The Importance of Design to Digital Editions and Research

Why should design be prioritized when we think about books today?

Professor Mandell discusses two project data models that show the importance of design to future scholarly research and the need to "get over' what she calls "the print hangover" in thinking about building digital editions. She gleans ideas from three digital humanities projects that involve creating digital online editions: The New Variorum Shakespeare, funded by the Modern Language Association; the Maria Edgeworth Letters Project, spearheaded by UT’s Professor of English Hilary Havens; and 18thconnect.org's digital edition maker, called TypeWright. 

Laura Mandell is professor of English literature and director of the Center of Digital Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015), Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), and, recently, “Gendering Digital Literary History: What Counts for Digital Humanities” in the New Companion to Digital Humanities. She is Project Director of the Poetess Archive, an online scholarly edition and database of women poets, 1750-1900; Acquisitions Editor of 18thConnect; and Director of ARC, the Advanced Research Consortium overseeing NINES, 18thConnect, and MESA.

She spearheaded the Early Modern OCR project or “eMOP,” a project concerned with improving OCR for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing, and is currently at work on a text-mining project to discover emergent genders in essays and novels comprising the Feminist Controversy debates in England, 1788-1810.

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