Bradley and Short explore three prosopographies (Prosopography of the Byzantine World; Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England; Clergy of the Church of England Database) to demonstrate that seemingly unstructured data contains an underlying structure. Bradley and Short assert that it is important to understand the objective of a project in order to determine the nature of a project. In their case, they are no interested in digital editions but rather in a record of secondary source material. Bradley and Short argue that their is a common malpractice in scholarship of "squeezing" date: "trying to fit many shades of grey into a limited number of categories." It is important, therefore, to embrace plurality by aggregating one-to-many and many-to-many relationships. This will result in a collection of factoids that allows for the proper representation of "rich and complex objects."

Brett Hirsch argues that the partial attention Richard Brome received results from an editorial neglect, as well as the limited scholarly access to his works. To this end, the Richard Brome Online is necessary to facilitate access to Brome’s works in order to promote research and teaching outside the canon. This article discusses the design, functionality and usability of the Richard Brome Online database, a collaborative enterprise with dynamic features that offers “digital video clips of performances, parallel linked texts and pop-up annotations, and a sophisticated full-text search function.” The text is presented in the form of an edited transcription with a light TEI conceptual markup for both period and modernized texts, which are as close to the original as possible. Hirsch argues that the Richard Brome Online is an exemplary accomplishment made possible through innovative collaborations that will stimulate research on Brome’s works and promote interest in seeing his plays performed.

British printed images, collections of prints, Croatia „Croatian cultural heritage“ is a web site that contains catalogue and descriptions of digital collections made by materials digitized from physical collections held in libraries, museums and archives. These digital collections could be searched by different categories. One of these is „Graphics and drawings“. There are 25 collections in this category and I will discuss two digital collections of printed images from this category: collection made by Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rijeka and collection made by National and university library of Croatia. I have chosen these collections because of the importance of the institutions in which they have been made, because of possibilities of further development of these digital collections and because prints in these collections are presented, in opposite to many other collections in category “Prints and drawings”, separated from other types of digitized content. Digital prints collection of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rijeka (MMSU) contains only 6 prints. Digital prints collection of the National and university library (NSK) has few hundred prints. Both institutions have in their physical collections much more prints then they have digitized up to now. But if they continue with their digitization efforts and enlarge their digital collections new ways of searching digitized prints and informing about them would be beneficial to their users. On this poster I would also discuss digital prints collection “British printed images to 1700” (BPI) which holds few thousands prints originating from 16th to 18th century and also draw attention to some ways in which BPI enabled searching of prints and informing about them. Goal of this poster would be to identify some beneficial methods of searching and informing about prints in BPI collection because these methods, if implemented in NSK and MMSU digital collections, could also advance their usefulness.

Burgeoning interest in the history of translation is evident in the recent publication of such works as the ongoing 5-volume Oxford History of Literary Translation into English (Oxford University Press, 2005- ) and the Encyclopedia of Literary Translation Into English (Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000). The fact that massive corpora of English texts are now available as EEBO and ECCO opens up possibilities to take this research to a new level and move it beyond the realm of literary translation where the majority of existing scholarship has focused so far. The essay examines EEBO and ECCO and the ESTC, which catalogs the former two, in the light of Anthony Pym’s Method in Translation History (St. Jerome, 1998) with the goal of discovering how best to extract the kind of information that might be of interest to translation historians. The most obvious place to begin is at the stage Pym terms “translation archaeology,” where the scholar selects and defines a smaller corpus from within a larger one to become the object of investigation. Once this smaller corpus is selected, in this case by using the appropriate keywords in EEBO and ECCO, various methods of translational analysis may be applied to it, depending on the nature of the question the scholar is trying to answer. The essay explains Pym’s method and then applies it to a sample Boolean search in ESTC, EEBO, and ECCO to find translations from Danish into English. Other tools, like the “Virtual Modernization Tool” may also prove useful here.

Collaboration by use of common artifacts is at the core of e-science. A recent enabling technology is the Grid, which ties together heterogeneous computation and data resources through the use of middleware, linking the techniques and resources to infer higher-level knowledge. This article presents results from research and development of Grid technology for semantic interoperability between scientific artifacts on the web. The research employs the ‘industry-as-laboratory’ approach to software development. This means development of theory and models through successive implementations, their deployment in pilot studies and subsequent evaluation studies. The research is exemplified through the case of the OSCAR project, which is directed to the domain of bioinformatics.

David McInnis begins this chapter with a question: "why go digital?" McInnis argues that while the digital does offer a myriad of benefits - including increased access and enhanced layouts of materials - simply being digital is not enough for a project to be defined as value added. McInnis makes clear that the decision to create a digital resource over a print resource should be a choice of calculated and critical thinking. McInnis traces his experience developing the Lost Plays Database as a case study. McInnis addresses issues of access, subscription, copyright, and user engagement, contribution, and collaboration. He argues that this type of communal engagement desires more exploration and research.

Diana Kichuk delves into a discussion about remediation in Early English Books Online (EEBO), remediation referring to the representation of old media in new media forms, and the limitations that such a project entails. The core of the article addresses whether the remediation done by EEBO achieves the actual goal of replicating the look and feel of the original book in all its dimensions in addition to replicating the text. Instead of attempting to deemphasize the importance of EEBO in the scholarly society, Kichuk brings our attention to the issues digital facsimiles entail in general, such as the inability to accurately capture the size of the book and the lack of information in the metadata about its physicality and binding. According to Kichuk, the central issue isn’t whether these digital facsimiles have to complete the entire absorption of the original medium, but rather that scholars should “openly acknowledge the limits of the remediation, guard against publisher claims of authenticity and avoid scholarly artifact creation and misreading.” There is a new form of representation of texts in a digital format being sought out, and Kichuk believes that before long a digital codex will become a reality.

