I’m not a morning person. I had been hoping that graduate school would change that, but it decidedly hasn’t. I’ve been up since 8:30am and while I don’t work at breakfast, I am on the computer: catching up on last night’s twitter stream, skimming through Facebook to keep up with friends back in the States, and trying in vain to catch up on some of my Google Reader. I usually collate a number of links over breakfast that I will want to read over the course of the day, stick them all in their own firefox window, and deal with them later. Over lunch I will skim the Guardian, the Boston Globe and the New York Times for headlines, as lunchtime in the UK is morning in the US.

My work day officially starts when I decide I’ve had enough coffee to answer email in a sensible way. I’ll answer anything that needs to be answered and I’ll start to work through that aforementioned firefox window. I’ll save the good stuff for Twitter later.

I’m currently working on trying to read as many Early Modern London plays as I can from my 400-play corpus, so I can say I know something about the plays I’m addressing in my PhD. I’m in the middle of a collection of John Marston’s plays at the moment. I’m reading The Malcontent this morning – I’ve been saving that for a Monday morning.

After I finish The Malcontent I’ll pack up and go into my office for a while. I’ll blog about my office when I get there, but I don’t always work there: it’s a kind of miserable space, so I work from home a lot. I’ve fallen back into the habit of coming into the office; it’s nice to get up and have to go somewhere. Lately I’ve been finding myself going a little stir-crazy working from home full-time. I’ve always liked having separate work-spaces and home-spaces.

Today might be more of an “analog humanities” day than a “digital humanities” day, but we’ll see. I often joke about analog vs digital humanities. For all the digital stuff I do, I’m still writing a rather traditional dissertation, with close readings of plays serving as evidence. I read and write in much the same way as my non-digital colleagues who study any combination of linguistics, gender, and/or Early Modern London plays. But I also produce and analyze varieties of wordlists of linguistic features of gender using a variety of digital tools. In essence, I read both linearly (“analog humanities”) and non-linearly (“digital humanities”). I just happen to find my examples through distance, rather than close, reading. Digital tools are a methodology for highlighting what needs to be read closely, rather than serving as the close-reading itself.

So, in practice, some days I’m reading about the sociolinguistics of gender, other days I’m reading literary criticism on Early Modern London plays, and other days I’m counting instances of a pronoun in Middleton. Often I’m doing several of these at the same time.  I’ve been editing a paper I just gave in my department two weeks ago into something publishable, I’m cleaning up a chapter I recently gave my supervisors.  My colleague Danielle, a member of UW-Madison’s Data Visualization group, has just sent me some I stuff combining TFIDF and her TextDNA visualization tool on Friday, and I’ve been playing around with this information for a bit in hopes of addressing similarities and differences between plays. But first: Marston!