Mark DeLong (Director, Duke Research Computing) did some "digital humanities" back in 1986 with code developed using Borland's "TurboPascal" and data compiled by counting lines in an Everyman's Library Edition, derived from the 1557 edition of Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation. Following established digital humanities practices of the 1980s, DeLong misplaced both the Pascal code and the data he compiled. He did get a couple of pages in his dissertation out of the effort, which he now says was "not a good trade, given the amount of time the data compilation took."

Since 1986, More's work has been made available online (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17075), and Mark has learned Perl and some Python. In order to redeem himself from the horrors of bad data practices, he's returned to the project and hopes to deepen his now ancient scholarship on More's Dialogue of Comfort. At this Munch & Mull discussion, Mark will outline his current progress and opine about his transition from classic scholar to grey-haired, bow-tied digital hipster, perhaps shedding some light on a direction for (at least his) digital humanities work.