GSU’s investment in the Hoccleve Archive has resulted in the first graduate degree involving the project. Sruthi Vuppala, who has worked for the past two years as a Student Innovation Fellow assigned to the Hoccleve Archive, recently defended her MS in computer science thesis project, “Digitization of the Hoccleve Archive.” Her thesis focuses on her work coding the conversion of the HOCCLEX files created by David Greetham, et al., from .WIN and .CAT formats into TEI-compliant XML.

Sruthi’s coding skills contributed to the Hoccleve Archive in several different ways. Her file conversion code ensures the converted files retain the detailed lexicographical data compiled for every word in every poem by previous editors of Hoccleve’s poetry, while adding markup regarding the formal structure of the poems and identifying metadata. No mute archival texts, these transformed files will put in yeoman’s work behind the scenes as the basis for a searchable lexicon of Hoccleve’s Middle English that we have plans to produce in the future. Even now, however, her work is evident at the Hoccleve Archive, where we use the HTML transform Sruthi coded to display “clean” versions of the XML-encoded HOCCLEX files as the basis for our digital edition of the Holograph MSS.

Sruthi’s work is much appreciated by everyone here at the Hoccleve Archive. Our project sits at the intersection of humanistic skills and computing and depends on the abilities of programmers like Sruthi. But her thesis is also a powerful reminder that interdisciplinary collaborations like those that fuel the Hoccleve Archive have great value for STEM students, as it gives them the chance to engage in graduate-level programming designed to open new frontiers in interdisciplinary learning, and provides them with real-world opportunities to test their programming skills.