D. Johnson & I. Johnson: "The Tremulator" (Text Technologies)

This is an Archive of a Past Event

The Tremulator is a digital tool developed initially to aid in the collection and visualization of ‘irregular’ data found in medieval manuscripts, especially the interventions and signs of use left behind by medieval and post-medieval readers of those manuscripts. It takes its name from the first subject whose signs of use it has been employed to collect and annotate: the so-called Tremulous Hand of Worcester, a thirteenth-century scribe who marked up nearly two dozen Old English manuscripts.

This tool was developed, then, for a very specific purpose, yet Prof. Johnson's team intends to expand its usability so that it may be configured by others to meet their own needs (TEI tagging of manuscript documents and similar images comes to mind). In this talk, David Johnson will present the genesis of the project and explain how it has advanced his own research, and Ian Johnson will speak on the more technical aspects of the program’s current engineering and future promise.


David F. Johnson is Professor of English at Florida State University, where he teaches Old and Middle English, Old Norse/Icelandic, History of the English Language, and Medieval Literature and Film, among other course. His research interests include Old and Middle English, Old Norse/Icelandic, and Middle Dutch language and literatures, especially in their manuscript context. He is currently working on a new edition of the Old English translation of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, as well as a book on the Tremulous Hand of Worcester.


Ian Johnson earned a BA in Chinese literature and Language and a BS in Applied Mathematics from Florida State University, and a Master’s in Scientific Computing from FSU, as well. He has worked at a number of start-ups in the Bay Area, and is currently a UX Engineer at Google.