Inaugural GW Digital Humanities Lecture: Addressing the Text (Dr. Michael Witmore, Folger Shakespeare Library)
The George Washington University is pleased to announce its Inaugural GW Digital Humanities Lecture! Dr. Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, will offer talk about large-scale data-mining and literary analysis … and Shakespeare, of course.
This exciting event is co-sponsored by GW MEMSI, the Dean’s Scholars in Shakespeare program, the Department of English, the Department of History, Gelman Library, and the new GW Digital Humanities Institute, which is co-founded and co-directed by Alexa Alice Joubin and Jonathan Hsy. We are proud to welcome Dr. Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library; his work across computational and literary communities provide an entry point into a discussion of some of the possibilities — and potential limitations — of large scale digitization projects. This event is free and open to the public.
ESSENTIAL INFORMATION:
Addressing the Text: Reflections on Shakespeare, Digital Access, and Libraries
Time and Location: 3 pm on Friday September 6 in Post Hall on the Mount Vernon Campus. Followed by a reception.
The talk will explore the ways in which large scale digitization projects have created new access problems while solving old ones; it will also show some underlying similarities between the physical codex and the digital surrogates that we are now creating for printed books: both are “massively addressable objects,” simply at a different scale. The plays of Shakespeare are only one place where this convergence can be explored; they will serve as a point of departure in this talk.
Dr. Michael Witmore is Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and author, most recently, of Shakespearean Metaphysics and Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare (with Rosamond Purcell). He is part of the Mellon funded digital research initiative Visualizing English Print, 1470-1800 and maintains a blog on digital approaches to literary studies at Wine Dark Sea.
Free shuttle to Mount Vernon Campus: full information here.
The flyer for the event can be downloaded here.
