English 280 - Fall, 2017

Seminar in Research Practices

Class Information

Instructor: Bloom, Gina
CRN: 62693
Time: M 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Earlier British
Focus: Interdiscipline, Method

Description

Co-taught by Gina Bloom (English) and Carl Stahmer (Director of Digital Scholarship, University Library)

Mondays 12:10-3:00 PM

This course investigates a wide range of digital projects in early modern studies in order to open up a conversation about the practical challenges and theoretical stakes of research in the digital humanities and arts. Although we will provide a bit of a backstage tour of the digital tools used to create these projects, the aim of the course is less to train students in the nuts and bolts of programming for a digital project than it is to understand what each digital project aims to do and how its design facilitates those aims. How have digital projects in early modern studies been enabled and handicapped by the affordances of the tools available for project design? What questions and approaches to early modern texts and topics are easiest to answer or pursue with these tools? What sorts of tools would need to be developed or altered to help early modernists pursue different questions or approaches?

As we study particular digital projects, we will read scholarship on and about these projects—much, though not all of it, produced by the project makers. In so doing, we hope to explore how digital projects are, simultaneously, objects of research as well as modalities for research, and to consider more broadly the relationship between making and theorizing. Although this course focuses on early modern material, it would be of interest to anyone interested in learning more about the digital humanities or contemplating doing work in this field.

Our primary source will include the digital projects each of us has helped create--English Broadside Ballads Archive (Stahmer) and Play the Knave (Bloom)—as well as some of the following projects:
• Stephen Wittek, “Distant Reading Early Modernity (DREaM)”
• Nikolay V. Zakharov, Vladimir S. Makarov, Boris N. Gaydinm, “Russian Shakespeare Expands into Global Shakespeares: Collaborative Visualization Projects”
• Kurt Daw (San Francisco, CA), A Midsummer Night’s Dream Webapp
• Tanya Hagen (Records of Early English Drama), Early Modern London Theatres (EMLoT)
• Peter Latka, “#shakespeare2020: An Online Tutorial Suite for Undergraduates”
• Sally-Beth MacLean, Digital Bankside and Southwark
• Jami Rogers, Multicultural Shakespeare British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database
• Alan Nelson, The Token Books of St. Saviour, Southwark
• Linda McJannet, Amy Rodgers, Emily Winerock, The Shakespeare and Dance Project
• Michael Best, Internet Shakespeare Editions
• Janelle Jenstad, Kim McLean-Fiander, The Map of Early Modern London
• Roslyn Knutson, David McInnis, Lost Plays Database
• Beatrice Lei, Taiwan Shakespeare Database
• Peter Donaldson, Diana Henderson, Shankar Raman, Emily Griffiths Jones, MIT Global Shakespeares
• Katherine Rowe, Elliott Visconsi, Folger Luminary Apps
• Gina Hausknecht, All The World’s A Stage Direction
• Jen E. Boyle, “Observations Upon a Blazing World”
• Hank Dobin, “‘A Thousand Times Worse than Death’: A Thanatography of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex”
• Danielle Farrar, The Corpus of Revenge Tragedy (CoRT)
• Brett D. Hirsch, Sarah Neville, Aaron T. Pratt, “Digital Renaissance Editions”
• Alan Hogarth, Deidre Stuffer, Eric Alexander, “Visualising English Print”
• Noam Lior (University of Toronto), “Shakespeare at Play”
• Hillary Nunn and Jennifer Munroe, “The Early Modern Recipes Online Collective”
• Daniel Shore, “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon”
• William Bowen and Raymond G. Siemens, “Iter Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance”
• Daniel Powell, Lindsey Seatter, Matt Hiebert, and Shawn DeWolfe “Renaissance Knowledge Network”
• Michael Heaney, Giles Bergel, Alexandra Franklin, Mike Bennett, and Monica Messagi Kaya, “Broadside Ballads Online”
• Steve Roud, “Roud Folksong and Broadside Ballad Index”
• Peter C. G. Isaac, Catherine Armstrong “The British Book Trade Index”
• Carl Stahmer and Brian Geiger, “The English Short Title Catalog: ESTC21”
• Martin Mueller, “Shakespeare and His Contemporaries”
• Dot Porter, Timothy L. Stinson, Matthew Evan Davis, “Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance”
• Michael Hunter, “British Printed Images to 1700”
• Stephen Rose and Sandra Tuppen “Early Music Online”
• Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Voyant Tools”
Roy Rosenzweig Cen

Grading

TBD