Yesterday morning we ran three panels on digital teaching methods for early modern studies, sponsored by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Great presentations by Michael Ullyot, Tom Lolis, Sarah Neville, Tara Lyons, Jason Boyd, David Stymeist, Patricia Fumerton, Eric Nebeker, and Christine McWebb. We generated some good discussion and I got to talk about My boy Tarlton. I’ll post more info later, but it was particularly gratifying to hear another speaker in an unrelated session refer to our work (never had that happen before!)

Here’s the rundown for our panels:

New Technologies and Renaissance Studies
Session I: A New Set of Teaching Tools: Digital Shakespeare
(Christine McWebb, chair)
Michael Ullyot: “Reading Hamlet in the Humanities Lab”
Michael Ullyot is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Calgary, specializing in early modern literature. He has published articles on new historicist anecdotes, Spenser’s complaints, modernized Chaucers, and Senecan drama; and he recently wrote a grant proposal to crowdsource the encoding of Shakespeare’s complete works for text analysis. He tweets @ullyot.

Tom Lolis: “Mapping the Shores of Bohemia: Shakespearean Geography in the Digital Classroom”
Tom Lolis is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has also held full-time positions at the University of Miami and the University of California, Los Angeles. His work on dissent in early modern communities has appeared in Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History  and Forum for World Literature Studies. A book manuscript, “The Cartography of Interiority: Magic, Mapmaking, and the Search for Eden in the Renaissance” is under review at Oxford University Press.

Sarah Neville: “Mashups, Social Media, and the Utility of the New: The Ethics of Engagement in the Classroom”
Sarah Neville is a Research Associate at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis where she is currently at work on a multi-format edition of 1 Henry VI. She is an Assistant Editor on the New Oxford Shakespeare, a General Textual Editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions, and the conference secretary for “The History of Cardenio: Spain and England, Then and Now”, a research colloquium being held in Indianapolis April 27-28, 2012, in conjunction with the first full-length, professional production of Gary Taylor’s recreation of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s 1613 play.

Diane Jakacki: “‘Didst thou neuer know Tarlton?’: Teaching Early Modern Popular Culture with Digital Editions”
Diane Jakacki is a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has published several articles on visual rhetoric approaches to early modern printed images. She is the online consultant and interface designer for the imageMAT image and text annotation tool, and serves as a member of the digital advisory committee to the Records of Early English Drama and the advisory board for the Devonshire Manuscript Project. She is currently developing a digital “dynamic biography” of Richard Tarlton, viewable at http://tarltonproject.org.

Session II: A New Set of Teaching Tools: Incorporating Digital Research
(Diane Jakacki, chair)

Jason Boyd: Playing History: Teaching Shakespeare and Beyond with a Theatre History Database
Jason Boyd is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He is the Associate Director and Managing Editor of the Records of Early English Drama’s Patrons and Performances Web Site, which enables the study of touring entertainment practices in early modern England.

Tara Lyons: Digging in DEEP: Teaching Shakespeare in Print with the Database of Early English Playbooks
Dr. Tara Lyons is an assistant professor of English Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. She is currently working on a book project that constructs a history of the drama collection in the hundred years before the publication of Benjamin Jonson’s Works (1616) and William Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623).

David Stymeist: The Integration of EEBO and LdL in the Teaching of Early Modern Texts
David Stymeist (Ph.D. Queen’s University, Canada) currently teaches in the Department of English at Carleton University. His research primarily examines the representation of social transgression in the early modern era. He works in the areas of popular drama, early forms of crime reportage, travel narratives, and digital pedagogies. His published articles have appeared in journals such as Studies in English Literature, Renaissance and Reformation, Cahiers Elisabéthains, Mosaic, and Genre.

Session III: A New Set of Teaching Tools: Beyond the Book
(Bill Bowen, chair)

Patricia Fumerton and Eric Nebeker:  “EBBA’s Reimagined Classroom”
Patricia Fumerton is Professor of English and Director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive at UCSB. She is author of Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006), Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, 1991), and is working on a book project on mobile media in popular print culture, 1569-1789.

Eric Nebeker is Assistant Director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive. He has published articles on ballads in ELH and SEL, and is currently revising a manuscript that reintegrates broadside ballads and English literary history.

Christine McWebb: “imageMAT as a Teaching Resource”
Christine McWebb is the Director for Academic Programs at the University of Waterloo Stratford Campus for Digital Media. She is also Associate Professor of French at the University of Waterloo. She holds a PhD in French medieval literature from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Since joining the University of Waterloo in 2003, she has been actively involved in the Digital Humanities, directing the internationally known MARGOT project. She has published extensively in the areas of late medieval literature/culture, the interaction between text and iconography, scientific discourse in literature, and Digital Humanities.

Roundtable:

  1. Jason Boyd
  2. Patricia Fumerton
  3. Diane Jakacki
  4. Tom Lolis
  5. Tara Lyons
  6. Christine McWebb
  7. Eric Nebeker
  8. Sarah Neville
  9. David Stymeist
  10. Michael Ullyot

~~~
This morning I went to a session organized by SHARP in which Gabriel Egan, Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore presented some very exciting digital approaches to textual analysis.

An unqualified success. Not looking forward to the 11 hour drive back to Atlanta tomorrow.