EMDA 2013 Visiting Faculty

Early Modern Digital Agendas 2013 invited a remarkable group of visiting faculty to collaborate with participants in July 2013. Their brief biographies and links to projects and interests are below.

Director: Jonathan Hope (University of Strathclyde) is Professor in English Humanities and Social Sciences, whose research can best be described as Literary Linguistics (the application of linguistic techniques and theories to literary texts). His work has a strong emphasis on the analysis of early modern English, and Shakespeare’s language in particular.

Visiting Faculty

Marc Alexander (Lecturer in English Language, University of Glasgow) works mainly on stylistics, digital humanities, and meaning studies. He is the Director of the STELLA Project, which is the UK’s only dedicated computer laboratory for teaching English studies and a key site of pioneering work in computer-assisted learning and experimental digital research in language and literature for the past twenty-five years.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University) does research in new media and comparative media studies. She is the author of Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), and co-editor (with Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005). She has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Mark Davies (Professor of Linguistics, Brigham Young University) has created several large corpora that can be used for the lexical analysis of English, including the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). These are both available, as well as a more powerful interface for the billions of words of Google Books data. He has also created a great deal of frequency data that are based on the corpora, which can be accessed from Word and Phrase, Word Frequency, and NGrams. He is the author of five books (including three frequency dictionaries from Routledge) and more than sixty articles dealing with corpus design and use, especially research on language change and (genre-based) variation.

Gabriel Egan (Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Centre for Textual Studies, De Montfort University) currently researches press variants and compositor stints in the early editions of Shakespeare, looking towards computer applications to generate new knowledge. His most recent book was The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text (2010) and among other things he teaches letter-press hand-printing. He is Principal Investigator on the $665,000 project Shakespearean London Theatres, which uses digital technology to help tourists discover and learn about the sites connected to theatre in London between 1567 and 1642.

Julia Flanders (Director of the Digital Scholarship Group, Professor of the Practice in English, and Director of the Women Writers Project, Northeastern University) is Editor-in-Chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly and has served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and as Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, in addition to other roles with centerNet and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. With colleagues, she teaches regular workshops on text encoding, teaching with TEI, and related digital humanities topics. Her research focuses on text encoding, digital methods of scholarly communication, and the politics of labor in the digital academy. She looks at text encoding as an opportunity to think about the transformation of textual information into data.

Ian Gadd (Professor in English Literature, Bath Spa University) is Vice President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). He has run HoBo, a website dedicated to the History of the Book, since 1996. He is a General Editor of the Cambridge Works of Jonathan Swift (for which he has co-edited one volume, and is co-editing two more), and a volume editor for a new four-volume History of Oxford University Press. He has research interests in the London book trade of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, especially the Stationers’ Company (the body that regulated the trade), as well as in the theory and practice of editing. He has taught courses on the Stationers’ Company at the Rare Book School and the Folger Institute.

Alan Galey (Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto) teaches in the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture. His research focuses on intersections between textual scholarship and digital technologies, especially in the context of theories of the archive and the history of new media prototyping and experimentation (print, digital, and otherwise). His main project currently is a book titled The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity. He holds a SSHRC grant for a project called Archive and interface in Digital Textual Studies, and a Connaught New Researcher Grant from the University of Toronto for an online project called Visualizing Variation.

Eric Johnson (Folger Director of Digital Access) is responsible for developing strategy for Folger’s current and future digital initiatives, and decides how digital assets will be deployed to expand access for both scholarly and popular audiences. He is the creator of Open Source Shakespeare, one of the most widely-used online Shakespeare resources, attracting more than 4 million unique visitors in the past seven years. He was also instrumental in the development of Diplopedia, a tool created for the U.S. Department of State that allows communities of experts to collaborate on authoring and editing texts. Mr. Johnson serves on the board of advisors for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University.

Deborah J. Leslie (Senior English Rare Book Cataloguer, Folger Shakespeare Library) has taught rare book cataloging at Rare Book School since 1998, and was the chief editor of Descriptive Cataloguing of Rare Materials (Books), published by the Library of Congress and in use throughout the English-speaking world. She previously held positions as a rare book cataloger at Yale University and at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Martin Mueller (Professor Emeritus of English and Classics, Northwestern University) is interested in the place of literary studies in a professional and technological environment. He is the general editor of WordHoard, and the co-principal convener of MONK. Together with Ahuvia Kahane, he is the editor of The Chicago Homer, a multilingual web site that makes distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek.

Goran Proot (Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books, Folger Shakespeare Library) is the former Keeper of Historical Collections at the University Library Antwerp. He was also the director of the Short-Title Catalogue for early Flemish works, a major bibliographical project documenting all pre-1801 hand-press books published in Flanders. He is a member of the organizing and academic committees of the international congress Book Design from the Middle Ages to the Future: Traditions and Evolutions, served as editor of the Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, and is active in the Flanders Book Historical Society

Katherine Rowe (Provost, Smith College, formerly Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College) teaches and writes about literature and media change. She is a Board Member of DH Commons, Associate Editor of the Cambridge World Shakespeare Online, and co-founder of Luminary Digital Media. She also co-edits (with Thomas Cartelli) the book series Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation & Appropriation.

Jonathan Sawday (The Walter J. Ong, SJ Professor in the Humanities and Professor and Chair of English, St. Louis University) focuses on the intersection between science, technology, and literature particularly (but not exclusively) in the early-modern period. He is on the editorial boards of Medical Humanities and Writing Technologies. His most recent book is Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (2007). His current work involves the idea of blank or empty spaces in literary and cultural texts and artifacts.

Owen Williams (Assistant Director, Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library) has served as the Folger Institute’s officer with day-to-day oversight of the Institute’s programs for over a decade. As the Institute’s Assistant Director, he welcomes some two hundred scholars annually to advanced seminars, workshops, and conferences on topics related to early modern scholarship. He serves as Project Director for Early Modern Digital Agendas. He is also the editor of Foliomania! Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Famous Book (2011).

Michael Witmore (Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library) has most recently written, with Rosamond Purcell, Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare, which inspired the fall 2012 Folger Exhibition. He is a pioneer in the digital analysis of Shakespeare’s texts, and has received funding from the Mellon Foundation for the University of Wisconsin’s Visualizing English Print project. His research findings can be found on his blog, www.winedarksea.org.

Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts, Folger Shakespeare Library) is interested in EAD markup and aids to manuscript transcription and paleographic training. She has co-written, with Alan Stewart, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (2004). She teaches an Early Modern English Paleography course at both the Folger Institute and the Rare Book School.