The Folger Institute is proud to announce the twenty participants we will welcome to Early Modern Digital Agendas in July 2013.

David Ainsworth, Assistant Professor – English, University of Alabama

Robin Davis, Emerging Technologies and Distance Services Librarian, John Jay College of Criminal Justice,The City University of New York     

Douglas E. Duhaime, PhD Student – English, University of Notre Dame

Jacob J. Halford, PhD Candidate – History, University of Warwick

Matthew P. Harrison, PhD Candidate – English,  Princeton University

Jacob A. Heil, Postdoctoral Research Associate –Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Texas A&M University

Brett D. Hirsch, ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow – English, University of Western Australia

Nicholas Hoffmann, PhD Candidate – English, University at Buffalo

Jonathan P. Lamb, Assistant Professor – English, University of Kansas

Joseph F. Loewenstein, Professor – English, Washington University

Ellen MacKay, Associate Professor – English, Indiana University

Lynne Magnusson, Professor – English, University of Toronto

Kim McLean-Fiander, Postdoctoral Research Fellow – English, University of Victoria

Daniel Powell, PhD Student – English, University of Victoria

Daniel A. Shore, Assistant Professor – English, Georgetown University

Scott Trudell, Assistant Professor – English, University of Maryland

Christopher N. Warren, Assistant Professor – English, Carnegie Mellon University

Jacqueline D. Wernimont, Assistant Professor – English, Scripps College

Patrick Williams, Associate Librarian – Subject Specialist for English, Syracuse University

Mary Erica Zimmer, PhD Candidate – The Editorial Institute, Boston University

]]> http://emdigitalagendas.folger.edu/2013/05/01/list-of-participants/feed/ 0 http://emdigitalagendas.folger.edu/2012/10/23/project-curriculumwork-plan-week-one/ http://emdigitalagendas.folger.edu/2012/10/23/project-curriculumwork-plan-week-one/#comments Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:49:12 +0000 Owen Williams http://titania.folger.edu/blogs/emdigitalagendas/?p=19 Continue reading →]]> The Digital Corpus for Early Modernists

This first week provides an historical overview of DH, considers pressing current issues, presents the theoretical contexts for DH approaches for early modern literary scholars, and opens a practical exploration of tools currently considered essential by most early modernists. Monday morning will begin with an orientation necessary for work in a restricted-access, non-circulating, rare book library: reader registration will be followed by an introduction to the rules and regulations of the Reading Room in the course of a tour of the Library. Participants will also be introduced to the Folger Library’s online catalog, Hamnet. They will confer with the institute’s Technical Assistant to configure wireless password protocols and the like.

The NEH Institute Director, Jonathan Hope, and participants will then convene for an introductory lunch. The first session in the afternoon will be crucial for community-building and setting the agenda for the rest of the institute. Priorities include: (1) to establish a level of critical discussion which theorizes and contextualizes DH within the broad field of Humanist studies; and (2) to establish continuing sub-groups within the institute which will allow the development of good inter-personal relations, the sharing of knowledge, and the creation of a supportive context in which participants’ research plans can be refined. In the two-hour session before tea, the twenty participants will meet in five sub-groups of four people each. In each sub-group, participants will introduce themselves and will describe their experience in early modern studies and DH. The institute will then reconvene as a whole, and each person will introduce the work and research project of another member of their sub-group. The aim of these introductions is to establish a research problem for each participant that relates to DH and for which the participant will develop a solution, a visualization, a guided approach, or a list of resources over the course of the coming weeks.

Dr. Hope will also outline plans for the institute’s digital footprint: live tweeting of presentations and discussions; private wiki-sites for each sub-group to record ongoing work and allow sharing between participants; and a public website to present the participants’ work and discoveries. This website will migrate the best ideas drawn from the sub-group’s wiki-sites to an ongoing hub for DH work in early modern studies. After tea, Dr. Hope will lead discussion of the first set of assigned texts, drawing on two recent anthologies: Matthew K. Gold’s Debates in the Digital Humanities (2012) and David M. Berry’s Understanding Digital Humanities (2012). Special attention will be paid to the aspects of these debates which involve early modern scholarship, such as the recent polemics against DH by Stanley Fish, for instance.

