Early Modern Digital Agendas

Funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities through its Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities programs, the Folger Institute offers Early Modern Digital Agendas to foster the development of digital approaches to early modern texts. These multi-week institutes explore the robust set of digital tools with period-specific challenges and limitations that early modern literary scholars of English have at hand.

Following the success of EMDA 2013, the Office of Digital Humanities generously funded a second Early Modern Digital Agendas institute for the summer of 2015. We have recently received news that a third iteration devoted to Network Analysis will be funded for July 2017. Information about this Early Modern Digital Agendas institute can be found below.

EMDA2013

In July 2013, “Early Modern Digital Agendas” created a forum under the direction of Jonathan Hope, Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Strathclyde. It afforded the opportunity for twenty faculty, information staffers, and advanced graduate student participants to historicize, theorize, and critically evaluate current and future digital approaches to early modern literary studies—from Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) to advanced corpus linguistics, semantic searching, and visualization theory—with discussion growing out of, and feeding back into, their own projects (current and envisaged). With the guidance of expert visiting faculty, participants paid attention to the ways new technologies were and are shaping the very nature of early modern research and the means by which scholars interpret texts, teach their students, and present their findings to other scholars.

Folgerpedia articles produced and resources compiled by EMDA2013 participants

Digital editions of English Renaissance drama

Glossary of digital humanities terms

Digital tools for textual analysis

Bibliography of textual analysis readings

EMDA2013 participant blog posts

The Hors-Texte Tumblr: Tracing the Unpreserved

Digital humanities readings and resources

History of Early English Books Online

Using Early English Books Online

EMDA2013 Curriculum

Week One: The Digital Corpus for Early Modernists

Week Two: Extending the Early Modern Textual Corpus and Organizing Major Digital Projects

Week Three: New Analytical Approaches to the Corpus

Further Resources

Original promotional website

Video Introduction: A three-minute, “lightning-talk” of the project was made at the ODH Project Directors meeting.

News from EMDA2013 Participants and Faculty

Archive of EMDA2013 Tweets

EMDA2015

Again under the direction of Professor Jonathan Hope, EMDA2015 allowed fifteen participants to explore even more advanced topics in the digital humanities. The curriculum is available here, and information on visiting faculty can be found here.

EMDA2017

Under the co-direction of returning EMDA director Jonathan Hope and EMDA 2015 distinguished faculty member Ruth Ahnert, "Early Modern Digital Agendas: Network Analysis" (EMDA 2017) will bring together experts from the field of network analysis from 17-28 July 2017 to examine one of the most “quantitative turns” in early modern digital humanities.