Our most recent digital project, Giorgina S. Paiella’s “‘The Skill to Strike Out a New Path’: Mapping Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters,” is now available online. 

“‘The Skill to Strike Out a New Path’: Mapping Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters,” is a digital project that maps and visualizes Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters with digital humanities (DH) tools. The interface—the first digital platform that features layered historical maps and contemporary images that appear alongside the text of Montagu’s 52 letters—provides a fresh glimpse into Montagu’s cross-cultural encounters on her travels and approaches Montagu’s account of her travels as an act of literal and figurative world-making. The project examines the affordances but also the challenges that emerge when building a DH visualization of Montagu’s letters—which are some of the same issues that arise in The Turkish Embassy Letters themselves—therefore teasing out resonances that link the eighteenth century, DH methodology, the epistolary genre, and both literary and digital world-making, while also addressing the unique challenges that face eighteenth-century DH tool and interface building at large. 

Giorgina S. Paiella is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include the long eighteenth century, digital humanities, cognitive science, and gender studies, with a particular focus on the intersection of gender and automation and the history of artificial intelligence.

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Our most recent publication, Roger Clegg’s Reconstructing the Rose: 3D Computer Modeling Philip Henslowe’s Playhouse is now available online.

Accounting for recent archaeological discoveries and re-assessing theatre historical scholarship of the past century, Reconstructing the Rose offers a robust account of Henslowe’s Rose, and it employs fly-through architectural modeling to offer readers an utterly new and immersive experience of a key site in the history of English theatre. Visit the book for a tour of Henslowe’s playhouse and its neighborhood, developed with Eric Tatham (Mixed Reality Ltd.UK).

Roger Clegg, MFA, PhD, is an independent researcher and formerly Senior Lecturer in Drama at De Montfort University whose recent publications span early modern jigs (Singing Simpkin and other Bawdy Jigs), broadside ballads and the English popular stage (Huntington Library Quarterly), and danced endings to Shakespeare’s plays (The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance).

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Ballads and Performance: The Multimodal Stage in Early Modern England, edited by Patricia Fumerton, is now available online.

Ballads and Performance: The Multimodal Stage in Early Modern England takes up Bruce R. Smith’s call, in “Shakespeare’s Residuals,” for much-needed new inroads into thinking about broadside ballads within theater history/performance studies. The collection at the same time answers the call made by the two early modern genres themselves, or at least by their authors/producers and–to the extent they were also participatory makers of meaning–their audiences. Public broadside ballads and the public theater were not only the most popular, indeed affordably mass-marketed, of early modern performative multimedia.They also evince an intense consciousness of the many ways of capitalizing on their own and on each other’s media through a variety of performative modes. The essays in this collection explore what we shall describe as the “intertheatricality” and “remediation” of such interaction by themelves capitalizing on the multimedia synergy of the world-wide web channeled through the EMC Imprint to afford us as moderns to actively engage with early modern ballads and performance.

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Our first peer-reviewed publication is the collection, The Making of a Broadside Ballad, edited by Patricia Fumerton, Andrew Griffin, and Carl Stahmer, appeared in February 2016.