On Tuesday morning, Professor Jonathan Sawday (St. Louis University) will open up theoretical discussions on the history and culture of technology and human interaction and its effects on scholarship and research. In his Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (2007), Professor Sawday explored how the imaginative impact of early-modern technology changed the user’s relationship to the world in ways that were often unpredictable. Professor Sawday will guide discussion of the ways DH is transforming not just the object of study (texts) but scholars as users, readers, producers, and consumers of texts and ideas. Readings will range from Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954) to Gerard Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997). (See Appendix J (p. 90-93) for the full bibliography.) Professor Sawday will pose questions about current models of reading in comparison with ways of dealing with information throughout history. He will explore the extent to which the advanced capabilities derived from DH are framing new kinds of enquiry that transform the user of technology.

In the afternoon, Professor Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Brown University) will examine the importance of networking technologies to the scholarly imaginary and vice versa. Networks have arguably become the defining concept of this epoch. Although much theoretical work has already been done elucidating networks, from Jean François Lyotard’s evocative description of the postmodern self as a “nodal point” to Tiziana Terranova’s analysis of global network culture in “Free Labor,” surprisingly little work has addressed the question: why networks? What is the conceptual power of networks? Professor Chun will help the participants think through the ways in which the conceptual power of networks stems from their alleged ability to bridge unbridgeable scales: the micro and the macro, the molecular and the molar. Networks and their mapping tools, in other words, seem to offer a way to dispel postmodern “confusion,” described by theorists such as Frederic Jameson (in his “Cognitive Mapping”) and sociologist Ulrich Beck (in Risk Society), which prevents the individual from understanding his or her relation to the larger global system.

In general discussion, Professor Hope and participants will relate these issues to the larger aims of the institute. Participants will focus on the allure of technology, the dangers of uncritical approaches to it, and the extent to which researchers need to take ethical responsibility for the tools and protocols they employ. This responsibility includes considering fully the extent to which software and hardware can function as a “black box,” producing “data” on which scholars fix their analytic gaze without stopping to consider the processes by which that “data” is brought into being. Excerpts from Professor Chun’s book, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), will focus this discussion.

At the end of the day, exercises will be assigned introducing the most widely used digital corpus in early modern English studies, Early English Books Online (EEBO). EEBO is a commercially available collection of digitized full-text facsimiles. It currently contains more than 125,000 titles listed in A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave’s Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Donald G. Wing’s Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. Participants will keep close track of their searches, make notes about aspects of EEBO they find unusual or surprising, and prepare to discuss how intuitive and user-friendly the interface is. Their searches will provide them with examples to trace through the remainder of the week’s exploration.

On Wednesday morning, following some lab time for participants to complete their EEBO exercises, Professor Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University) joins the institute to discuss their findings. In the afternoon, Professor Gadd will be joined by two librarians, Goran Proot, Mellon Curator of Rare Books at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Deborah Leslie, Head of Cataloguing at the Folger, to discuss the scope and organizing principles of online catalogues like the Folger’s Hamnet and online bibliographies like the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), whose catalogue data provides the underlying parameters for EEBO. The ESTC is the British Library’s comprehensive union catalogue, listing some 470,000 catalogue entries for letter-press books, serials, newspapers, and selected ephemera printed before 1801 in Britain, Ireland, overseas territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. Through the example of the ESTC, participants will learn the “logic” of the online catalogue: The ESTC has enhanced scholarly access to the metadata produced by cataloguers and provides a multitude of new ways to search for relevant texts and to distinguish between editions and even individual copies. With discussion framed by readings and practical exercises, participants will consider how the migration of catalogues and bibliographies online modifies the nature of scholarly research.

