The Shakespeare Quartos Archive is a freely-accessible, high-resolution digital collection of the seventy-five pre-1641 quarto editions of William Shakespeare’s plays. This one-year project has also produced an interactive interface and toolset for the detailed study of the quartos, with full-functionality applied to all thirty-two copies of one play, Hamlet, held at participating institutions. Contributing content to this multi-institutional project are the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Library of Scotland. Textual encoding is provided by staff of the Oxford Digital Library of the University of Oxford. Programming and prototype design is undertaken by staff of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities of the University of Maryland. Now, three months from the conclusion of the grant, the production team will demonstrate the current state of the interface and seek advice and feedback to guide the completion of their work.
The Shakespeare Quartos Archive
A MITH Research Update
March 31, 2009
MITH Conference Room
Speaker Bios
GRANT DICKIE, recent graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Information Science Master’s Program, joined MITH as a web programmer. While an undergraduate at University of Richmond, he studied English and German comparative literature. While working as a student for the University of Richmond Boatwright Library, Grant worked alongside Dr. Andrew Rouner and Chris Kemp on the Richmond Daily Dispatch project as well as other digital initiatives. In addition, he has also digitized and encoded the Anna Burwell 1855-1856 diary for the Historic Burwell School site in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
DOUG RESIDE is the Assistant Director of the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Maryland in College Park. Doug holds undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and English and earned his PhD in English at the University of Kentucky where he worked on several digital humanities projects, including Kevin Kiernan’s celebrated Electronic Boethius. Doug’s primary research interest is musical theater and the way in which digital technology can be used both to create and to preserve the art form. In addition to his managerial, and programming work at MITH, Doug is currently working on a book on the “born-digital” musical.