A MITH Digital Dialogue
Tuesday, April 27, 1230-1:45
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Tool Mashing: The Devonshire MS (BL Add 17492) and its Networks”
by Ray Siemens

Our interest in the Devonshire MS (BL Add 17492) for almost two hundred years, now, has been in its role as a central textual witness to the works of Thomas Wyatt, but the movement late last century toward social theories of textuality and textual production has drawn significant and new attention to the manuscript. It is now chiefly seen as the product of a relatively large coterie situated in Queen Anne Boleyn’s court at an exciting time in English history (fictionalized grandly by the Tudors’ miniseries ;), and quite prominently as the first sustained example of men and women writing together in the English tradition. Even so, what we now find to be most unique and engaging about the document itself is difficult to access, in part because of academic skills and context necessary simply to read and understand it, but in larger part because the connection between prominent identifiable figures and their expressions in the manuscript — which amount in the best cases to multi-voiced discussions and pontifications on matter important to the authors and scribes of the manuscript — is difficult to sustain in any meaningful way using traditional methods. This talk will represent the work of a largish group at UVic who have been working on an edition of the manuscript and, as part of this, have carried out an experimentation in tool mashing / visualization to allow a more coherent engagement of the connection between the people contributing to the manuscript and the nature of the their exchanges and, via this, to enable a significantly increased ability to understand the interpersonal networks evident in the manuscript.

RAY SIEMENS is the Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Professor of English at the University of Victoria with cross appointment in Computer Science. Ray is the editor of several renaissance texts and the founding editor of the electronic scholarly journal, Early Modern Literary Studies. He has written numerous articles on the connections between computational methods and literary studies and is the co-editor of several humanities computing books such as Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities and Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ray serves as Director of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and is President (English) of the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l’étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI); he has also been Chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Information Technology and the MLA Discussion Group on Computers in Language and Literature.

All talks are free and open to the public!

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (www.mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927)