On Thursday morning, participants will have the opportunity to compare EEBO versions of their selected books with originals paged from the Folger collections. This will lay the groundwork for the afternoon’s discussion on “remediation,” or how a new media refashions prior media forms, when Professor Gadd will discuss these comparisons with participants. He will demonstrate the different ways in which EEBO presents and characterizes the images it shows. The history of these images from microfilm to digitized image will be explained. The considerable variation in procedures and techniques will be demonstrated through examples from EEBO. The session will conclude with a series of assignments designed to introduce participants to EEBO’s more sophisticated searching options, and the kinds of complex research questions that can be explored as a result.

Professor Gadd returns Friday morning to explore the Text-Creation Partnership (TCP) aspect of EEBO, by which a growing proportion of EEBO’s books are available in full-text form. He will describe TCP’s origin, transcription procedures and guidelines, and its future aims. Sample TCP texts will be analyzed to illuminate the difficulties of transcribing early modern texts. The session will also explore more advanced uses of the TCP transcriptions which will contribute to week two’s presentations. Participants will break into small groups to find examples and discuss applications of EEBO-TCP for research and classroom use.

On Friday afternoon, discussion returns to the principles of STCs by examining those aspects of early modern print culture that digital resources such as EEBO do not adequately capture. The difficulties of reliably searching for printer and publisher information, publication dates, and other elements of imprint data via ESTC and EEBO will be considered, and some possible solutions will be offered. Dr. Proot will raise some quantitative questions with a statistical analysis of how representative the existing corpus of early English titles is. Participants will have an opportunity to discuss with Professor Gadd and Dr. Proot what they learned during the first week and pose questions to each other about larger issues involving digital facsimiles and the current possibilities for searching them. After tea, the participants will discuss with each other their experiences using EEBO as a research and teaching tool. Readings for week two will be distributed, assignments set, and the dedicated Technical Assistant will support the installation of requisite software as needed.

For many scholars of early modern English, DH is equated with electronic editions. Following from the individual scholars’ use of ESTC and EEBO in week one, the second week will begin with a discussion of the challenges facing scholars who want to add to the electronic corpus through digital editions of printed and manuscript works. Working with material and electronic examples, the participants will learn the principles and challenges of editing texts electronically and the scope of knowledge and skill sets such projects require. Throughout the week, visiting faculty will address the practical issues of how a scholar collaboratively and realistically conceives a digital project and organizes its workflow. What can a single scholar undertake, and what kinds of projects require collaboration? Object lessons will be taken from major early modern projects currently underway that expand the set of data available to early modern textual scholars and the tools through which they are accessed.

On Monday morning, Professor Alan Galey (University of Toronto), Professor Julia Flanders (Brown University) and Dr. Heather Wolfe (the Folger Curator of Manuscripts) will introduce the theory and practical issues concerning editing in the digital realm. Professor Galey will begin by focusing on the concept of digital modeling. One question will be how the design of digital representations prompts users to think in new ways about books and digital technologies alike. Readings will include Willard McCarty’s seminal Humanities Computing (2005) and Johanna Drucker’s articles on visualization and speculative computing. Professor Flanders and Dr. Wolfe will further complicate the concept of modeling with examples of early modern manuscript materials showing their inherent complexity and heterogeneity. The diversity of editorial approaches and the vibrancy of debates about methods, prompted by the upsurge of interest in manuscript editing in the digital medium, will provide this discussion with additional readings including the TEI Manuscripts Special Interest Group’s “An Encoding Model for Genetic Editions,” and Jerome McGann’s “Marking Texts of Many Dimensions.”

In the afternoon, the visiting faculty will turn to specific digital projects that exemplify the challenges they have introduced. Professor Flanders will draw on two examples, The Devonshire Manuscript and the Henry III Fine Rolls Project, to demonstrate the complexity of digitizing the manuscript medium. Professor Galey will discuss his “Visualizing Variation” project funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and how it deals with material phenomena like marginalia. Dr. Wolfe will consider what an Early English Manuscripts Online, or EEMO, would look like. She will discuss with the participants why such a corpus is needed and how a collections-specific version at the Folger might be organized with the support of existing catalogue features.

