David J. Birnbaum

A computational pipeline is a way of modeling the flow of information through a sequence of programs or operations, so that the output of each step becomes the input to the next. The decomposition of complex operations into discrete individual steps, each of which does only one thing, and none of which depends on knowing how the others operate, supports distributed, modular development; enhances maintenance and sustainability; and enables reusability. In this workshop we will examine how the concept of computational pipelines can be extended to model the planning, development, and deployment of digital textual editions. Participants are encouraged to come prepared to discuss their own digital edition plans and projects.

David J. Birnbaum is Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches computational Digital Humanities. Much of his electronic text work intersects with his research in medieval Slavic manuscript studies, but he also often writes about issues in the philosophy of markup. His most active current research involves two topics: the machine-assisted analysis of Russian verse and textual transmission in the Slavic middle ages. He is one of the developers of CollateX, a software package for the collation of manuscript variants.