Early Modern Digital Agendas is a three-week summer institute to be hosted by the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Jonathan Hope, Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Strathclyde, will direct a survey of the most current resources and methods in digital research. It is supported by an Institutes for Advanced Topics grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities.
Early modernists have at hand a robust set of digital tools with period-specific challenges and limitations. Early Modern Digital Agendas will create a forum in which participants can historicize, theorize, and critically evaluate current and future digital tools and approaches in early modern studies, with discussion growing out of, and feeding back into, their own projects (current and envisaged). Throughout the institute, attention will be paid to the ways new technologies are shaping the very nature of early modern research and the means by which scholars teach their students and present their findings to other scholars.
In this intensive and high-level exploration, twenty faculty participants will be guided through a series of hands-on interactions with the most advanced digital tools, resources, and methodologies available. The visiting faculty include:
Marc Alexander (Lecturer in English, University of Glasgow)
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University)
Mark Davies (Professor of Linguistics, Brigham Young University)
Julia Flanders (Director of the Women Writers Project, Brown University)
Ian Gadd (Professor in English Literature, Bath Spa University)
Alan Galey (Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto)
Deborah Leslie (Head of Cataloguing, Folger Shakespeare Library)
Martin Mueller (Professor of English and Classics, Northwestern University)
Goran Proot (Curator of Rare Books, Folger Shakespeare Library)
Katherine Rowe (Professor and Chair of English, Bryn Mawr College)
Jonathan Sawday (Professor of English, St. Louis University)
Michael Witmore (Director, Folger Shakespeare Library)
Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts, Folger Shakespeare Library)
The summer institute will gather a diverse group of early modern literary scholars with different levels of expertise in digital humanities and at different stages of their academic careers. While participants need not have a project at hand, they must be able to articulate their motivations for understanding digital initiatives that involve early modern English texts and describe the skills and digital tools that they would like to develop during the course of the institute. Application guidelines and materials will be available on this page by 1 January 2013; the application deadline will be 1 March 2013. In the meantime, please contact Early Modern Digital Agendas Project Director Owen Williams with any questions.