All digital-edition projects obviously depend on text encoding. On Tuesday morning, Professors Flanders and Galey will introduce the participants to some of the underlying principles of the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines. They will trace the ways text encoding has developed in recent years. The focus will be on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), but the lesson will be that encoding is not simply the application of a technical skill or technology to a problem. Rather, it is an intellectual exercise that makes a virtue of the constraints of digital representation. Participants will gain a sense of how various technologies work in concert, as well as an idea of what level of expertise would be required to undertake certain types of digital editing projects and where they might obtain those skills.

In the Tuesday afternoon session, Dr. Wolfe will provide an introduction to the semi-diplomatic transcription of manuscripts. She will explain the standards currently governing manuscript transcription and describe the potential challenges that emerge for subsequent applications when transcriptions are converted to digital texts. Professor Flanders will join discussion on key questions that confront the scholarly community when editing manuscripts: to what extent, and in what circumstances, is it essential to model material characteristics of manuscript sources in a digital representation? Can manuscript materials be accommodated effectively within repository collections that also include printed materials, and do they require specialized forms of searching, document management, and access? How do different communities of users (documentary editors, literary scholars, genetic editors, curators, etc.) conceptualize the modeling and representation of manuscript materials differently? What kinds of research questions do electronic editions of manuscripts uniquely support? How might scholars represent digitally modeled manuscript materials to support interactions that depart from conventional reading practices?

On Wednesday morning, participants will find examples of manuscripts in the Folger collection that raise specific challenges for electronic editing. Some of these manuscripts will have appeared in early printed versions or in modern editions for participants who do not read early modern hands. A number will have been digitally captured in the Folger Luna Insight Database. In the afternoon, participants will present these manuscripts and early printed texts for discussion, considering especially those features which would be difficult to realize in electronic editions. Professor Galey, Professor Flanders, and Dr. Wolfe will help evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of specific examples. Following these examples, the larger discussion will revolve around questions of supplementing the corpus.

Following the demonstration of digital editions of individual works and the practical considerations behind them, on Thursday morning the participants will be introduced to a project on a much larger scale that is devoted to a single genre: “The Folger Digital Folio of Renaissance Drama for the 21^st Century.” Known as F21, the planning phase of the project has recently been funded by the Mellon Foundation. An ambitious experiment, F21 starts from the texts established through EEBO-TCP to create interoperable digital editions of some 500 plays written by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The organizers are Michael Witmore (Folger Shakespeare Library), Martin Mueller (Northwestern University), Neil Fraistat (the University of Maryland), and Katherine Rowe (Bryn Mawr College). Through corpus/text curation of TEI-XML transcriptions and the tagging of verse and prose, speaker labels, and stage directions, F21 will model large-scale crowd-sourcing on early modern plays that may be replicable with other humanities projects. The organizers will describe the project’s work plan, principals of selection, and production methodology.

Participants will explore the F21 project during the first part of the Thursday afternoon session individually or in small working groups. They will reconvene post-tea to ask questions of the F21 organizers, specifically concerning the inclusion of undergraduates as scholar-editors in digital projects.

On Friday morning members of the F21 team provide a broader overview of recent developments in the DH field. They will suggest networks that offer assistance and training in specific tools and applications. Professor Rowe will introduce the collaborations possible through DH Commons from her perspective as a Board Member, and discussion will feature the work of centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers.

On Friday afternoon, participants will examine the protocols by which a given digital humanities center analyzes and evaluates digital projects. Folger professional staff will join the conversation. Participants will receive valuable advice about conceptualizing digital projects, whether large-scale and multi-institutional or more modest in scope, and how to avoid common planning and implementation pitfalls. The participants will discuss with each other possible applications of text encoding, digital editions, and the importance of networking and resource sharing in the collaborative DH world. After tea, readings for week three will be distributed, assignments set, and the Technical Assistant will support the installation of requisite software as needed. Work continues on the participants’ contributions to the final website project.

