Exhibits in Boston, Massachusetts
Alice Thornton’s Books: Remembrances of a Woman’s Life in the Seventeenth Century
EXHIBITORS: Cordelia Beattie, University of Edinburgh and Suzanne Trill, University of Edinburgh
The Alice Thornton’s Books project has created a searchable digital edition of her four autobiographical volumes, written c.1659-96. The modernised and semi-diplomatic versions can be read separately or side-by-side. Textual markup enables users to trace people, places and events across the edition and different versions of the same event can be compared on screen.
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks
EXHIBITORS: Alan B. Farmer, Ohilo State University and Zachary Lesser, University of Pennsylvania
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks allows scholars and students to investigate the publishing, printing, and marketing of English Renaissance drama in ways not possible using any other print or electronic resource. An easy-to-use and highly customizable search engine of every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland—or in Europe in the English language—from the beginning of printing through 1660, DEEP provides a wealth of information about the original playbooks, their title-pages, paratextual matter, advertising features, bibliographic details, and theatrical backgrounds.
The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project
EXHIBITORS: Line Cottegnies, Sorbonne Université and Janelle Auriol Jenstad, University of Victoria
This project provides a semi-diplomatic edition of 6 Shakespeare plays from an 1694 manuscript held at the ‘Bibliothèque municipale’ of Douai, France. This important MS, which might have been used as a promptbook, bears witness to the recreational, perhaps educational, activities among English Catholics in exile in the period, and contains original editorial interventions.
Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press: Tools, Data, and Methods for Researching Secret Printing
EXHIBITOR: Christopher Warren, Carnegie Mellon University
This project proceeds from the recognition that some of the most fascinating stories of the First Amendment’s prehistory are yet to be told—and that they can only be discovered with tools, data, and methods developed in digital humanities. The most persuasive evidence of clandestine printing often lies below the threshold of human attention—in minute typographical details, recurring pieces of damaged type, similar or divergent paper stocks, or tiny variations in print shop practices, observable only at scale. At the same time, it takes sophisticated information architecture for researchers to move effectively from minute physical details to broader, more consequential patterns. This project aims to ameliorate the persistent challenges of studying clandestine printing with a suite of tools, data, and machine learning methods that can detect, model, and integrate hidden sources of information in letterpress print.
Macbeth VR Experience
EXHIBITOR: Peter Kuling, University of Guelph
Macbeth VR Experience is a 25-minute adaptation directed by Peter Kuling featuring voice work by actors from the Stratford Festival of Canada. Developed in partnership with Simwave VR, solo players take part by becoming one of the three witches and participating in the spectacular magic of Shakespeare’s Macbeth through virtual reality.
The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making
EXHIBITORS: Leah Knight Brock University and Wendy Wall Northwestern University
This prize-winning, international collaboration presents the striking political, scientific, and religious verse of Hester Pulter as mobile, variant artifacts. By endorsing equally-authorized versions of an emerging 17th-century female writer, The Pulter Project models a radical editorial practice and new mode of humanist, collective feminist research in the digital age.
Shakespeare in Brazil
EXHIBITORS: Cristiane Busato Smith, Arizona State University, Belinda Yung, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mary Erica Zimmer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Shakespeare in Brazil provides online access to Brazilian performances of Shakespeare, as well as interviews, essays, and metadata by Brazilian scholars and educators. These resources allow users to view and study productions and interviews with Brazilian playwrights, actors, translators, and theater practitioners. We invite further collaborations.
Shakespeare’s Theaterscape
EXHIBITORS: Callan Davies, University of Southampton, Christopher Highley, Ohio State University, Christopher Matusiak, Ithaca College, and Paul Whitefield White, Purdue University
Shakespeare’s Theatrescape (NEH-funded, 3 years, $250,000) introduces an innovative new scholarly website featuring spatially accurate and topographically detailed ArcGIS models of four London playhouse districts, as well as searchable, relational databases of places, people, and events, freshly edited theatre-related archival records, and new interpretive essays.
Sonance: A Journal of Early Modern Sound Studies
EXHIBITOR: Rachel J. Willie, Liverpool John Moores University
Sonance: A Journal of Early Modern Sound Studies is a new online peer-reviewed interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and multimedial Open Access journal published by ACMRS Press that addresses historic sound in all its capacious forms from the period c.1400-c.1800. Our focus is global, ranging across all subjects, theories, and methodologies that attend to sound.
Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700
EXHIBITOR: Madeline Bassnett, Western University
This SSHRC-funded ArcGIS database maps English Little Ice Age weather using narrative data from historical chronicles, diaries, and weather pamphlets. It reveals not only severe cold, but also unusual conditions of heat, drought, and damp. Showing us how climate change destabilized historical weather, the site also allows us to connect the past with today’s experience.
Women Writers Project
EXHIBITORS: Sarah Connell, Northeastern University and Julia Flanders, Northeastern University
The Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women’s writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader.