So, I would like to talk to you about the Digital Tolkien project. But before I do that,

I want to talk about two things that happened in 1937. There was two big releases in the

sort of cultural world. One was an animated film in America and one was a children's book

in England. And both of them ended up radically changing their respective genres. The book

was J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and the film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. What's

interesting about this is that both these stories took inspiration from Germanic stories

and both heavily featured dwarfs. But one of the things you may not be aware of is that

the way the word dwarfs is spelled in The Hobbit versus Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Now it's an interesting question why the difference isn't just an American English thing, not

at all. In fact, the dominant spelling of dwarfs was with an F, not a VE in 1937. And

Michaela mentioned Google Ngram Viewer. So one of the things we can do is go to Google

Books Ngram Viewer and look at the relative frequency of the two spellings of dwarfs.

An interesting thing you notice though is that just after 1937, starting in the 1940s,

the Tolkien spelling with the VE started to rise. It was almost non-existent at that point.

But by around the time that the Peter Jackson films came out, the two crossed over and now

the spelling, Tolkien's spelling dominates. I bring this up not to talk about spelling

conventions but really just to give you an example of doing digital humanities in the

sense that what we've done is we've counted some things and compared them across time.

But one of the things that's sort of hidden behind this sort of chart is just a tremendous

amount of work to get all these texts digitised and everything. And this is a very common

thing in digital humanities. It's one thing for us to be able to count things and do visualisations

like this but there's a lot that needs to get done before that happens. And I'm going

to be talking about quite a bit of that sort of stuff today.

I want to briefly say something about my background and entry into all of this with Tolkien. I

was a huge fan of The Hobbit when I was about 11 years old and the other thing I was really

interested in was computer games. And at the time computer games were these text adventures.

You got a little bit of graphics but it was mostly interacting with the world by typing

sentences where you would say, you know, get lamp and go north and stuff like that. And

as an 11 year old I wanted to write these kind of games. And reading computer magazines

about this I discovered that behind these computer games they were doing things like

parsing the sentences and they had lexicons and stuff like that. So I was learning all

of this linguistic terminology that planted the seed in my mind to end up studying linguistics

and use computers to better understand languages and texts.

The third book in the, well third part of The Lord of the Rings, if you look in the

appendices has tremendous amount of linguistic information and this was another thing that

sort of planted the seed. These different writing systems and languages and so on that

was a big part of all this. So I ended up having an interest in computers and also having

an interest in language. I studied linguistics as an undergraduate and in particular at the

time I was interested in ancient Greek. And so a lot of the software development that

I've done over the years has been applying computers to ancient Greek and I work on,

I built something called the Skaithiou which is the new reading environment for the Perseus

Digital Library. Some of you may be familiar with Perseus. It's one of the oldest digital

humanities projects. It's been around since the 80s and basically providing free Greek

and Latin texts to classicists. And the sort of stuff in the software that I've built includes

a reading environment here. This is the start of Homer's Iliad but bringing in dictionaries,

syntactic annotations, translation alignments in this case with Persian and so bringing

together all this sort of information, images of the manuscripts. This is the Venetis A

manuscript and so tying the images to the text with scholarly commentaries from the

middle ages on the right hand side and so on, bringing all this sort of information

together in an online reading environment. But about six years ago I was actually at