The third and final week will take the idea of the digital texts established through digital surrogates and electronic editions and discuss new ways of analyzing them. Coordinated by Director Jonathan Hope, the sessions in week three will look forward to new tools, new methods, and new opportunities as well as discussing the new problems they introduce. Against the backdrop of scholarly articles on corpus linguistic analysis, visiting faculty will guide discussion on these overarching questions: how will the availability of massive corpora of historical English change the subject? What tools are being developed to enable new kinds of searching (and at what cost)? How can scholars use DH in a way that is genuinely transformative of the subject? How do they bring their literary knowledge of texts (their genre, their relationships within literary history as it is currently understood) into a meaningful relationship with the vectors that can be drawn to visualize statistical relationships between those texts?

Monday’s visitor will be Mark Davies (Brigham Young University), who has pioneered the use of “mega-corpora” for the lexical analysis of English. In an initial morning session, Professor Davies will provide a hands-on demonstration of how his NEH-funded, 400-million-word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and his Google Books Corpus can be used to study lexical change in English. The possibilities for uncovering useful data in meaning and usage include the frequency of any word, semantically related word, or phrase across time; searches conducted by parts of speech or lemma (i.e., the headword as it would appear in a dictionary); comparisons of the English language’s word-stock in contrasting time periods; and discovering instances of collocates (i.e., words which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance). Participants will experiment with some guided corpora searching. When they are comfortable using the interface to make queries of the datatset, they will divide into small groups in the afternoon to perform experimental searches related to their fields of interest.

On Tuesday morning, participants will reconvene to discuss and analyze their searches and discoveries with Professor Davies. Two questions will focus the discussion: what chronological and word-type restrictions do scholars of early modern literature face, and how does modernization of early modern orthography currently reduce the usefulness of such corpora?

On Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Marc Alexander (University of Glasgow) will lead discussion. His work on semantic searching and the Oxford Thesaurus builds on that of Davies in interesting ways. While simple string-searching for word-forms can be productive, making the theoretical leap from word-form to meaning and semantic relationship is not straightforward. Dr. Alexander will discuss the thorny problem of integrating meaning into the digital study of English texts. Current practice focuses on words and those things which can be identified from words (such as grammatical classes); investigating meaning has been a much harder task. Of the various resources which aim to provide semantic “gateways” into texts, Dr. Alexander will introduce participants to the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTOED) and demonstrate its usefulness. This session will discuss the possibilities provided by HTOED, by looking at the English language as a whole, and through a narrower exploration of the ways early modern semantic fields change, for instance, for the words meaning man and woman. Once again, participants will divide into small groups to conduct searches relevant to their interests.

A semantic arrangement of information about text (rather than, say, an alphabetical organization) lends itself to techniques of displaying and clustering data visually. On Wednesday morning, Dr. Alexander will shift discussion to consider visualization methods and their appropriateness to certain types of projects. The participants will compare ways of visualizing data provided from HTOED using the University of Maryland’s Treemap software and discuss the USAS tagger available from Lancaster University. He will invite discussion on how these applications may be useful for the participants’ research.

How does visualization provide a tool that offers serious inroads into scholarly data using new techniques? How can visualizations allow scholars to investigate rather than simply view data? On Wednesday afternoon, NEH Institute Director Jonathan Hope will take up these major questions. His case study will involve the work of the “Visualizing English Print” (VEP) project, a major Mellon-funded initiative coordinated by scholars at the Folger, the University Wisconsin at Madison, and Strathclyde University. Its team seeks to develop tools and protocols that enable researchers to analyze and visualize the data being made available as part of the Text Creation Partnership through EEBO and other archives. The VEP project addresses the possibilities, and problems, of dealing with mega-datasets. One of the most striking methodological issues facing researchers is the vast quantity of data that is becoming available, as corpora shift from 40 texts to 400, and on to 400,000. If scholars are focused on a history of words, then such data sets are an advantage. But when scholarship seeks to move beyond words to study the development of genres, for example, then the quantities of data pose significant problems for the researcher. After introducing participants to some of the problems of dealing with such data sets, Dr. Hope will demonstrate the analysis and visualization tools being developed by the project team. In addition to lexical and semantic searching, participants will consider comparative rhetorical analysis using Docuscope, which allows scholars to trace the development of genres and modes of discourse through time. His presentation will culminate with a discussion of the mathematics of comparison: the “spaces” in which scholars project texts in order to compare them.

