Academia
CFP: UCSB Early Modern Center Annual Conference
Play’s the Thing: Phenomenology and Play in Early Modern Literature, 1500-1800 University of California, Santa Barbara Conference Date: March 4-5, 2016 Proposal Due Date: December 4, 2015 The Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites proposals for our annual conference, “Play’s the Thing: Phenomenology and Play in Early Modern Literature, 1500-1800,” to be held on March 4 and 5, 2016. We are happy to...
CFP: After Print: Manuscripts in the Eighteenth Century
Following up on a highly successful CSECS panel, I'm organizing a one-day conference at UCSB on the same topic: the continuance of manuscript composition, publication, and circulation in the eighteenth century. I'm hoping for papers from a wide range of fields. After Print: Manuscripts in the Eighteenth Century UC Santa Barbara April 24, 2015 Co-sponsored by the Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School and the...
What happens to the un-notable letters?
The short profile in the New Yorker online of epistolary blog Letters of Note makes clear both the totemic status letters hold in our current media moment, and how aberrant an interesting standalone letter is. The blog features mainly celebrity letters and each one has to hold the reader's interest (the most interesting have also now been collected into a book). The letter represents a form of communication thought...
Mapping periodicals
At this year's MLA in Chicago, I was part of a great panel on "Geospatial Literary Studies" organized by David Wrisley of the American University in Beirut. The "geospatial humanities"—digital humanities work that emphasizes place and geography—has been expanding in the past few years, and this panel was the first devoted to the subject at MLA. The panelists presented some fabulous projects, from mapping bookstores in nineteenth-century Manhattan...
‘Speeding up the Ent-like conversation’
Among the many great points Ted Underwood makes in his recent blog response to Franco Moretti's latest work, I wanted to flag his brief opening observation about the Internet's effects on scholarly interaction. "If the Internet is good for anything," he writes, "it’s good for speeding up the Ent-like conversation between articles, to make that rumble more perceptible by human ears." Academics have been largely inured to the...
The digital-manuscript Dickinson
The Emily Dickinson Archive is the latest digital humanities project featured in The New York Times, and the latest to offer a more intimate connection with an author through images of letters, manuscripts, and other examples of handwriting. The site performs an incredible service in breaking down the institutional barriers between archives that can stymie scholarly investigation; the Times article details some infighting among the participating libraries, but they seem to...
NYCDH: Community and methodology
This weekend saw the first meeting of NYCDH, an exciting initiative to join the various digital humanities efforts on campuses across the city under one umbrella group. The event, which was moderated by Ray Siemens and Lynne Siemens of the University of Victoria and DHSI, was meant to build community among what can often be disparate organizations despite our physical proximity. Just like Digital Experiments, the NYU DH...
Teaching with DH
There's been a lot of recent discussion about how to incorporate tools of the digital humanities into teaching, with a panel on the topic proposed for the 2014 ASECS and a book, Brett Hirsch's Digital Humanities Pedagogy, just out from Open Book Publishers. This question goes to the heart of how to define DH—as a field, subfield, speciality, discipline, etc.—and of its role in the humanities writ large. There...
A London season
Yesterday I had one of those amazing, serendipitous archival experiences that researchers romanticize (with good reason). As I was searching Britain's National Archives database for correspondence to and from Charles Hanbury Williams—an eighteenth-century diplomat whose letters I read at the Lewis Walpole Library last year—I found this entry: "An 'engagement' diary. Of a member of the Capell family (probably Frances, daughter of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams): the very concise entries...