simmons and have checked in with Sarah Burke Cahalan, Special Projects and Reference Librarian at Dumbarton Oaks in DC, to see what other DH projects would benefit from a tool like TANDEM. She brought up NINES.org and the William Blake Archive, as well as the Cooper Hewitt children’s book collections and Princeton’s Cotsen Children’s Library (which Grant Wythoff had mentioned last week).

Still feeling like the work only makes more work at a stage when we need to work on deliverables, but the outreach will continue to come together.

#picturebookshare continues to be a delight and Renzo offered a good number of productive leads for outreach to other illustrators and comic artists. He suggested: The Society of Illustrators  who run events of all sorts like MoCCAFest in April and might have some directories to work with, Tumblr — which I have started to investigate– and Dare2Draw an organization that serves illustrators in the city.

Keeping it going.

-Jojo