On Thursday morning, participants will reconvene to discuss how the methods and tools used for the VEP project might be amenable to their own work. There will be an opportunity to run Docuscope and the tools developed by the VEP team. They will focus on how scholars develop the ability to read, interpret, and evaluate visualizations, and the importance of understanding the statistical procedures that lie behind visual representations.

In the final three sessions, on Thursday afternoon, Friday morning, and Friday afternoon, participants will respond to the themes of the institute and lay out plans and issues for their future research. They will discuss what they have learned, speculate on what needs to be done or made available to researchers in the field, and describe what they have been inspired to investigate. They will also indicate what their continuing contribution to the Institute’s digital footprint will be. These sessions are the culmination of the three week program, but they also mark the beginning of the work participants will continue after the institute.

Early modernists have at hand a robust set of digital tools with period-specific challenges and limitations. Early Modern Digital Agendas will create a forum in which participants can historicize, theorize, and critically evaluate current and future digital tools and approaches in early modern studies, with discussion growing out of, and feeding back into, their own projects (current and potential). Throughout the institute, attention will be paid to the ways new technologies are shaping the very nature of early modern research and the means by which scholars teach their students and present their findings to other scholars.

In this intensive and high-level exploration, twenty participants will be guided through a series of hands-on interactions with the most advanced digital tools, resources, and methodologies available. From 8 to 26 July 2013, this summer institute will gather a diverse group of early modern literary scholars with different levels of expertise in digital humanities and at different stages of their academic careers. While participants need not have a project at hand, they must be able to articulate their motivations for understanding digital initiatives that involve early modern English texts and describe the skills and digital tools that they would like to develop during the course of the institute. Application guidelines and materials are now available; the application deadline will be 4 March 2013. In the meantime, please contact Early Modern Digital Agendas Project Director Owen Williams with any questions.

Visiting Faculty

Marc Alexander (Lecturer in English Language, University of Glasgow) works mainly on stylistics, digital humanities, and meaning studies. He is the Director of the STELLA Project, which is the UK’s only dedicated computer laboratory for teaching English studies and a key site of pioneering work in computer-assisted learning and experimental digital research in language and literature for the past twenty-five years.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University) does research in new media and comparative media studies. She is the author of Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), and co-editor (with Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader (Routledge, 2005). She has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Mark Davies (Professor of Linguistics, Brigham Young University) has created several large corpora that can be used for the lexical analysis of English, including the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). These are both available from http://corpus.byu.edu, as well as a more powerful interface for the billions of words of Google Books data (http://googlebooks.byu.edu). He has also created a great deal of frequency data that are based on the corpora, which can be accessed from http://www.wordandphrase.info, http://www.wordfrequency.info, and http://www.ngrams.info. He is the author of five books (including three frequency dictionaries from Routledge) and more than sixty articles dealing with corpus design and use, especially research on language change and (genre-based) variation.

Gabriel Egan (Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Centre for Textual Studies, De Montfort University) currently researches press variants and compositor stints in the early editions of Shakespeare, looking towards computer applications to generate new knowledge. His most recent book was The Struggle for Shakespeare’s Text (2010) and among other things he teaches letter-press hand-printing. He is Principal Investigator on the $665,000 project Shakespearean London Theatres, which uses digital technology to help tourists discover and learn about the sites connected to theatre in London between 1567 and 1642.

