Out of the Archives: Digital Projects as Early Modern Research Objects
Out of the Archives: Digital Projects as Early Modern Research Objects is a seminar and event series co-sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library and NC State Department of English with support from the NC State Libraries. The application-only seminar facilitated by Maggie Simon (NC State) and Chris Warren (Carnegie Mellon) will host scholars from around the world.
A free public exhibition accompanies the seminar, housed in the D.H. Hill Library's Innovation Studio and online. The digital humanities thrive at NC State and our partner institutions Duke, UNC, and UNCG. This exhibition brings together representative examples of this pioneering work in digital early modern studies. The exhibition is curated and designed by Paul Broyles, Kelsey Dufresne, and Erin Willett. Creation of the online version was supported by the NCSU Libraries Open Knowledge Center. The physical exhibition is on display in the Innovation Studio at D. H. Hill Library from March 10 through May 1, 2022. The Innovation Studio is open weekdays from 10–4.
As with the exhibition, the keynote address by Anupam Basu (Washington University in St. Louis) is free and open to the public. The keynote, entitled "Scaling the Archives: Curating the Corpus of Early English Print," will be held virtually on March 10, 2022, at 7 PM; more information and free registration are available here.
Seminar Description
How do the digital humanities reconfigure our sense of “the archive?” As instantiations of humanistic inquiry during a period of rapid technological change, digital artifacts become research objects in their own right. Digital projects continually reshape our modes of accessing traditional archival objects and the very questions we ask of them. Supported by North Carolina State’s extensive digital technologies infrastructure, this seminar will combine discussion of shared readings with workshop experimentation on digital projects to consider a range of questions. What do digital models reveal about scholarly definitions of historical research? How might digital praxis, the exploration of multimodal research objects, and new forms of scholarly communication change researchers’ thinking about early modern communicative practices? How can digital methodologies accommodate diverse communities and improve the politics of access? What might we learn about the scope of the archive as we consider early modern research in distributed, digital, and often data-driven contexts? Those working in early modern studies, archives, library science, and digital scholarship are invited to apply.