Digital Donne is a web-based database that contains “high-quality digital images of early editions and manuscripts of Donne’s poems accurate transcriptions of the texts of poems, and tools for the analysis of both artifacts and texts.” The infrastructure for this project was adopted from previous projects and has evolved over time, moving from a personalized mark-up system for the transcription of poems to Unicode after it was released. The large number of texts ensued inevitable errors in the transcription, resulting in the creation of a post-processing tool that enables editors to modify the transcriptions in a simple manner and be instantly reflected on the user interface. There are three ways through which the collection can be accessed: through index of poems, a concordance index, or an index of press variants. The Digital Donne database is meant to complement the multi-volume Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne and demonstrates how digital tools can enhance traditional research and scholarly editions.

For several years I have been using the Old Bailey Online as part of an assessment exercise with my second years with the broad aim of reconstructing a criminal trial from the Old Bailey proceedings. The assessment has two parts, a group ‘presentation’ and an individual written piece; the two halves are weighted equally for assessment purposes so that I can test students’ abilities to present orally and on paper. The assessment takes place at the start of the second (spring) term so that I have had time to introduce a number of the themes of the module which I hope will emerge during the exercise. This exercise has grown and developed over the years, and, while it is far from perfect, has proved to be a popular and challenging one for students. In this talk I will discuss the assessment and how it has evolved, look at some of its strengths and weaknesses and suggest ways in which it could develop in the future

Grace Ioppolo begins this essay by diving into a brief history of the Henslowe-Alleyn archive, which constitutes "the first theatre history archive in England" and the "single most important collection on early modern English theatrical performance and production in the world." Ioppolo notes, that as of 2009, the project has digitized over 2,000 pages from the archive. The documents in the archive preserve "an intersection between theatre and the political, cultural, religious, and social spheres of early modern England." Ioppolo discusses her role in the project, which involved using advanced technological to electronically archive the manuscripts. To conclude, Ioppolo returns to the importance the Henslowe-Alleyn materials comprise; the digital archive of these documents allows greater access to these rich materials.

In this article, Matthew Bradley critically analyzes the Reading Experience Database (RED). The RED database project aims to archive "extensive evidence regarding acts of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945." Reading is broadly conceptualized here and is more accurately defined as "a recorded engagement with a written or printed text beyond the mere fact of possession." Bradley notes that each of the approximately 26,000 records are extremely detailed and notes the who/when/where of the reading experiences. However, Bradley observes that "non-bibliocentric searches" produce far fewer results than the overtly literary. Overall, Bradley praises RED's achievements and hopes "that the end of RED’s recent funding period does not lead to a downturn in that effort."

In this article Allen Webb discusses the advantages of switching entirely to open access digital materials in the English undergraduate classroom. Through his teaching experience, Webb demonstrates the different possibilities this offers students to delve deeper into the study of literature and how it renders the experience more meaningful through a more personal engagement with the works. Webb provides different examples of the activities his students completed, such as translation, rewriting or manipulating a text, looking at the illustrations with which some texts were originally published, and accessing contemporary works through the web. He also discusses an activity they completed in another class on war in Iraq where the students compared the news about the same event provided by different news channels, which resulted in a more critical awareness of the underlying biasness of media. According to Webb, working in a digital medium allows students to take advantage of the large amount of resources available, and enhances student learning through the variety of activities that can be carried out.

In this article, Alexander Marr reviews the British Printed Images to 1700 (BPI) database and two print resources. Marr praises the print resource's "willingness to look beyond the single-sheet art print and the genre of portraiture to establish the larger domain of early modern English printed images" but asserts that it overlooked a great deal. Marr sees BPI as helping to fill these gaps by making a most important contribution to the field. BPI aims to create a "representative (but not comprehensive) corpus of British printed images before 1700." Overall, Marr argues that this database is a great success: the 'Research' section is robust, 'Resources' section is helpful, and the digital images are of a high quality. The monograph that accompanies this databaseis comprised of sixteen essays regarding images and seventeenth-century English Culture. Marr's review of the' publication praises the "monumental book" for "reproducing so many and such varied prints." Together, Marr sees these three resources as spurring scholars to "re-evaluate images and techniques of long-standing interest to their subject."

In this article, Andrew Prescott references Juola’s shocking publication that cast the digital humanities as a small, peripheral, discipline unable to register any significant scholarship in the general field because of its unimportant topics. Despite the biting critique launched by Juola, Prescott finds some merit in the accusations and argues that, in order to be relevant, digital humanities must contribute to the current scholarly debates in the humanities, more generally. Citing McGann, Prescott argues that in many ways the digital humanities community operates as an isolated island and this prevents any possibility of making a significant impact. For example, Prescott acknowledges that journals like DHQ are “seriously out of touch with the modern study of the humanities” because they fail to engage with key disciplinary themes or questions. In conclusion, Prescott asserts that the digital humanities must move from “technical method” to “intellectual territory” in order to make an impact.

In this article, Andrew White discusses the past, present, and future of digitization projects in the UK. White focuses on the effort to digitize “academic textual sources.” White begins by citing the basic motivations behind digitization: access, conservation, and creating new research methods. White discusses the efforts of Google Books and how this project has worked both against and in tandem with governmental digitization efforts. In conclusion, White presents a set of recommendations for the composition of a digitization strategy plan for the UK moving forward.

In this article, Anne Mahoney explains and reflects on the classroom assignment she designed that requires the students to use the online library Perseus. Mahoney demonstrates the use of Perseus in class, specifically the word study and word search tools. Some students struggle with the mechanics of Perseus. While this task could have been completed without using the online library, this resource made the assignment more efficient. Mahoney argues that the assignment was effective in teaching the class about oral composition and forced them to think critically about the choices translators make.