Julia Flanders (Director of the Women Writers Project, Center for Digital Scholarship, Brown University Library) is editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, an online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of digital humanities, and has served as Vice-Chair and Chair within the Text Encoding Initiative, and as President and Vice President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, in addition to other roles with centerNet and the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Her research focuses on text encoding, digital methods of scholarly communication, and the politics of labor in the digital academy. She looks at text encoding as an opportunity to think about the transformation of textual information into data.

Ian Gadd (Professor in English Literature, Bath Spa University) is Vice President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP). He has run HoBo, a website dedicated to the History of the Book, since 1996. He is a General Editor of the Cambridge Works of Jonathan Swift (for which he has co-edited one volume, and is co-editing two more), and a volume editor for a new four-volume History of Oxford University Press. He has research interests in the London book trade of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, especially the Stationers’ Company (the body that regulated the trade), as well as in the theory and practice of editing. He has  taught courses on the Stationers’ Company at the Rare Book School and the Folger Institute.

Alan Galey (Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto) teaches in the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture. His research focuses on intersections between textual scholarship and digital technologies, especially in the context of theories of the archive and the history of new media prototyping and experimentation (print, digital, and otherwise). His main project currently is a book titled The Shakespearean Archive: Experiments in New Media from the Renaissance to Postmodernity. He holds a SSHRC grant for a project called Archive and interface in Digital Textual Studies, and a Connaught New Researcher Grant from the University of Toronto for an online project called Visualizing Variation.

Deborah J. Leslie (Head of Cataloging, Folger Shakespeare Library) has taught rare book cataloging at Rare Book School since 1998, and was the chief editor of Descriptive Cataloguing of Rare Materials (Books), published by the Library of Congress and in use throughout the English-speaking world. She previously held positions as a rare book cataloger at Yale University and at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Martin Mueller (Professor Emeritus of English and Classics, Northwestern University) is interested in the place of literary studies in a professional and technological environment. He is the general editor of WordHoard, and the co-principal convener of MONK. Together with Ahuvia Kahane, he is the editor of The Chicago Homer, a multilingual web site that makes distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek.

Goran Proot (Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books, Folger Shakespeare Library) is the former Keeper of Historical Collections at the University Library Antwerp. He was also the director of the Short-Title Catalogue for early Flemish works, a major bibliographical project documenting all pre-1801 hand-press books published in Flanders. He is a member of the organizing and academic committees of the international congress Book Design from the Middle Ages to the Future: Traditions and Evolutions, served as editor of the Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, and is active in the Flanders Book Historical Society

Katherine Rowe (Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College) teaches and writes about literature and media change. She is a Board Member of DH Commons, Associate Editor of the Cambridge World Shakespeare Online, and cofounder of Luminary Digital Media. She also co-edits (with Thomas Cartelli) the book series Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation & Appropriation.

Jonathan Sawday (The Walter J. Ong, SJ Professor in the Humanities and Professor and Chair of English, St. Louis University) focuses on the intersection between science, technology, and literature particularly (but not exclusively) in the early-modern period. He is on the editorial boards of Medical Humanities and Writing Technologies. His most recent book is Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (2007). His current work involves the idea of blank or empty spaces in literary and cultural texts and artifacts.

Owen Williams (Assistant Director of the Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library) organizes seminars and conferences for advanced scholars and faculty on topics related to early modern scholarship. He serves as Project Director for Early Modern Digital Agendas. He is also the editor of Foliomania! Stories Behind Shakespeare’s Most Famous Book (2011).

Michael Witmore is the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. His most recent book, with Rosamond Purcell, Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare, has inspired the fall 2012 Folger Exhibition. He is a pioneer in the digital analysis of Shakespeare’s texts, and has received funding from the Mellon Foundation for the University of Wisconsin’s Visualizing English Print project. His research findings can be found on his blog, www.winedarksea.org.

Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts, Folger Shakespeare Library) is interested in EAD markup and aids to manuscript transcription and paleographic training. She has co-written, with Alan Stewart, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (2004). She teaches an Early Modern English Paleography course at both the Folger Institute and the Rare Book School.