Early Modern Digital Agendas

In July 2013, the Folger Institute offered “Early Modern Digital Agendas” under the direction of Jonathan Hope, Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Strathclyde. It was an NEH-funded, three-week institute that explored the robust set of digital tools with period-specific challenges and limitations that early modern literary scholars of English then had at hand. “Early Modern Digital Agendas” created a forum in which twenty faculty, information staffers, and advanced graduate student participants could 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.

This institute was supported by an Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities. A three-minute, “lightning-talk” video introduction of the project was made at the ODH Project Directors meeting.