Meeting Agenda
With July quickly creeping up on us, we have still to finalize the agenda for our planning meeting. Hugh and I wanted to ask for your feedback on the following suggestions.
SUNDAY 1 JULY
11:30 - 11:45 Meet and greet session
11:45 - 13:00 Short papers on current research projects (10-15 minutes each?)
13:00 - 13:30 Brainstorming session to consider possibilities for collaborative research
13:30 - 14:30 Break for Lunch
14:30 - 15:30 Discussion on possibilities of providing training, fostering links with similar bodies and networks
15:30 - 16:30 Discussion of possible conferences and publications
17:00 Dinner?
Are we happy with this time schedule? Should we start earlier/later? Is more time required for the brainstorming session?
MONDAY 2 JULY
For Monday, Hugh has proposed that we plan sessions based around discussion topics, suggesting the following possibilities:
-- Copyright in Early Modern drama to be published on the web
-- Readable EM drama on the web
-- How to make EM drama on the web searchable and researchable
-- Critical apparatus, theatrical apparatus, editorial apparatus, history-of-the-book apparatus -- what context for the digital EM text on the web?
-- The Shakespeare bogey -- what limelight is left for non-Shakespearean EM drama on the web? Piggy-back or crushed under?
-- How far should EM drama on the web be designed for uploading to other applications?
-- Digital EM drama and off-site software tools
-- Computational linguistics and cognitive linguistics applied to digital EM drama -- what's to be gained, and how to get there?
I think this is a splendid idea. Are there any other topics of discussion that should be included?
Perhaps it is worth nominating individuals to particular sessions (e.g. Hugh on computational stylistics) so that they can open up the discussion. If this is how we wish to organise things, please feel free to (a) nominate yourself for any particular topic(s), (b) add any other topics for discussion.
What time should we start and end on Monday?
Once Hugh and I have received your responses, we will organise the topics across as many sessions as we need. Please email me with your responses by Friday 18 May (i.e. a fortnight from today) to allow for plenty of time to make arrangements.
Panel Session
We have finalized the lineup for our panel session at the NEER conference, "eMEMS: Electronic Medieval and Early Modern Studies." The session is in the conference abstract booklet as follows:
1. *"Medieval Manuscripts and Digital Ecosystems."*Toby Burrows NEER Digital Services Director University of Western Australia (Australia)
There are countless digitized medieval manuscripts available on the Web, as well as a significant number of digital editions, corpora, and archives based on medieval manuscripts. In this paper, I will look at the place of these digital materials in the wider landscape of Web-based resources for medieval studies. In particular, I will examine current progress towards integrating digitized manuscript materials into a broader "digital ecosystem", with some discussion of what tools, directions and strategies for achieving this might be required in the future.
2. *"The Theory and Practice of Lexicons of Early Modern English."*Ian Lancashire Editor, Lexicons of Early Modern English Professor of English, University of Toronto (Canada)
The University of Toronto Press and the University of Toronto Library jointly launched my Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME) on April 12, 2006. LEME offers both free public access to and a licensed scholarly site for half a million word-entries in more than 150 lexical works, print and manuscript, written by people who spoke and wrote English from about 1480 to 1702. In this paper I will discuss the sources, rationale, and uses of LEME, with emphasis on how it supplements the Oxford English Dictionary and Early English Books Online/Text Creation Partnership (EEBO/TCP), on how it helps revise the history of English, and on its uses for scholarly digital editions.
*3. "Variation and Mutabilities: Representing Variants in Shakespeare's Texts."*Michael Best Coordinating Editor, Internet Shakespeare Editions Professor Emeritus of English, University of Victoria (B.C., Canada)
One of the most interesting challenges - and opportunities - in the development of interfaces for Early Modern texts in the electronic medium is the representation of variation and uncertainty. Early Modern texts typically present a range of variants and silences, challenging a modern edition as it has to grapple with multiple possible readings. Most obviously, there will be variant readings from different witnesses; in the Shakespeare world, quarto and Folio versions will often differ in multiple and significant ways. The centuries-old practice of conflation has come under close scrutiny in recent discussions of Shakespeare's texts, and editors have become increasingly uncomfortable with making final decisions about the ambiguities they necessarily face. Early printed plays often omit entrances or exits, with the result that an editor has to choose from many possible alternatives in inserting the appropriate stage direction, and the process of modernization will often force an editor to choose between multiple possibilities, either because the original is suspect, or because words originally ambiguous have become represented by more than one modern alternative. Two recent editions - the Bate/Rasmussen Folio, and the Thompson/Taylor Arden Hamlet - push the limits of the print medium in grappling with the representation of multiplicity and uncertainty; both, I will argue, create an "interface" that is fraught with problems, and which obscures as much as it reveals. The computer screen provides us with an opportunity to rethink and re-imagine the interface between text and reader. This paper will discuss the issue of conflation versus deconflation, and will illustrate the problem of choice between variants with representative examples, suggesting how they might be displayed on the screen.
*4. "Staging Early Drama for the Electronic Age: The Brome and Queen's Men Projects."*Helen Ostovich General Editor, The Queen's Men Editions Professor of English, McMaster University (Canada)
This paper looks at two performance-based projects with electronic goals, the UK-based Richard Brome Electronic Editions and the Canadian Shakespeare and the Queen's Men which includes the Queen's Men's Editions which will be mounted on the Internet Shakespeare Editions electronic platform. The connection between the two projects is the idea of performance as the best access to meaning in early modern play-texts. The Brome Editions were initially conceived of as having commentary and textual problems workshopped by RSC actors in order to experiment with possible performance options and perhaps resolve some of the issues raised by the editors. These performance alternatives will be attached to the electronic editions along with the more usual glosses and commentaries. I will be drawing on one scene from Brome's collaboration with Heywood, The Late Lancashire Witches, for examples. The Queen's Men Editions will also be producing texts and performance based commentaries, along with rough archival DVDs and links to developed film clips on a specially created website, in order to explore the impact of the Queen's Men on their audiences, specifically on Shakespeare and his later choices, based on the Queen's Men influence.