Welcome to SPACE, our adult continuing education program which offers interactive monthly courses for personal enrichment! Learn more here.

James Tauber

Signum MA Faculty • SPACE Preceptor • SPACE Team

Digital philologist and corpus linguist

James is a philologist, linguist, and software developer who works with scholars around the world using computers to better understand languages, texts, and music. He has worked with text corpora, markup languages, and Web technologies for over thirty years. He currently develops software for Signum University and the Perseus Digital Library among other organizations. As a scholar he works on corpus-driven historical language learning, digital philology, text and music encoding, corpus stylistics, and computational literary studies. He also heads up the Digital Tolkien Project. James has studied linguistics, Ancient Greek, educational measurement, Germanic philology, music theory and composition, and recently completed an MA in corpus linguistics with a dissertation on linguistic variation in Tolkien's writing style. [see full bio...]

Highlighted Modules

All Modules

'The Rings of Power' Discussion Group

Discussion-based Low intensity
The wait is over and the second season of Amazon's Tolkien-inspired series is upon us! Already, this series has stimulated much heated discussion across various social media, with the images and trailers dividing opinion among Tolkien fans. In this discussion group, we will watch the show and discus...

A Journey Through The History of the Hobbit Non-Sequential Series

Lecture-based Medium intensity
Just as Christopher Tolkien did for the rest of his father’s Middle-earth works, John Rateliff has compiled the manuscripts and early versions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and presented them with notes and commentary. In this three-part series, we will work our way through Rateliff’s book, ...

A Journey Through The History of Middle-earth (HoMe Series) Non-Sequential Series

Mixed Lecture/Discussion Medium intensity
Christopher Tolkien’s twelve volumes on the History of Middle-earth give unparalleled insight into the development of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium. They contain early drafts of familiar texts, different conceptualizations of well-known stories, and in some cases completely new material. In this ser...

Ancient Greek Morphology

Mixed Lecture/Discussion Low intensity
Designed for intermediate students of Classical or Biblical Greek with roughly a year under their belts, this course will provide a detailed look at the inflectional system of Ancient Greek, moving past the memorization of paradigms to provide a rich linguistic explanation for why Ancient Greek word...

Bach’s Goldberg Variations

Mixed Lecture/Discussion Low intensity
The Goldberg Variations is a keyboard work by J. S. Bach considered by many to be one of the greatest musical compositions of all time. In this module, we will listen, analyze and discuss our way through the piece. We will begin with the background to the composition, and study the initial ar...

Bridge to The Silmarillion

Lecture-based Medium intensity
This course is intended for people who have read The Lord of the Rings and are beginners to The Silmarillion. We will re-read various passages from Lord of the Rings that make reference to First Age people, places, and events: the mighty Elf-friends of old, the Exile of the Elve...

Electronic Text Markup With XML and TEI

Mixed Lecture/Discussion Medium intensity
This module will introduce the markup of literary and historical texts electronically. It will begin with a tour of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and then the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). There will plenty of hands-on activities to markup your out-of-copyright texts of ch...

Lowdham’s Report on the Adûnaic Language

Mixed Lecture/Discussion Low intensity
Tolkien wrote a grammar of the Adûnaic language, the language of Númenor, as part of his Notion Club Papers in the 1940s. Unlike his other language invention, this work was never revisited and so, even though it is incomplete, we don’t have to sort through multiple layers of corrections and...

Music Theory for the Mathematically-Inclined

Lecture-based Low intensity
Music is often described as mathematical but music theory is rarely taught from this perspective. This course will cover traditional basic music theory but will explore some of the underlying mathematical reasons why music works the way it does. Nothing beyond high school math is required.

The History of the Symphony: After Beethoven

Mixed Lecture/Discussion Low intensity
This module will be a chronological listening tour of the history of the symphony after Beethoven. We will explore the symphony’s subsequent development in the romantic era, and its rethinking in the 20th century. We will listen to some key works together and discuss some of the innovations introduc...

The History of the Symphony: Beginnings to Beethoven

Mixed Lecture/Discussion Low intensity
This module will be a chronological listening tour from the precursors of the symphony in the baroque era to the birth of the symphony in the classical era culminating in the works of Beethoven. We will listen to some key works together and discuss some of the innovations introduced in those particu...

The Second Age of Middle-earth

Lecture-based Medium intensity
The Second Age of Middle-earth saw the rise and fall of Númenor, the rise and (apparent) fall of Sauron, and the creation of the Rings of Power. This course will look at the events of the Second Age with readings from LOTR (especially Appendix A and B), Unfinished Tales, and The Silmarilli...

Tolkien's Writing Systems

Lecture-based Medium intensity
This module will study various writing systems invented or adapted by Tolkien. We will primarily look at the Tengwar and the Angerthas (Cirth) described in The Lord of the Rings but we will also touch on other systems such as the Hobbit runes and other runic variants as well as the Goblin Alp...

Tolkien’s Invented Languages in The Lord of the Rings

Mixed Lecture/Discussion Low intensity
In this puzzle-solving course we will work to piece together Tolkien’s invented languages based primarily on how they are used in The Lord of the Rings. Although much richer linguistic information became publicly available later, this course will look primarily at those aspects of the languag...

Tolkien’s Invented Languages: Next Steps Beyond The Lord of the Rings

Mixed Lecture/Discussion Medium intensity
In the module Tolkien’s Invented Languages in The Lord of the Rings, we exclusively looked at Tolkien's language invention from the perspective of how the languages were used in The Lord of the Rings. In this follow-on module, we will explore the linguistic information in The Road G...