Early Modern Digital Agendas News

Below are some of the research outputs, accolades, and academic adventures that our Folger Institute participants and faculty (names bolded below) have brought to our attention:


  • David Ainsworth has announced the University of Alabama’s inaugural DH conference, Digitorium, April 9-11, 2015, with three “tracks” for sessions: Digital Methods, Methods in Early Modern Digital Scholarship, and Methods in American Studies Digital Scholarship.
  • In 2015-2016, Brett Hirsch will hold a Distinguished Early Career Research Fellowship at the University of Western Australia's Institute for Advanced Studies.
  • On 2-5 April 2015, at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Vancouver, BC, Joe Loewenstein will co-lead a seminar on "Form, Complexity and Computation" with Anupam Basu and Brett Hirsch will launch Digital Renaissance Editions.
  • Martin Mueller hosted a combined meeting of the 2014 TEI Conference and the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS). These overlapping events met at Northwestern University on 22-24 October 2014. Joe Loewenstein presented "Extending the Affordances of EEBO-TCP" during this gathering, and Doug Duhaime spoke on "Making Literary Traditions: Computational Approaches to Text Reuse in Early Modern Literature." Duhaime and Mary Erica Zimmer presented a poster drawing upon their ongoing collaboration regarding literary influence. The poster was entitled "From search to serendipity: computational approaches to intertextuality in the work of Geoffrey Hill."
  • Mary Erica Zimmer presented her digital bookshops work and Joe Loewenstein delivered "Affordance and Deformance in the Spenser Archive" at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in New Orleans on 16-19 October 2014.
  • On 7 October 2014, Dan Shore delivered the keynote address at Dartmouth College’s Digital Crucible Arts & Humanities & Computation Conference, hosted by the Leslie Center for the Humanities and Neukom Institute for Computational Science. His presentation's title was: "Cyberformalism: Search and the History of Linguistic Forms."
  • In 2014-2015, Brett Hirsch will enjoy a short-term fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library to work on his Bibliography of Editions of Early English Drama (BEEED).
  • Mary Erica Zimmer presented a poster on her digital bookshops work as part of the 2014 Digital Humanities in Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS).
  • 24 June 2014 brings the “Beyond Authorship” symposium at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Speakers include Jonathan Hope, Gabriel Egan, Lynne Magnusson, Douglas Duhaime, Heather Froehlich, and Mary Erica Zimmer, and the symposium is convened by Hugh Craig and Brett Hirsch.
  • Brett Hirsch is co-authoring a chapter on “Shakespeare and New Media” with Michael Best for a collection, The Shakespearean World, edited by Jill Levenson and Rob Ormsby, and a chapter on “Graveyards, Greenblatt, and Google” with Laurie Johnson for a collection on Shakespeare and the New Source Study edited by Dennis Britton and Melissa Walter.
  • Heather Froehlich was invited to the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, University College London, to give a talk in March, and gave a variation of that presentation at the 2014 Renaissance Society of America conference in New York.
  • In February 2014, Heather Froehlich spent a week at Helsinki University as a visiting scholar, where she presented a three-day workshop on digital humanities, corpus linguistics with a specific digital approaches to the early modern corpus, with a day on Docuscope. More details here and here is the followup blogpost , containing links to her slides.
  • The “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” project (with Dan Shore and Christopher Warren through Carnegie Mellon University) and the Folger Institute have both been selected to host two-year CLIR postdoctoral fellows in Early Modern Data Curation for 2014-2016.
  • Institute staff have uploaded three-minute “lightning round” videos of four EMDA participants introducing their DH projects during the summer of 2013:
Daniel Powell on REKN: Renaissance English Knowledge Networks
Kim McLean-Fiander on Map of Early Modern London
Christopher Warren and Dan Shore on “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon”: http://flic.kr/p/iioxvP and http://flic.kr/p/iiosbv
  • Jacque Wernimont reports the publication of a collaborative digital book, Performing Archive: Edward Curtis + the “vanishing race”. While not an early modern project, this effort has resulted in the development of an experimental new interface within Scalar that enables gallery views of objects—great for viewing an early modern cabinet of curiosities or a large set of manuscript images!
  • Kim McLean-Fiander reports that the Map of Early Modern London project has undergone some major renovations
  • In early December 2013, Christopher Warren gave invited talks at the Oxford Culture of Knowledge project and at the Center for Early Modern Mapping, News, and Networks at Queen Mary University of London: “Bacon and Edges: Reassembling the Early Modern Social Network.”
  • Brett Hirsch delivered a guest lecture at Strathclyde University on 2 December 2013.
  • Jacob Heil presented an invited lecture at Carnegie Mellon University on 21 November 2013 entitled “Connecting History of the Book and Digital Humanities: Typography, the Book Trade, and the Early Modern OCR Problem.”
  • Brett D. Hirsch and Hugh Craig, ‘Mingled Yarn’: The State of Computing in Shakespeare 2.0. Digital Shakespeares: Innovations, Interventions, Mediations, ed. Brett D. Hirsch and Hugh Craig. Special issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook 14 (2014): in print. [Article refers to EMDA as an example of "dedicated institutes and workshops to facilitate formal knowledge transfer in this area".]
  • On 8 November 2013, Scott Trudell gave a lecture titled, “Multimodal Sidney: Digital Curation and Early Modern Poïesis,” at a colloquium called Digital Humanities / Early Modern Texts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His presentation showed how audio- and image-rich web interfaces offer a means of exploring early modern poetic and musical culture, including William Byrd’s musical settings of Philip Sidney’s verse. The digital humanities present an opportunity to bring out the kinds of interactivity among media sites that would have been intuitive to the Sidney Circle. You can view the links mentioned in his presentation here.
  • Jonathan Hope, Michael Witmore, and Lynne Magnusson have been invited as plenary speakers for an Australian Research Council symposium on corpus-based approaches to early modern literature that Hugh Craig and Brett Hirsch are convening at the University of Newcastle, NSW, in 2014.
  • Doug Duhaime and Erica Zimmer are co-authoring a journal article on her St Paul’s book stalls project.
  • The “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” project received a second Faculty Research Award from Google for 2013-14.
  • Doug Duhaime has been invited to co-author a chapter with Gary Taylor for the companion volume on authorship attribution for the New Oxford Shakespeare in 2016.
  • Jacque Wernimont reports that she and a research assistant have begun presenting on the PoemAlgObject project, which takes a transhistorical set of poems from text through algorithmic transformation into a physical object. The first instance had to be realized in a Lego mock-up because we ran out of processing capacity! More on this effort soon.
  • Scott Trudell has invited Brett Hirsch to guest lecture via Skype to his class on digital early modern studies in the spring.
  • On 9 October 2013, Erica Zimmer gave an invited talk on the bookstalls project during the University of Maine’s “Surfacing: THATCamp Maine 2013″ Digital Humanities Week. The talk was entitled “Affordances of the Digital: Mapping, Modeling, and Early Modern Methodologies.”
  • EMDA was very well represented at the September EEBO-TCP conference at Oxford 16-17 September 2013.
  • On 9 September 2013, Christopher Warren gave a keynote lecture at the HathiTrust Research Center Uncamp 2013 entitled “Inky Data: Reassembling the Early Modern Social Network.”